Ask HN: What did you learn in 2018?
What did you plan to learn in 2018 and what did you actually learn?
- Realized that the secret to promotion is that it’s all about making your superiors look good. This brought on even greater realizations about society in general and individuals in my life.
- The importance of work/life balance and that the “life” portion must involve taking good care of yourself.
- The value of being kinder to all those I see regularly. It’s easy to drop some of the positive interactions with those we’re comfortable with.
Also learned a lot of Elixir.
Both are things which in the past year I've commited to learn. Learning is a constant process, next year I expect more of the same, but a higher mastery level!
Also learned a decent amount of management things, better organization skills etc, but that I didn't plan for.
I also did the whole "learn Erlang for greater good" like 5 years ago. It is much easier to understand elixir if you know Erlang, at least to the basic level, as in the end, it is just Erlang.
can you let me know the process you have followed and how did you practice and tips on getting better
If you don't live in a country where they speak the language, I suggest you learn it in a class, for a long period of time and do your homework. There are no secrets imho. The more time you dedicate, the more you learn. It is really like learning an instrument, there is no short way of becoming good at it as some might claim. Your brain needs a lot of time to do the bit flipping it needs to get accustomed to the language.
Some tips that worked for me for learning German: Join some Discord where people speak the language, use some reddit sub in that language, read the news and so on. Today using the web I think somebody can learn how to speak it fluently as they can talk to other people online. You don't really need to move to that country in order to learn it.
To be honest, even though I live in Germany, people would rather almost always just talk in English with me. Only when I go to the doctor or some government agency I have the chance to speak German. Discord and internet friends/people made me learn much more than in real life. Maybe it is my personality type, check what works better for you. As long as you have exposure and you feel challenged by what you are studying, I think you are learning as good as you can.
Give it time.
I currently speak 3 languages and have learned then due to needing to speak in my day to day life. Just move abroad!
I studied a fair bit of CS, but in a fairly shallow way (it's been a decade since my last maths lesson).
This year I proved to myself I could learn lots - next year is proving I can do the same, just in one or two things!
> It's harder to focus on learning a single thing perfectly with all the noise out there
Preach! I've definitely flipflopped languages and target positions based on a combination of reading posts here (and on Reddit), and a few damning/exciting articles or blog posts - not that I'd admit that at the time. I continue to seriously consider various levels of disconnection from the web, from blocking a couple of sites, to editing my hosts file, to using my routers child-blocking settings (block device by time, website etc)...
So, instead of learning React, I learned that I kind of like dev. management, or at least some parts of it. I also learned that I like traveling for work. I would never have thought that this would be so, but I was encouraged to try it and to my surprise it's working out well.
Which reminds me, the Java I knew from 6 or so years ago is apparently nothing like the Java of today..!
Before this I used to like Angular 1.x but it was quirky with all the boilerplate code, DI stuff, etc and then I was completely feeling lost and upset with v2 upwards. A friend suggested I try Vue and it turned out to be everything that was missing in Angular 1 and so much better. I feel so happy working with it everyday now!
After those, some basic ML and I hopped straight to DL.
For CS related: Kotlin, Algorithms Design, Operating Systems & basic Networks. I'm preparing for OMSCS and I want to strength my application by earning as much MOOCs as I can. It was a very difficult -but enlightening- year.
It attracts non decent programmers and code is usually not great when you inherit a project which causes performance issues later on and things in Rails are just odd.
Variables and methods are predefined with unnecessary English plural/singular rules which you can't tell if it's a variable/method defined by the local developer or done by rails and had to google so much to know how to use it when that knowledge is completely useless once I leave Rails.
Always better to learn the actual underlying tech like SQL.
After 10 years as a Ruby developer I had resisted working w/ Rails (always opting to use Sinatra).
This year I embraced Rails for a large project and I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. The documentation is great and the speed at which you can knock out features is second to none.
note: French shares many long and technical words with English, thus more complicated topics are often easier to discuss.
Also I used Installshield and VBScript for the first time to work on the Installer of our current project.
For next year, I hope to continue learning various tools for text processing
I did about 60-70% before stopping mine though, hopefully will finish next year or ask for ruby community to pitch in.
I spent a small amount of money on some Chinese FPGA boards and I have been having a great time building things and doing experiments with logic gates instead of software.
The cheapo Chinese FPGA boards don't have much onboard except an LED or two, so you will need some components and a breadboard or two to start making stuff happen.
If you have any experience with micro-controllers like Arduino (IE: knowing how to connect to components on a breadboard), and are already familiar with Boolean Algebra and finite state machines, then you won't find the initial learning stages to be too challenging either.
Learn{t|ing} Rust, ported a lot of stuff from Java/Kotlin and JS to Rust.
Started my third degree, Maths and Stats. First semester went well, but I had to bail out of 2nd because of life issues.
I hadn't planned on learning Kotlin, everything else was planned.
Next year, I'm looking into if I can port some of my old .NET code to .NET Core.
- The average person is quite selfish.
- The average person is poorly educated.
Much of history/politics now makes sense to me.
What was the hardest ? Elixir.
What was more enjoyable ? Italian.
React - No option, work required it. Starting to enjoy it finally.
- First project fully in javascript (as a backend developer this was a hard one): yes I did
Go, Rails, Lambda/serverless, docker, java, python
Learned how to use dynamodb, google cloud datastore, bigquery, redshifts
I did this while working for startups which seen to use many different technology.
I work in ad tech because that's the only place i get to handle billion of clicks and challenges to deal with the traffic volume.