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Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#371

Post by scarface74 »

inimino wrote: post #362
scarface74 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about what you need to get the job done. It’s about what you need to be employable. But any functionality from third party modules carries with it dozens of other dependencies.

Getting the job done and being employable are more closely correlated in some positions, industries, and markets than others. Finding those is a key to job satisfaction if this sort of thing matters to you. From the other side, if employment criteria is stupid and broken, we all have some professional responsibility to push back against it.

My responsibility starts and stops with getting a paycheck to keep a roof over my family’s head as long as I am not working for a company that I feel is doing something immoral.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#372

Post by scarface74 »

ipsun4 wrote: post #365
scarface74 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python isn't known for high performance As was said by one of the original Twitter architects, defending the choice of Ruby against people who were saying that it was at the root of all of their performance problems, for any well capitalized company, the language rarely makes a difference. A stateless web server is a “embarrassingly parallelizable”. The speed or lack there of your runtime is usually not a make or bre…

That's all fine if you stay stateless. Once a well-meaning developer introduces local application state into your web app or adds a feature that locks your database, your web server is no longer "embarrassingly parallelizable". This doesn't even start to handle issues you get when you use a single-threaded langugage that cannot handle multitasking well. Sidekiq makes money purely because Ruby is single threaded, and…

Once a well-meaning developer introduces local application state

And this would break the minute you have more than one web server. How many websites of any consequence are running on only one web server?

Having server side session state that can be shared across servers is a solved problem as is having a load balancer that handles “sticky sessions”. I’m not saying either is a good idea.

Also if you are “locking your database” even if you use a faster runtime, you’re just delaying the inevitable of your scaling limits.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#373

Post by shantly »

kragen wrote: post #354
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL. I have to second this. There is so much power in relational databases that is untapped by most developers. The best part about this is that, for the most part, this type of knowledge can apply to multiple databases. Some specific things that I want to gain a deeper understanding of are window functions[0] and recursive CTEs[1]. In par…

I'm not sure recursive CTEs simplify things. Yes, they allow you to express Turing-complete computations in SQL, including indefinite and parallel iteration. But if you weren't going to express those computations in SQL, you'd probably express them in Python or Lua or JS. Is doing them in SQL really going to be an improvement? So far I have not impressed with the results.

My experience has been, especially if your application layer's in a scripting language, pushing as much data-fiddling to the DB as possible will save you serious performance headaches down the road, even if the application layer implementation looks OK at first. They're all really slow and memory-inefficient, and often moving that stuff to the application layer also means more queries (else, typically, why not do it in the DB?) which means more network latency, which an be a real killer. In a lot of cases fixing the performance means, at the very lease, re-implementing a bunch of what your DB already does to support fast & efficient data manipulation.

I've also seen the application change on top of the DB way more than I've seen the reverse, so I'm inclined to avoid putting data manipulation in the application when possible. That way it's there, for free, when we need a second application to access the same thing, or when we break off some chunk of a program into its a separate service and re-write it in Go because it turns out to be a performance bottleneck, or WTF ever.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#375

Post by sansnomme »

madhadron wrote: post #356
sansnomme wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Assuming a CS background) To do anything useful/fun/interesting in bio you should have a strong understanding of the Central Dogma, once you understand that you can move on to the rest. Many here recommend building gene analytics and other similar software/SaaS. I don't recommend it because you learn absolutely nothing from those low hanging fruits. Genetics and its relation to CS, at a sufficiently low level, is mo…

> Molecular biology of the Gene I really, really wish this book would stop being recommended. It doesn't teach any biology, just a lot of random facts disconnected from reality about a fictional average eukaryotic cell. Nowhere in it do you build an intuition about working with biological systems.

Sorry I meant Molecular Biology of the Cell. I think it's meant as a reference more than anything else. Bio is like ML in that it moves very quickly, so there is the need for constantly updated evergreen texts.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#376

Post by inimino »

jlokier wrote: post #370
inimino wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assembly and C will still be around in 20 or 50 years. Rust is way too early to say.

I don't know about 50 years. I have a feeling the Von Neumann architecture (including SMP variant) will be superceded by then even in the mainstream, and the idea of a "sequence of machine instructions" will seem rather old-school.

It's entirely possible, and I certainly hope so. But it hasn't happened yet. The history so far suggests that better technology will generally be ignored unless there's a clear way to make money from it now, which tends to favor incremental improvements and makes early mistakes impossible to ever correct.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#377

Post by DudeWhoCode »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #272
Dowwie wrote: post #76

Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL. Not knowing of their capabilities may lead you to unnecessarily complicating your tech stack. You can go a really long way with just this domain of expertise. From there, do the same with whatever key-value store interests you (for me, it's Redis). Python isn't known for high performance but when a django web app uses a cache and relati…

Do you have any examples of a good book that will take me from intermediate to advanced? Most of the guides I’ve found online either assume you’re an absolute beginner or already quite advanced. I’m quite competent with SQL and relational databases, but nearly all of my experience is on Microsoft SQL server. I’ve heard postgresql has a lot of really cool functionality but I would really love a nice, professional, in-…

I'll highly recommend "A Curious Moon" by Rob Conery [0].

In this book you'll load Cassini space mission data from NASA into Postgres and analyze one of the Saturn's moon. I learnt a lot about Postgres and also about satellite data.

[0] https://bigmachine.io/products/a-curious-moon/

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#378

Post by ianai »

kragen wrote: post #369
ianai wrote: post #326

What’s the community stance on Linux certifications? Taken as a granted for people to take you seriously or not so much? Does HR generally require it where you’ve worked? Etc. Asking for myself really. I’ve been around tech and Linux/*nix since 2.4 was the new shiny, but don’t have the RHCSA/CE. Have A+/S+, BS math.

It might not be a bad idea to do the certification, but putting it on your résumé seems like a negative. It's like including "potty trained". Similarly for most industry certifications except maybe the ones from cisco.

Thanks for the reply, I thought the red hat certs would be comparable to the Cisco for resume purposes.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#379

Post by inimino »

scarface74 wrote: post #371
inimino wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting the job done and being employable are more closely correlated in some positions, industries, and markets than others. Finding those is a key to job satisfaction if this sort of thing matters to you. From the other side, if employment criteria is stupid and broken, we all have some professional responsibility to push back against it.

My responsibility starts and stops with getting a paycheck to keep a roof over my family’s head as long as I am not working for a company that I feel is doing something immoral.

Fair enough! You're not responsible for using organizational clout you don't have, but can still look for opportunities to make things better as they come.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#380

Post by bcrosby95 »

scarface74 wrote: post #133

For context, I’m 45, but was an “expert beginner” staying at one company for over a decade before I took my career seriously a little over a decade ago. I also don’t live on the west coast where both salaries and the cost of living are both far beyond normal. My experience from being in the job market frequently, watching trends, talking to people in the industry locally and recruiters, is that it doesn’t take more t…

This makes me wonder - what do you plan to learn in 2020? What do you see as in that phase now? As someone that is nearly 40 and has a family your goals seem fairly in line with mine. Not enough time to follow all the new hype, but need to keep up to stay employable.
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