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Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

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231–240 of 620 posts

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#231
post #32

Rust! :) I've been working full time with Rust this year for web development using postgres. The language and ecosystem have largely been sufficient for creating a robust platform. I have been working with the latest version of stable Rust all year and have never experienced breaking changes. Working with futures was unnecessarily difficult. Async/await is releasing next year, hopefully in Q1. This will simplify futu…

Have you tried writing a doubly linked list?

https://rcoh.me/posts/rust-linked-list-basically-impossible/

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#232
post #60

Elixir. The ecosystem has been steadily growing (and, more importantly, becoming more robust and mature) throughout 2018 with continuously improved tooling, libraries and frameworks. I'm excited for many of the upcoming things [1] in the Elixir world, and how those things can improve the way I build (web) software in 2019. [1] For one example, https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/12/12/phoenix-liveview-intera...

LiveView is really interesting for me! I wish Golang had a framework with a similar idea though. I don't think I have time for a new language

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#233

Machine Learning. In 2018 I went from "zero to sixty", so to speak. At the beginning of the year I knew nothing about ML, and my math skills had gotten so rusty I couldn't even remember how to do simple derivatives or multiply two matrices. In the first half of 2018 I relearned the college math that I had forgotten by working through MIT OCW's Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability courses. In the Fall, I enrolled…

That's amazing :) What do you plan on using ML knowledge? Like does having this skill have a market (for non-PhDs)?

Applied ML is one of the hottest CS jobs these days :-) From startups to big cos, everyone's looking for data scientists.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#234
post #196
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You strongly misunderstand the purpose of HN and the purpose of parent post. This is not a product being sold. It's a neat fun gadget that was designed purely so parent robertAngst could learn stuff. The gadget is obviously a nonsense device, a Heath Robinson contraption, with no other purpose than to learn stuff while it's being built. You may want to read these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873688…

If you watch the video he posted, it sounds a lot like a product unveilment, hence my question, followed by my thoughts so my post did not seem like empty criticism. There is no singular purpose of HN. People post their businesses and their hobbies here.

Sure, but the thread was about learning and the GP referenced learning several times. So in this context, it was a learning project, and it sounds like a great one.

It's good that you added those details. Your original comment was a shallow dismissal, which breaks the site guidelines (not good) but the details are substantive and interesting (much better). Still, even the edited comment comes across as a cross-examination, as if you're dressing someone down for putting a lot of time and work into something creative. That's a buzzkill for everyone here. I'm sure you didn't intend it that way, but intentions get lost. We have to be careful not to let HN turn into a place where people won't share what they're doing because they get such a hostile reception (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18705345).

Your comment would be better if instead of leading with a mean insult, you made clear that you were thinking about whether it would work as a product and realized some issues with that. Also, if you think about it, asking whether someone's hobby project is intended as a product prototype is actually a high compliment to the hobby project. There should be no problem framing that positively. Had you done so, you'd probably have gotten a bunch of replies exploring the issues you raised, and maybe even the creator would have found something to respond to. The goal of HN threads is interesting conversation, and that would have been a much better vector to get there.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#235

Ansible. Suddenly, deploying new Linux systems is easy! A bit of a learning curve figuring out how to write playbooks for pip vs n vs apt-get, but all in all an outstanding time investment.

Ansible is worth the effort to learn it. The end results are declarative scripts that almost read like documentation, and it simply works.

I’ve even used it personally to automate the deployment of Wintendo machines :)

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#237
post #55

I discarded job opportunities with web programming in Go and instead started learning about software-defined radio from scratch. Eventually, I got my own LTE network up. I think there are interesting things happening in the compiler space, so I hope to learn more about those. Coincidentally, I find Rust my favorite "tech" in 2018 because of the compiler and its various targets (like Nvidia cards).

What are the interesting things for you in the compilers space?

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#238
After a couple years of working all kinds of Android and iOS native development for clients, I finally got a chance to dig into React Native and it's been incredibly fun so far! I hope it's not just the honeymoon phase but it seriously looks like a keeper framework, I've been able to build beautiful cross platform MVPs faster than I ever could before natively.

And hobby-wise, I created an educational program with an entirely Kotlin stack, all the way from a Spring Boot backend to a TornadoFX desktop frontend - sharing all models with the backend and even having a local SQLite instance that mirrors the server side DB and enables distributed and delayed updates - mainly aimed at schools with zero to no Internet connectivity. It was incredibly fun and I got to submit PRs and issues to a bunch of cool projects.

It's been a fun year!

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#240

I started my job last year in July as a search engineer in a major Indian e-commerce company straight out of college and was really glad to be able to work using one of the most beautiful tech stacks I've seen - Golang microservices talking to Apache Solr, Redis and a little bit of MySQL/Mongo connected to the external world through RabbitMQ. I learnt writing good abstractions, organising code, the value of commentin…

Wow, that's awesome! Congrats on the experience.
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