
Ask HN: What did you learn in 2018? - rwieruch
What did you plan to learn in 2018 and what did you actually learn?
======
00117
\- Dove head-first into the fundamentals of distributed systems, applying all
that I learned to solutions for scalability issues at work.

\- 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.

~~~
aryamaan
This sounds interesting. Please tell us more.

------
thiago_fm
Improved my German considerably. Can definitely deal with any situation by
now, but I still have much to improve.

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.

~~~
120bits
Nice! I'm learning German as well. Can you tell me if you used any
books/tutorials/apps/classes? Thanks in advance.

~~~
thiago_fm
Duolingo, normal classes in the beginning. Nowadays mostly speaking to people
and watching TV and every once in a while reviewing grammar.

Give it time.

------
rwnspace
I planned to go from beginner Python to employed developer. Went a bit off
track and learned the basics of lots and lots of languages. Kept switching the
domains I wanted to work in.

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!

~~~
escape-effect
It's harder to focus on learning a single thing perfectly with all the noise
out there. Did you get employed as a python developer?

~~~
rwnspace
Nah, it turns out opportunities for Python + first job in the UK are somewhat
rare, especially as I don't have a completed degree. If you don't live in
London, C#/.NET or JS + a framework make up 90% of opportunities. Of course,
just learning the right language isn't how it works, and it took me a while to
take that on board.

> 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)...

------
pivo
I planned to learn React and modern JS/Web dev (had been doing iOS/Swift dev.)
Instead, my dev. manager left and, since I was the most senior person on the
team, I was given the job.

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.

~~~
specialjack
What kind of dev work do you do that requires traveling?

~~~
pivo
It's mostly because the dev team is geographically disperse
(India/Boston/Seattle). I also have to meet with customers occasionally and of
course they could be anywhere.

~~~
brutus1213
Don't want to turn this into a reddit AMA but .. would be nice to hear how you
managed your transition to management. Did you read any books or blogs that
helped? I was in a similar situation and have basically been emulating the
style of previous managers - not sure how the team feels but I'm in a bit of a
funk - feel like I'm letting myself down.

~~~
johnstorey
I am not the original poster, but you can do much worse than reading and
really thinking about _The Phoenix Project_ and _High Output Management_.

~~~
CaRDiaK
Solid recommendations. I would also suggest books and content by Michael Lopp,
aka Rands. He's gone from engineer to high profile manager and his work is
solid. "Managing Humans" is a particular favourite and seems to be well
received by engineers and leads making the transition.

------
davidgrenier
Basics in Probability as well as a superficial introduction to Stochastic
Processes. Decent foundation in mathematical analysis. Continued progress in
calculus and basics in differential equations. Covered parts of the history of
mathematics from 4000BC up to Newton/Leibniz. Did some mathematical
modelisation, improved in R. Learned a basics in Mathematica and Matlab.
Introduction to differential geometry. Had a solid introduction to group
theory. Started an introduction to numerical analysis.

------
eb0la
Google cloud platform. Got certified as architect in exam beta. Kubernetes...
... and Salesforce (as a sales representative). I know, completely unrelated
stuff; but worth every minute.

------
pizza
That Django is neither the mental megalith nor archaic project I thought it
was. It's actually a joy to program with and extremely flexible, without
getting to e.g. Java levels of verbosity. I've not learned close to all of it
yet, and have relied upon more glue code from blog posts than I'd like to
admit, but it's actually pretty nice, and definitely Pythonic!

Which reminds me, the Java I knew from 6 or so years ago is apparently nothing
like the Java of today..!

~~~
collyw
It's worth checking out Two Scoops of Django for some best practices and just
understanding how to use the framework well.

~~~
pizza
Cool, thanks for the rec

------
superasn
Learned Vuejs and oh my god it is the best thing that has happened for web
development (at least to me) in a very long time.

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!

~~~
infinii
Same here. Started off by trying to pick up React. Found React to be really
complicated for a non-JS developer (I've done mostly server-side stuff).
Someone suggested I try VueJS, tried it and had a much easier time.

------
hambos22
I started studying intensely math since May (~2-3h/day) to fill some huge
gaps. Calculus up to multivariable, linear algebra and discrete math.

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.

------
h1d
Finally had the opportunity to use Rails after not liking fat frameworks for
over 10 years and kept using my own framework instead and learnt I never
actually needed it.

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.

~~~
schappim
I have to say I had the exact opposite (with the exception of performance).

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.

------
atiredturte
Took a French course on a whim, and ended up learning moving to France for a
month, getting myself to comfortably conversational in the space of 5 months
in all. Had my first insightful conversation on Blockchain tech entirely in
French!

note: French shares many long and technical words with English, thus more
complicated topics are often easier to discuss.

------
baud147258
I didn't plan to learn anything new, but I did (re)learn some about c, mostly
a good refresher on syntax, pointer and strings, plus the PKCS#11 API to
communicate with HSMs. And along to this, a few crypto fundamentals around
DES, AES, CBC/ECB, and KDF functions.

