Ask HN: What are you learning?

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73 comments

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Currently learning Elixir/Phoenix as well as web development in general. I've done desktop and a small intranet site throughout my career so this is new to me.
I keep coming back to the idea of learning erlang/elixir. Can you point out the resources you've been using? Functional programming is still a little foreign to me.
For Elixir you can work your way through the exercises on Exercism here: http://exercism.io/languages/elixir/about
I also suggest trying to create an application and then work through the docs when you run into issues. I learned more from creating a mix task and reading the Elixir docs (which are amazing) than from the books I purchased
Sadly a lot of exercism exercises boil down to Regex and are generally uninteresting.

Practicing Elixir/Erlang means practicing OTP/distributed computing. The core language takes at most a week to learn.

I bought Programming Elixir 1.3, Metaprogramming Elixir and Programming Phoenix and started from there. Unfortunately I feel like I wasted my money on Programming Elixir and Programming Phoenix. The docs for both are Elixir and Phoenix are just amazing and really make the need for anything else unnecessary.
Currently learning how to transform ideas into business...
Physical Improvement:

  BJJ - fun, keeps me active
  Dancing - ballroom, tango
Personal Impromevment:

  Drawing - because I can't draw a stick figure
  Spanish - relationship, travel
Intellectual Improvement:

  Calculus - because I've forgotten so much, and it's
    actually relevant at work now.
Professional:

  Rust
To take a few minutes for myself every day.
Sailing: You don't need a boat. Most cities near the water will have some sort of sailing club where for $300 a year you can join and use their fleet of boats. My end goal is to do some sort of week long solo trip.

Rock Climbing: Lots of fun and a great work out.

Meditation: Just getting started with this, but have already seen improvements in concentration and a decrease in anxiety.

Introductory Deep Learning: http://course.fast.ai/ This is probably my favorite course I've ever taken online.

Any recommendations on starting meditation?

Edit:. Both how and why.

How: check out Headspace which is a great app to get started with meditation.

Why: It makes me feel happier and less stressed. Read "Search Inside Yourself" for even more compelling reasons.

Thanks! A quick followup, how long have you been doing this? And, I guess, are you a generally skeptical person?

Picked up "Search Inside Yourself" on Audible. Looking forward to it!

I'll admit that building the meditation habit is difficult, due not to skepticism (I definitely feel the benefits) but just because meditation is hard. It's much like going to the gym. I'm generally open-minded, not skeptical, but I definitely do explore ideas and "facts" before I come to my own conclusions. I definitely encourage you to try meditation a couple times (the first dozen times will be difficult), keep an open mind, and you will very likely discover the benefits on your own accord.
>have already seen improvements in concentration and a decrease in anxiety.

Interesting to hear. Meditation is something I have considered looking into for a similar purpose. Do you have any recommendations on a good place to start?

First, I did a few random 'guided meditations' off youtube (Sam Harris has a popular one) and discovered that I enjoyed it.

After that, I've been enjoying The Mind Illuminated, by John Yates, and I think others on hackernews will as well. It doesn't bother with a lot of the eastern spirituality aspects, but instead focuses on how to become good at meditating and find the most benefits from it.

Swedish & Erlang. I'm also eyeing stone carving and hopefully starting roller derby.
I signed up for 3 months of https://linuxacademy.com, dedicating at least 2 hours a day during the week and more on the weekends. System administration has been my weakness when it comes from delivering a product from development to production. I hope to be able to become a RHCE by April.
Thanks for the link. Getting into containers and the whole container ecosystem has felt really daunting. I'll definitely check this out.
Did this for a few months when I first learned to code and could never figure out how to get something from my laptop to a "real server" ...

Great material!

Taking the 3rd part of a Cisco CCNT course so I can have a decent income for once.
Going through Coursera's "Functional Program Design in Scala" (second scala class in the series).. looking to finish the specialization which eventually touches on Spark.

Also, linear algebra refreshers ..

Topics for the Oracle Certified Master exam. We don't use a lot of the technology in it at work, so just knowing it even if I don't take / pass the exam might help me in my job search.
Personal: - Portuguese for my relationship Professional: - OTP with Elixir - React (been slacking on my front end skills) Physical: - nutrition - more time doing CrossFit
Learning Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) paradigms. Combining pure functions with reactive concepts (where variables change as their values change) is something that sparks my interest. Also the idea of chaining functions together to create composable pipelines of functions without any local state: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfWR3dKnFIo&feature=youtu.be
I learning software engineering! Right now I'm using python to learn about OOP, because I've never really understood the paradigm. I figured it's high time I buckled down and figured it out. But to be honest, I think I'd like to try my hand at systems engineering if I get the chance to program professionally.

I am also learning Norwegian, because I want to talk like a viking.

And I am learning Go (Baduk). It is the type of game I will be learning for the rest of my life. Which is why it is my favorite :)

Word of warning about OOP: it's just a programming paradigm. It's not the best or the only way to do things, but some 1990s era educational material might tell you so.
Yes! I am quickly learning that. It's not very intuitive for me anyway.
I've been reading "Distributed Algorithms" by Nancy Lynch lately.
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Oil painting. I often like to learn completely new, unrelated skills like this because it allows me to draw from unusual, and wide sources when working on solutions. People often wonder how I am able to 'think outside the box' and I believe it's because I have a wider, more varied set of skills to draw from.
Microsoft DHTML Behaviors, this is the IE5-6 stuff that was deprecated with IE7. I'm on a legacy modernization project. I never worked with that stuff before so it's all new to me. I kind of enjoy this type of work so if you or anyone you know needs help with such a project, ping me (email in profile).
Just started the Coursera Nand2Tetris course. I don't have a comp sci background so it's pretty fascinating stuff to learn from the gate-logic level.

On the job I'm still learning best practices of enterprise software architecture. There's so many opinions about the 'right' way to do things that I've focused on trying to get a better understanding of the organization I'm working in so I can suggest better directions to take.

Ruby & RoR. It's something new & fresh after several years of Java & Scala development.
Spanish - I feel like it's easier to learn now instead of in 8th grade when I had 7 other classes to study as well. Plus, I feel it's like learning a new programming language in some ways, which I've spent the past X years doing. As a concrete skill, I can use it every day (Austin), and on many vacations.
I too am learning Spanish this year. It has been very interesting learning the differences between English and Spanish. For instance, there is a formal and informal way of speaking to people. It blew my mind a little to learn that my girlfriend (whose native language is Spanish) only speaks to her brother using the formal way. Also, she uses the informal way with some of her friends but not others. It's like a weird extra dimension of language that I never knew existed.