Ask HN: What's the simplest tech to learn fully? - mezod
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openfuture
I think the best answer is "the one you're interested in" or maybe if you have
a goal then use that?

Learning something completely is never simple, everything leads to the same
thing.

~~~
cutety
> I think the best answer is "the one you're interested in" or maybe if you
> have a goal then use that?

Ding ding ding, this is the correct answer. Something you have a vested
interest in will always be infinitely easier to learn than some random thing
someone else (who likely _is_ interested in it) suggests because they said it
was easy.

For example, while not exactly a “super simple” topic, at work part of my
responsibilities include maintaining/developing ETL jobs for copying data from
a few data warehouses to local app dbs. I absolutely dread anytime I have to
spend any amount of time working on these, I find it boring, the software
terrible, the problems tedious. And, I’m certain if I spent a fair amount of
time really learning the technologies/patterns/etc, it wouldn’t be nearly as
much of a chore. And, given I’m not working with google level terabytes of
data, only a few 100 or so gigs, the scope of what I’d have to learn likely
isn’t terribly difficult. The problem is though, I have absolutely no interest
in doing so, I only work on them because I inherited them, and if I were to
need to do the same thing from scratch, I’d likely try something other than
“enterprise” ETL frameworks, or more realistically try my damndest to find
someone that actually likes doing this kind of thing so then I don’t have to
worry about it.

Contrasted to about a little over a year ago, I got super interested in CI/CD
and containerization technologies. I started having no experience with CI,
Docker, and really only having deployed things to heroku. However, I was
fairly quickly able to get up to speed with the basics of the technologies,
and then a short time after that I became the “Docker & CI” guy at work, I
found that I was able to quickly and (hopefully) competently answer almost any
question/issue coworkers were encountering. I now spend a fair amount of time
configuring CI and containerizing older apps in our portfolio just because I
thought it was fun/interesting to do, which provided me with even more
opportunities to learn and find gaps in my knowledge. But, to some others,
spending any amount of time configuring CI, fighting with a legacy codebase to
get it’s test suite to run in a containerized/CI environment , and building
security scanning practices likely sounds absolutely dreadful, tedious, or a
waste of time.

So, whatever you have an actual interest in learning completely will be the
easiest, whether that be Machine Learning, full blown functional programming
in Haskell, enterprise Java OOP, application architecture, compiler/language
development, or even something as deceptively “simple” as building CLI
tooling. Anything someone advertises to you as “easiest to learn” is something
that person themselves are interested in, which is why to them it was easy,
but if you don’t give a shit about it, it likely will be a chore and far from
the “easiest”.

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rudolph9
Boolean logic. It’s applicable to every day programming and foundational to
software in general.

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cimmanom
HTML

