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Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

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41–50 of 171 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

#41

I always start with a ship project. My project of choice, for the last ten years, has been this little "toy" app: https://littlegreenviper.com/portfolio/nacc/ When I finally start learning SwiftUI, for real, I'll do a version of that. I find that it is a good idea, for me, to always be writing for ship.

I’m planning on learning SwiftUI as well and thinking about writing another Hacker News client lol

Re: Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

#43
I do a variety of dev, web, native, backend, embedded. I don't code a project, I mostly just play with the features and try the variations to make sure I understand them. Once I think it's a good option and does what I need, I just code the actual project

Re: Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

#44
Apart from the languages that were taught in college, I've never learnt a language or framework in the 'abstract'.

I learn a new language/framework while trying to solve a specific problem. The latest I picked was Nodejs/Vuejs/Electron while building https://nocommandline.com. A year ago, I basically had zero to little knowledge about them but now I know a whole lot more.

Also, I'm not a professional developer. I'm a Product person who basically writes code to solve specific problems I encounter (at work and outside of work).

Re: Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

#46
post #24

I really like building Conway's Game of Life. It's big enough that each time I still have to think about the solution and how to build it, but small enough that it allows me to recognize patterns and differences from a language to another.

Came here to give this answer.. it’s not an entire way to learn anything but it’s a good start and flexible enough it can actually apply to pretty much any new tool or tech component you want to learn… can do database or vitalization or most things it can think of can adapt some aspect of it to work with life as a simple toy problem. I think I discovered my favorite functional version of life adapting game of life to Apache Spark to find a way to describe the next state from current in a unified way without conditional logic or something, though memory is fuzzy as I never did spark again and it’s been 7 years now…

Also second someone else’s suggestion of Exercism.

Re: Ask HN: What do you code when learning a new language/framework?

#47

The whole idea of implementing something useless to learn a tool is deeply flawed and it is sad that most of our schools and universities still follow this practice

Some of us just really like digging through raw Martian Elevation data and turning it into models or textures or whatever. And learning a new language while we’re at it is a nice (intended) side effect. If we could just “learn the language” cold we would. By all means, if you have something “useful” you need to do, prefer that. But we don’t always have that on hand, and fun toys are a good substitute.

Do you run filters to "sanity check" for continuity breaks, data noise bursts, etc, and setup for feature detection, relief highlighting?
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