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Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#42
Carpentry.

I thought I knew a bit about woodworking because of my middle-school shop class. Turns out it's an extremely precise and technical activity, packed with lessons in engineering, measurement, statistics, and physics.

I'm really excited to mention it to you guys because I found learning woodworking is a great application of modern technology: I watch youtube videos on it at 2x, and can basically google any problem I encounter. I often say to my friends: watching youtube at 2x is my superpower.

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#43
Technical (at various stages)

    Python more deeply (used it for years but it's a surprisingly deep language)

    Few different open source libraries

    Some "big data" stuff (using open government data).

    Ada

    Javascript properly
Non-Technical

    Learning to manage pain (recent diagnosis of degenerative spinal condition)
    
    To be a more positive person

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#44

VHDL. I'm planning on making an FPV quadcopter using an FPGA + using analog signal transmission on a personal project.

Very cool. What tooling are you using? I've found the world of FPGA tools to be bewildering to the point that I've abandoned my projects and my Nexys3 languishes in a drawer.

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#45
post #26

Electronics. I got started with a spare Raspberry Pi a friend gave me. I got hooked and test as much things I can get my hands on. I now have a BeagleBone Black, a few Arduinos on the way and lots of sensors. There are a lot of interesting small projets you can do with small electronics.

I've been (very slowly) working my way through "Art of Electronics" for the last few years, and I highly recommend it for the next level of depth below Arduino et. al.

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#47
For middle aged person, how about "what new skills are you growing?"

One of the dilemma in learning new skills is there are so many new skills out there and how do you know that spending effort in learning the new skills are more worthwhile than strengthen your old skills? Every person is unique, and depending on popular votes from outside is risky ...

On the other hand, focus on the problem you are trying to attack and work from your existing skills and only learn new skills when it become apparent that old skills are not sufficient, at which point which new skills to learn will no longer be a question.

More often, I find myself developing new skills that are grown from my old ones. In fact, look around, all existing skills were grown from somewhere.

TL;DR Focus on the problem, not the skills.

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#48
I'm working my way through the matasano crypto challenges and learning a lot. http://cryptopals.com/ Also learning Racket through HtDP http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e I had started with Swift, but… not loving it. There's so much, it's overwhelming sometimes just deciding what to go after.

Re: Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

#50
I'm trying to decide whether I want my future to steer toward mobile or web development. I've completed the Codecademy JS course but feel like I need to do certain parts of it to really cement my knowledge of it. I'm also trying to build some basic apps in Xamarin.iOS since C# is my bread and butter. I feel like I might struggle with this for some time :/

Outside of development, I'm studying Farsi, getting back into running, and hopefully renew my private pilot currency. Oh, and Arduino :)

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