Also I used Installshield and VBScript for the first time to work on the
Installer of our current project.

------
asicsp
Did not plan it as such, but trying to convert Perl one-liners to Ruby one-
liners led to learning Ruby more than I expected. I tried my hand at
translating "Think Python" to "Think Ruby" and by November, I even published a
book on Ruby regular expressions.

For next year, I hope to continue learning various tools for text processing

~~~
lizmat
Ah, another translation of "Think Python"! Laurent Rosenfeld originally wanted
to translate "Think Python" to French, but then decided to translate it to
Perl 6: Think Perl 6 ([https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-
perl-6/](https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-perl-6/)). Which in turn got
translated to Spanish by Luis F. Uceta: Piensa en Perl 6
([https://uzluisf.gitlab.io/piensaperl6/](https://uzluisf.gitlab.io/piensaperl6/)).
Where will it stop? :-)

~~~
asicsp
that's because Think Python is simply too awesome ;)

I did about 60-70% before stopping mine though, hopefully will finish next
year or ask for ruby community to pitch in.

------
satori99
I decided to try my hand at hardware design. Just for fun, not profit. I
expected to make modest progress because it has always seemed like some sort
of dark art to me.

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.

~~~
aryamaan
Could you tell more. I get same "dark art" feeling when I think about hardware
design. And simultaneously I want to play with them.

~~~
satori99
Honestly the hardest part I have encountered so far has been learning the
lingo. So much of what I was reading early on went over my head because i
didn't fully understand the terminology and I don't really have an electronics
background. But with enough patience and reading it starts to become clearer.
And there is so much material to learn from online.

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.

------
sotojuan
A lot of Python/Django from work, Japanese by myself, and a lot about art and
history from reading.

~~~
depecode
Can you share the library or packages you used in django projects

------
nevi-me
Learnt Flutter and built an Android app.

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.

------
zapzupnz
I learnt how to code in Swift targeting Linux. That, in turn, taught me how to
deal with the availability of just a subset of the frameworks/library with
which I am familiar.

Next year, I'm looking into if I can port some of my old .NET code to .NET
Core.

------
hluska
I planned to learn French, but je ne speakez it bien. Hopefully 2019 is the
year.

~~~
baud147258
As a French native speaker, good luck.

~~~
hluska
Thank you very much. 2019 is my year!

------
jakobov
\- That humans are rather primitive creatures. Monkeys in disguise.

\- The average person is quite selfish.

\- The average person is poorly educated.

Much of history/politics now makes sense to me.

------
ttonkytonk
I didn't plan anything, but I learned enough about dozenalism to invent my own
timekeeping (i.e. breaking the day down into 12 units ad infinitum). Currently
it's 3,9,6 est.

------
vontman
I've started learning Rust, and I have to say, it is the most satisfaction I
ever felt from a programming language. Hoping I could do something useful with
it someday :D

------
mortivore
I didn't really plan to learn about anything specific. However, I did learn
that I enjoy keeping journals/notes about everything I'm doing/want to do.

------
wildengineer
Ended up learning kotlin, advanced my python skills, acquired some basic ML
knowledge, and journeyed further into the rabbit hole that is brazilian jiu
jitsu.

------
DrNuke
Mini robotics combining mechatronics, computer vision and deep or
reinforcement learning at the cost of an average lunch at restaurant has
really been a dream come true.

------
sgillen
Seriously upgraded my python skills. Switched almost everything I was using
matlab for to python/C++ and it has been working out very well for me.

------
mthsc
I learned a lot about unix systems, server administration, Windows internals,
some more C++, graph theory and distributed systems theory.

------
sfusato
Learned Elixir and Italian :D. Both are very rewarding experiences and
somewhat similar in concepts of how to approach them.

What was the hardest ? Elixir.

What was more enjoyable ? Italian.

------
cuchoi
Took a great Bayesian analysis/PyMC3 class
[http://am207.info/](http://am207.info/)

------
awaywopassd
Swift - Wanted to get into iOS apps but ran out of steam.

React - No option, work required it. Starting to enjoy it finally.

------
patatino
\- Flutter: yes I did

\- First project fully in javascript (as a backend developer this was a hard
one): yes I did

------
eggie5
* factorization machines * word2vec * WARP loss for Matrix Factorization

------
gtirloni
Meta question: What do people expect to get from this thread?

~~~
mortivore
I want to know about what people pursued this year. I'm also the sort of
person that enjoys reading resumes, and making new years resolutions. I find
seeing what other people do can inform my own actions.

------
jgalentine007
Vue.js and EF Core. Publishing packages on NPM and Maven.

------
Odenwaelder
Coding a social network with Django and Neo4j.

------
person_of_color
its not too late to keep learning in 2018!

------
person_of_color
Sanskrit

------
InGodsName
Learned Vue -> React

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.

