Ask HN: Which technology are you learning or are you planning to learn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which technology are you learning or are you planning to learn?

6 pointsbontoJR25 comments

I spent the last few months digging in a lot of different technologies during my spare time, just for curiosity, from Elixir to Kotlin, and abstractions, from Functional Reactive Programming to Event-driven Dataflow Programming also reading about the history behind them. After studying the latter, I actually decided to write a book about Reactive Programming in Swift, that is a work in progress, but that's another story.

I am a desperately curious developer and I was wondering which technology are you currently learning or are you planning to learn in the near future and why?

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I'm going by concepts:

Learning how to apply clean architecture (ref: Robert C Martin) when using a large framework like rails/django. Learning ruby, rails, and django (already quite familiar with python. Been using flask for everything I do so far).

Building a real time application. Learning meteor and how to apply TDD with meteor.

Building a front end heavy single page application. Relearning HTML and CSS properly. Still deciding whether to use React or Ember. Ember's documentation is bad but I've already put up my hand to help improve it. I really want to help. But react is just looking really good and it's docs are stellar. To the point that I feel like I'd be missing a bus if I ignored learning it. Will probably toss a coin on that.

This is actually what I focused most of my time last year. I started by re-reading the good old GoF book about patterns, then from that I evolved to other kind of abstractions that are currently hyped.

I'm working to deepen my knowledge and experience with:

1. Networks and protocols

I know most of the TCP/IP stack, physical through to application layer, but lack expertise in most of it. For example, it couldn't tell you how to pack a query in a DNS packet even thought I know the header and body format - or tell you how TCP Fast Open works, despite knowledge of the 3 way handshake.

Security and exploits:

I'm really interested in exploiting software. In fact, just today I developed a buffer overflow vulnerability in a HTTP server that can be exploited by a maliciously crafted HTTP request (a dummy server for educational use)

Operating Systems:

Likewise, I have working knowledge of operating systems but nothing exemplary. I could talk to you about interrupts, ISRs, user level v.s kernel level threads, the VFS, etc..., but lack hands-on experience with any of them.

Finally, and to a lesser extent (I haven't got that far yet) the Linux kernel.

It's a lot, I know. However, it's becomes obtainable when you realize people dedicate years to their craft. You just have to be persistent, self-motivated and enthusiastic - the rest takes care of itself

I'm currently learning Elm[0] and OCaml[1]. Elm is a nice introduction to the ML family of languages (and FRP!) because you get to do so in the context of client-side web programming (something I'm familiar with). I'm then pivoting this knowledge to help me learn OCaml.

I find the ML languages fascinating in their approach to programming. I think there is a pragmatic side to MLs that gets ignored due to their background in academia. The way you set out to model your programs is interesting and a nice change coming from languages like Ruby/JS where you tend to run around with your head cut off.

0 - http://elm-lang.org

1 - https://ocaml.org/

I have been using Go for the past several months on my side project/startup. It works great, and I like the simplicity and tooling. I have also been using KnockoutJS. I really like its small size and great documentation.

Clojurescript and React because there are some interesting ways to create front-ends that I haven't explored, but heard about at a local meetup.

I'm learning apache spark and distributed data analysis with python. I'm on the last module of EdX's Scalable Machine Learning course and it has only been in labs 3 and 4 that I've felt like I've learned something fun and new.

Functional programming. I've been trying to wrap my head around the paradigm. I'm using clojure instead of haskell, but the principles are still there.

Maybe have a look at this also: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/

I've worked with Angular in the past few months and now I've started with React, I kind of like it till now.

Also I want to get more on the backend side so I've done some small projects with Node but I'm going to start to learn PHP and Symfony2 since there are no Node jobs where I'm from.

And generally I'm trying to improve the quality of my code, so I'm working slowly through Code Complete 2.

On and off I'm learning Go. Hopefully I have a working product or prototype (web service for turn based games) near the end of this year.

How are you feeling with Golang? I tried it for a while but never felt in love, I think the language is too basic and verbose sometimes.

So far I like the language. When using decent tooling (Sublime Text and several plug-ins) writing Go can be quite a joy. I do however have some difficulties translating concepts that I would find easy to implement in a object oriented language, but I think I just need to practice more with Go.

The language is indeed quite basic, but to me, that is one of the factors that I like about it.

Haskell and Yesod. Currently I'm a Rails developer, and I want to see if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It certainly feels that way.

ES6 and React. I haven't really done any JavaScript development since I used CoffeeScript and Backbone two years ago. Hopefully ES6 and React will have a relatively longer shelf life.

I'm learning Java right now, because the market around where I live is flooded by Java(Android too), and they pay well.

After that I'm probably going to learn HTML5/CSS3/JS and some JS framework. Also I really want to learn MeteorJS or Elixir.

Kotlin seems to be pretty popular for Android right now, is your surrounding looking for devs in Kotlin?

My region is full of companies with Java/.NET/PHP enterprise apps. Kotlin,Scala,Clojure, and Go it's inexistent here.

I've heard of Kotlin few times, but it never had my interest. I will give a try some day.

I keep making terribly slow progress with Apache Camel. I also am trying to re-learn Spring MVC as it's been 4 years since I last used it and I've done very little coding since then.

Not really technologies, but more of concepts. How to develop software better, software that is malleable, how to develop faster, etc. "Software Engineering"

Learning D lang these days, in particular async I/O @ http://vibed.org

Got into AngularJS over the winter / spring - really like it - trying to get into React / React Native now

building web / android G play games in c# / Unity; rolling a mean stack on google compute - hope to build a nice front & back-end using angular & some other stuff. Pretty fun so far. trying to get better at ruby & jscript...

currently learning Laravel framework (php), angularjs, playing a bit with nodejs.

I am currently working on a CMS built with Elixir, GraphQL, and React.JS

Any chance you've got a github for it? Would love to take a look.

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