Ruby on Rails! So glad I did.
Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
261–270 of 620 posts
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#262I've been translating idioms across languages. I've been expanding my vocabulary from APL, exploring meta-programming in Racket, and structuring programs in Rust. APL presents a distilled description of algorithms with a larger vocabulary of primitive operations which encourage a greater variety of approaches in problem solutions. I've been exploring Racket as a Lisp and reading On Lisp for what is uniquely implementable through meta-programming. I've worked through a dozen exercises on exercism on Rust, and I think that I have a lot I could learn from structuring programs around the borrow checker, but I expect that I will not have an opportunity to use the language directly at work.
Most of my learning has been around the architecture of distributed file systems and distributed object stores. It's given me very useful perspective to have a context for comparing different solutions to each other and how they relate.
I've learned more about awk, tr, and join to aggregate or process GBs of tables structures as text.
I've also been trying emacs and evil for an integrated, programmable ecosystem with familiar ways of editing text.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#263Nim: https://nim-lang.org/ (as a die hard Nim aficionado I absolutely love Nim)
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great looking circuit boards!
Chris! I owe you big time for your getting started with KiCad youtube series. Your "Getting To Blinky" video is what gave me the confidence to get started with PCB design, so thank you! If you're ever in the Chicago area, I'd love to buy you a beer.
I live in Chicago, actually! You should come to our meetup, going to have one in January: https://www.meetup.com/Hardware-Happy-Hour-3H-Chicago/
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#265Kotlin, our company had recently turned into a java shop, and I was literally tempted to throw in the towel because I'm used to C# & python, so the boilerplate was really unpalatable. Then one of our team wrote a service in kotlin, and we never looked back, I had my type inference, extension methods & null safety back, along with really strong immutability features, pure functions to boot. It is such a pleasure to wo…
I really liked Kotlin too. Which web framework do you recommend using with Kotlin (assuming you do webdev with Kotlin)?
Ktor, it's working really well, only downside is limited openAPI/swagger support, i.e. Schema first or code first code/schema generation.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#266Machine 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…
> so rusty I couldn't even remember how to do simple derivatives or multiply two matrices. I was never taught how to do either of those things. Am I missing out on something?
If you want to do machine learning, those two ops are pretty much the foundation of how it works under the hood.
If you want to do coding in general, I like to say that you can have a career in code without being good at math. But, math is how great coders do what seems like magic to other coders.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#267I 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.
Thanks a lot. It truly was an extraordinary ride. I hope to take the experience with me and apply it at other places.
It's quite telling when you aren't angry or resent being laid off from a job - the company was just THAT good but unfortunately is no more the same.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#268Rust! :) 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/
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Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#269Two technologies that I've had an on and off attempt to learn for the last couple years finally clicked into place this year:
Ansible -- I converted my dotfiles install bash script to use Ansible and to also install all my terminal dependencies. Then I started expanding on it to include my entire development box and to provision a bunch of vagrant boxes of different Linux distros so I could test the waters with something other than Ubuntu.
Docker -- Work's been using this now for over a year, and I was a bit of a hold out on it since Docker just seemed like another layer that Ansible + Vagrant was doing a fine job of handling. Once I really dug into how the configurations worked together and set up some of my side projects to use it, it's usefulness started to come together for me.
Otherwise, I keep trying to learn Rust but don't have any projects in mind that would fit with it. I also keep playing with React on the side but haven't gotten very far in my understanding of that ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define "useful". I personally have 3 AWS certifications (All of the associate level). Their use to me was 1) When studying for them, I learned a ton more about the platform and 2) Recruiters and employers love it - I get even more job/interview offers now.
Nice. I have been using AWS and GCP for a while now and was thinking about getting the certifications so I always wonder whether they have any incremental value, especially technically and jobwise.
Shorter answer.
Yes since you have practical experience it can’t hurt. You’ll learn things that you didn’t already know and it will help you get your foot in the door slightly.
But, don’t become a “paper tiger” with a lot of certs and no practical experience. I’ve also come across people who have claimed that “they have use AWS” but when you dig deep they mean - they’ve hosted a few VMs and used AWS as nothing more than overpriced colo.