Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

Learn to make money.

Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.

So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.

For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.

I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.

On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.

I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.

I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.

I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.

I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.

I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.

Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.

> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)

> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year

But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).

Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?

(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)

I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.

Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.

I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.

Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.

I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.

I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.

Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.

Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.

Become conversational in Ukrainian.