Give Lua some love. Learn the language, learn the VM. Learn to integrate it with a set of libraries and so on. Lots of bleeding edge stuff runs on Lua and its a fantastic stack of technology to learn ..
Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
11–20 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#12If learning is going to be a hobby, then learn something different (because that gives you perspective), but also something that has some connections to what you already know (because if you learn something part-time, then it's good if you don't need to re-learn all tools, environment, etc.). I would not care of the 'hot' stuff too much - frameworks come and go. I'd try some Clojure (you're familiar with the JVM and…
You're totally right the frameworks come and go, but on the other hand they come for a reason. And when I am learning a new framework there's usually something more I gain than just something to put in my CV. For example when I started with Spring I learned a whole lot of IoC and AOP. It was quite long time ago, but the principles that stand behind a framework might be very influential in the long term.
I like the Scala suggestion, because the last time I was involved with functional programming, I was using Haskell which I found quite difficult to grasp to a level that's useful for real-world projects.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#13Cloud Foundry.
(I'm biased, I'm currently seconded from Pivotal Labs to Cloud Foundry development in the buildpacks team).
It's an opensource PaaS. A full, all-the-stuff-you-need-is-in-there PaaS. You can take it and run it in a private datacentre.
For large companies, this is A Big Deal. Right now, in most F500s, deploying an application takes anything from days to months.
Except if they've installed Cloud Foundry, where deployment time drops to seconds to minutes.
For startups, it will soon be a big deal, because Cloud Foundry gives you a smooth path from just-playing-around (deploy on public cloud with Pivotal Web Services or IBM Bluemix) through to running on AWS (with the opensource distribution or a commercial derivative like Pivotal CF) through to running on your own hardware in your own datacentre.
CF is still evolving fast. The execution core is being rewritten currently and will probably hit feature parity early in 2015, carrying along with it the ability to natively allocate, mount, manage and monitor Docker and ACI container images.
It gets very little buzz on HN, because what interests us is building our own stuff out of cool, smaller components. Plus the main organisations driving development (Pivotal and IBM) have focused their marketing and sales at big companies, not startups.
Systems of this reach and influence basically appear once in a generation. I'd hop on while it's fresh, if I was you.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#14If you don't know python and you're interested in analytics you should solve that.
IMHO you'll become a far better developer if you devote the majority of your time to learning advanced algorithms, ml, and ai as opposed to the new hot framework.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#15Learn Nodejs/Meteor then join the product and help contribute relational database support. Please. Nodejs and persistent connection is a hugely important technology by my estimation which will become popular. Meteor is interesting because it is a full stack of interlocking parts that work together quite well, to lend an interesting new perspective on web development as a whole. However currently it doesn't support relational databases.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#16OpenStack seems to be trending, if you are into the whole cloud thingy.
I've only been in contact with TaskFlow, the state and workflow management library that OpenStack uses, and I'm very impressed how well-engineered it is.
On a related note, OpenStack uses RabbitMQ, and that seems to be trending too. Not a huge hype, but a steady adoption by both open source community and enterprises. And if not RabbitMQ, then being familiar with some kind of asynchronous messaging framework certainly wouldn't hurt.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#17C is a pretty nice language, have a look ;)
I second this. After using PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and various frameworks within each, "The C Programming Language" was very refreshing. It's fundamental, and made me think differently when using standard libraries in other languages, such as how they may work, etc.
Having done quite a lot of C myself I believe it's good for a person just starting off with software development, but I can't see myself doing it for fun, besides if I have a specific problem in mind.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#18C is a pretty nice language, have a look ;)
I found this video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ntGDm6hOs) very interesting. It is someone (Casey Muratori) building a game from scratch using C.
The intro videos really opened my eyes to how powerful C is. Being able to directly access memory seems crazy for someone who is just used to dealing with languages that really remove you from the hardware.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#19On the engineering side, I think you should learn concepts such as asynchronous programming, actor based programming and functional programming, and pick a new language (Swift, Scala, Go, Rust, etc.) and learn it.
On the more practical side, I think data science is a very useful tool, so learn everything there is to do with data today, from machine learning and data mining in small scale to big data processing.
Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?
#20[deleted]