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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?

#61
I'm slowly making my way through the Microcorruption puzzles. The first three seemed easy, but I feel completely stuck on the next ones. It's very satisfying, though, because I feel like I can learn my way through it, and then those will feel "easy" as well.

My biggest gripe now is that I can't rearrange the code + memory windows to be side by side for a large-monitor experience. I feel like that would make it easier to trace program flow.

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

#62

After interacting with a few lawyers I realized I am severely lacking in communication and people skills. Their emails were inviting but not over the top. My emails were either too curt or too verbose. When talking to people face to face, I also work on adding value without rambling. Breathing more helps a lot. And for fun I'm learning how to draw. Here is some of my work. http://www.redbubble.com/people/kelukelu htt…

How are you working on improving your written communication skills? I think that's something that I and others have lots of room for improvement in as well.

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

#63
post #52

I'm trying to finally give Erlang, Scheme / Racket, and JavaScript the attention they deserve in my life.

I've been really enjoying Elixir – I always liked the idea of Erlang, but became frustrated in practice, and Elixir feels like it has been designed around my frustrations.

I've also been meaning to try out LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang). Basically Erlang with a lisp front-end (originally started by Robert Virding).

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

#64
post #62

After interacting with a few lawyers I realized I am severely lacking in communication and people skills. Their emails were inviting but not over the top. My emails were either too curt or too verbose. When talking to people face to face, I also work on adding value without rambling. Breathing more helps a lot. And for fun I'm learning how to draw. Here is some of my work. http://www.redbubble.com/people/kelukelu htt…

How are you working on improving your written communication skills? I think that's something that I and others have lots of room for improvement in as well.

I have three short answers for you.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Nonficti...

2. Watch the video at the end of this link: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/watch-me-write-this-arti... The take away is write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

3. Pay attention to the people who write well in your life. When you read an email that feels well written try to figure out why you like it. And use those elements in your future writings.

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

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent an entire day trying to decipher how to replace spaces with tabs. Wish I had been better with regular expressions.

I hope this isn't flippant, but have you read the Perl regex man pages [0]? "Perl compatible" regexes are very common, and are explained _really_ well. Similarly, the Perl Cookbook (from O'Reilly) has a whole chapter on regular expressions -- even crazy ones like detecting US phone numbers (hard!) -- with explanations. That chapter is QUITE good, and I highly recommend it even you don't write Perl. For your specific…

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

#67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent an entire day trying to decipher how to replace spaces with tabs. Wish I had been better with regular expressions.

I hope this isn't flippant, but have you read the Perl regex man pages [0]? "Perl compatible" regexes are very common, and are explained _really_ well. Similarly, the Perl Cookbook (from O'Reilly) has a whole chapter on regular expressions -- even crazy ones like detecting US phone numbers (hard!) -- with explanations. That chapter is QUITE good, and I highly recommend it even you don't write Perl. For your specific…

Thanks for sharing the man page link. I am reading it now! :)

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

#68

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…

For JS, have you seen this? http://eloquentjavascript.net/

I haven't, but I'm going to check this out - thank you so much!

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

#70

Passively learning survivalist skills by watching Survivorman.

If that wasn't completely tongue-in-cheek, check out Lars Monsen[0] on NRK.no if possible from your country. He's the real deal. Now to look up Survivorman...

--

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Monsen

EDIT: DRM-free version of the great '365 Nordkalotten' available via Bittorrent here:

https://nrkbeta.no/2008/01/29/norwegian-broadcasting-nrk-mak...

Or the location-aware Norwegian TV site NRK might be good for you here:

http://tv.nrk.no/sok?q=lars+monsen

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