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Comment by freedrull | Hacker News Reader

> I get a lot of questions from aspiring programmers on what’s the best tool or languages to learn. It’s almost always a premature question to ask.

I often think about how to answer this question to beginners as well. I think he is right, the answer is probably "it doesn't matter".

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I think a good way to handle that is to ask them what they want to end up building. Want to make Android apps? Java. Want to make the front end part of web pages? HTML, CSS, JS with some preprocessors and libraries. Want to work on the back end? Ruby or Javascript/Node or one of the others.

Treehouse's learning tracks (https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks) are useful for a beginner to look through to get a general idea of what that would involve.

Explain that to HR drones.

Tooling matters a lot if you want to be doing this for a living.

Every now and then spend a whole weekend (or just a week of after-work hours) learning the new hot X to the point you can honestly say you know something about it (it doesn't take that much for an experienced coder to learn a new thing) and bam, you have another buzzword for your CV. Select as needed to get through HR filters.

Which is great, if the HR filter is simply "does X appear on the resume". It it is "does X appear on previous job experience" you are still screwed.

I don't have many resumes out there today, but I've never let HR people know if any X belonged to what previous experience, or home project or what.

If they wanted to know, they'd have to ask me. Very few times, they did.

Still not the same as working experience. And honestly I'd rather get payed for tinkering around.

Resume Driven Development is where it's at. Docker? Our "modular monolith" works just fine, but with Microservices we can now rewrite everything in Rust and Elixir. Lock ourselves with yet another build / automation tool just to remove trailing whitespace. Add RethinkDB and Redis and that new graph database now that we're at it. Let's pray for updated NixOS binaries!

For toy projects I'll stick to OpenBSD, Perl and ancient tools like make, awk or even rc.

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