Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613
Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800
Here are mine:
Technical skills:
- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.
- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)
- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.
- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.
Non-technical skills:
- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!
226 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadQuite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.
So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.
* Learn complex analysis!
* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!
I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.
On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.
I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.
Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.
I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.
I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.
I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.
I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.
Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.
Pick a language you love, and put together a text editor, or even just a quick utility to search through all your files for a keyword and show the results in a window. Write your own Clock app for Android, just to fix that little niggling detail that no other app quite gets right.
I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to put things together, once you start.
The point isn't to build something anyone else would care about - don't worry about the polish, you don't need to publish it, you don't even need to use it yourself. The point is just to make something. Although, personally, I now have a collection of random utilities that all make my life a little bit better, and it's nice knowing that any time a simple app like "Clock" or "Calculator" bugs me, I COULD fix it.
https://codecrafters.io/
Anyway, I got the "Writing An Interpreter In Go" book and I think I'll give it a shot either way. I think I'm at a point in my career where I'm finally tired of building the same things again and again. I've also been thinking about doing a design course in Interaction Design Foundation just to get my mind interested in things again and detach myself from the work I've been doing.
I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels
Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.
Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.
Become conversational in Ukrainian.
https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-atsc3
Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.
I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.
Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.
I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.
Any tips are welcome.
- There are 12 keys on the piano just repeated - A scale can start on any of those 12 keys - The "home" key of the scale get labels with a roman numeral one, I - The rest of the keys in the scale get roman numerals ii,iii,IV,V,vi,vii - The I,IV,V are all upper case to represent major chords, the lower case for minor chords - Most pop songs use I,IV,V from a scale. In C-major scale, C, F, G major chords. - You can start on any key on the piano and if you play the same sequence of I, IV, V, you'll get the same song, just transposed into a different key. (the scales are slightly different due to even temperament for advanced ears)
So, learn songs by the chord structure first. It is easier to remember and you'll start to recognize patterns in other songs and unlock them faster.
this is the blues. just learn how to play a blues progression on the piano and you'll learn what this poster is trying to teach.
I practiced enough to learn to play Satie - Gnossienne No. 1 in the right hand and then sold the piano.
My fav music is Chopin, Satie, Ravel, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ligeti on piano.
The distance between starting from zero on the guitar, to anything ever composed for the guitar is a 100X less than starting from zero on piano to Ligeti.
Learning to solo on electric guitar, play the flute, play the alto sax to me makes so much more sense than trying to learn to play piano or classical guitar as an adult. Classical guitar is hard enough. Piano is just a whole other level to that.
A monophonic instrument is just going to be so much better bang for the buck in terms of time woodshedding. Or a percussion instrument.
Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.
The bigger hurdle is the intimidation of the gym. It doesn't help that the gym will be packed on January 1st. I deload every January to avoid the gym as much as possible in January. It will be back to normal by mid February. A new lifter would be so much better off waiting until March 1st to join.
Walking 30 minutes a day to get your cardio up will almost certainly help your brain chemicals improve after a few weeks and no new skills needed.
Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.
Non-technical:
Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.
I think of this completely opposite. C++ and audio is the incumbent relic that will progress one funeral at a time. Librosa and Pyo are just incredible in python but for offline processing.
Rust and audio would be really cool in terms of wasm. Anything VST is IMO a complete waste of time. That was saturated 15 years ago.
Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.
And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.
- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.
- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.
- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"
So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.
Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.
I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.
As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?
I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.
I got better. Much better. I'm literally more social than ever and for the first time in my life i feel my cup is full.
If there's one piece of advice I can give is take ACTION, stay in MOTION. Always DO something to get better. You started going to the gym? That's great! Join some classes while you're at it. Don't stay still. That's when it gets you.
It sounds to me like you're already living with some ambition. What do you REALLY want from 2026?
Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).
Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.
Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.
I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.
Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.
The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.