Ask HN: What new/experimental technology should I learn for the next 10 years?

Learn a bunch of different things, knowing that some/many won't pan out. Ideally, learn some things that aren't trendy, to minimize competition. Maximize your flexibility, by learning how you learn best.

I was once told, around 1980, by a highly-respected IT person, that C had no commercial application. A few years later, I was told by a college's industry advisory committee, that Unix would not be used widely.

Arthur C Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.” (rephrased to remove sexism)

Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Here's another unpopular hn opinion.

Don't, go learn past technologies instead. People leaving school for tech in 10 years likely aren't going to have stood up servers and configured services. We'll be lucky if they've used anything that isn't a web gui on a large cloud operation. Rad Hat has already signaled it is going in this direction by tossing out their EX300 exam in favor of the EX294. I believe we will continue seeing such a trend going forward. There's going to be a growing need and shrinking availability of competent sysadmins over the next 10 years if I had to guess.

I respectfully disagree. I see the widespread adoption of these cloud services as condensing the sysadmin skills to those cloud providers and reducing the number required through automation.

Mobile app development with Ionic Framework v5 [1] and Capacitor (version 3 coming soon) [2].

I have looked into mobile development in years past and I always got the impression that it was a hot mess. An ever changing everything, undocumented everything, tons of languages and frameworks to choose from. I was immediately turned off by how complex, immature, and ever-changing that everything was.

To me, the most important selling point of Ionic is that I can write code once (Ionic UI Framework + Angular or React or Vue), then run it through Capacitor and it spits out a NATIVE mobile app that runs in a WebView (not a PWA, but they support PWAs).

I don't have to know anything about Android or SwiftUI. If I want to access native features (such as camera or location) I simply use a Capacitor plugin. Again, zero native code, the plugin handles it. There are plugins for things like storage, clipboard, file system, haptics, and more.

If you were ever turned off by the complexity of mobile app development take a look at Ionic. If you know HTML, CSS, a JS framework, and can learn their (simple) framework language you can write a fully functional app without knowing anything about the native coding.

[1] https://ionicframework.com/ // https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework

[2] https://capacitorjs.com/

Okay. I’ve been in mobile app development pre-iphone, when microsoft had smart phones. Since 2006. Have done native iphone since the first SDK was shipped in 2008. And android when it was available. Did Ionic, xamarin, react-native.

Shipped mobile banking, digital wallets and crypto wallets to 21 million customers, as architect and lead.

And yet, here we are in 2020... still there is this fantasy about xyz framework flavor of the year... write once... run everywhere...

Magical silver bullet to save time and development costs.

Because, who wants to learn the native language for the mobile platform.

And every single code once, write anywhere framework leads exactly to it’s own tradeoffs.

Let’s explore each.

React-native - if you enjoy debugging this is your platform of choice. Have an obscure nodejs open source library you are dependent on? That is being deprecated? Have fun maintaining and upgrading it yourself. Or how about 2000 security warnings you need to resolve... yeah, you’ll code once... and debug everywhere.

Like Iconic? - you won’t when iOS decides to upgrade the OS. And the look and feel and your app suddenly looks like it is a decade out of date. Good luck upgrading the look and feel... re-write on next flavor of the platform.

Like xamarin bc you like C#? Have fun learning microsoft’s unique mobile paradigm. As well as needing to understand how iOS and android paradigm’s work. And debugging across 3 platforms... trying to isolate whether the memory leak is on the microsoft or iOS side of things.

The reality is this. There are tradeoffs. And you are really only trading one pain for another pain.

Learning the native tools and languages are only one kind of pain. And the least painful.

This is the reason why i chose to use basic cordova instead of ionic in my application. I can't use cool out of the box components when building the UI, but i can implement my own UI components using Vue.

There are still some tradeoffs, the javascript webview ui components are not fast as the native ones.

To add. Do as much processing in your APIs as you can see fit. Then your apps are just CRUD, which makes them easier to manage.

What do you think of flutter?

Would ask the same.

Why is this setup better than using React Native? I believe RN spits out not just Android/iOS but also desktop Windows/Mac app code.

I prefere true HTML/CSS over React Native or Flutter because when it is time to integrate the visual prototype of your client, good luke trying to personalize native component that those solutions offer you.

I agree, in the past I always heard that HTML based application are not as fluid as native app, I think it is not true anymore for modern smartphones.

HTML applications also allow you to do great thinks like WebGL and WASM.

Thanks! That's really interesting. I'll certainly check it out. Do you by chance have any learning resource recommendations?

Chip design and manufacturing are rather complex fields. You'd be better position to take advantage from the advances that others are making. Again ML, sensors, edge computing, heterogeneous networks, swarm algorithms.

What I expect in ten years is that IOT will take off but this time it will have to be invisible for the user. An AI solution will observe, train, and expect the needs of the user and will try to provide what is needed in just in time manner. This will happen in both private and public spaces, so preparing some privacy and anti-tracking techniques might prove useful.

Disclaimer: This is a very unpopular opinion on hn.

Jump on the next hype topic any FANG company is talking about. Everytime you got a lot of developers jumping blindly into it even if they dont need it and you earn a lot of money by buying one of the first snd again if you move people away from it because its not a silver bullet for everyone.

Think about big data and map-reduce 10+ years ago, everybody was using it, and many with workloads <100GB you could reslly throw onto one beefy machine. Take nosql databases and everyone rebuilding joins and transactional semantics until switching back to a traditional database. Or the hype of microservice which is vanishing more and more.

There are not that many inventions which really last, and nobody is able to predict it very good. But being an early adaptor of some fang hype get you somewhere.

Out of curiosity I just did what you described - to me it seems like machine learning and everything surrounding it is the only hot topic right now.

Would you agree or did I just look at the wrong Github accounts?

I think he meant the next hype thing FAANGs are talking about. Maybe it’s gonna be VR/AR, maybe IoT, maybe personalized medicine, biohacking, who knows. That’s where you can be one of the first, an early adopter. If you just started in ML field, you can probably still get a job, but you will be competing with an awful lot of people.

A domain that is not related to tools. Law, medicine, shopping, marketing, whatever. You will sit in the intersection and be good not just at the tooling (programming) but the domain.

I hope we will se more proof assistance connected to more normal languages, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for though. :)

Law and medicine always seem to be growing.

Gene expression is taking off right now. Those pursuing a PhD at the intersection of computing and genomics will find themselves in good company this decade.

What are some companies in this space?

There are the big players such as Illumina and Thermo Fisher. You also have to dig into specialties such as longevity, where you have companies like Human Longevity and Alphabet company Calico.

My hypothesis would be look to modern day science fiction to get an idea about the future. Shows like Black Mirror & Devs, and I'm sure many others have curious ideas about the near to mid future. There are some examples of early 20th century ideas becoming reality by the late stage of the century.

What is your goal? Earn more money? Create interesting stuff?

If you are into cloud - the merge of telecom and cloud computing. More vertical integration in in the internet, telecom companies will start competing with AWS or AWS will become a telecom operator. Latency sensitivity will be a substantial moat of your product and more people will compete to be "on the edge" as much as possible.

Are you specifically talking about 5G? Which companies (startups, established companies, incumbents) are at the forefront of this? I work exactly in this field, literally at this intersection and want to work on creating a startup going forward. If you have ideas, please ping me.

> Are you specifically talking about 5G?

Not specifically 5G, but yes 5G will be accelerating this trend. CloudFlare workers are a step in this direction. AWS is doing Lambda@edge (they partnered with Verizon for this)

> Which companies (startups, established companies, incumbents) are at the forefront of this? I work exactly in this field

Rakuten, Dish, NEC, Altiostar, Mavenir, Robin.io are new entrants.

I’m interested in being on your future mailing list.

I'm planning to dabble in quantum computing.

I doubt I'll be any good or do anything with that knowledge though.

The trick is to always keep learning and get good at that and try to specialize.

I agree with the former, but disagree with the latter. Keep learning, become proficient (not fluent) with many things, but don't specialize.

I would not say Rust is "a new and untested technology"

Rust is still too new. It isn't used at the scale of C, Python, Java, and C++. OP should consider learning it for future systems programming.

Quantum programming.

From what I understand, keeping a useful amount of qubits in coherence isnt guaranteed. Would love someone who knows more to chime in

Learn finance to understand the domain, then learn how to do smart contracts in WASM or any new language (the current ones mildy suck)

Quantum Computing for good.

ReactiveX

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