HN Explorer

Ask HN: I have 10 months to spend. What should I learn?

9 points by mh77 ↗ HN
Due to weird circumstances I have about 10 months with secured income without having to work. When the 10 months are over I need to get a new job.

Up until now I have been working mainly with UX/IA/Design, but would like to transition more towards web and/or app development.

I should mention that on the side of my day job I have launched a few Rails apps and also iOS apps, so I am not starting completely from scratch.

Things I am considering:

* ASP.NET MVC (Where I live this is requested from a lot of companies)

* Backbone.js / AngularJS / Ember.js

* Android development

* Swift (I will most likely look into this anyway)

* Or just deepen my knowledge in Ruby/Rails.

Any feedback and ideas on what I should focus are welcome!

17 comments

[ 102 ms ] story [ 1362 ms ] thread
basicallydan
Lucky you!

If I were in your position I'd use a couple of months to do some Swift development, and a couple to do some Android development using Android Studio. Might be worth trying out something for Google Glass and/or Oculus Rift if you have the necessary hardware. Or maybe grab a programmable quadcopter and give that a go?

Don't forget to consider learning about some other disciplines too, never know where things will take you :) or are you totally set on spending your time on programming?

mh77
I will surely look into other things too.

I have found myself getting more and more into health, nutrition, yoga and meditation the last years. So the dream would be to somehow combine it.

basicallydan
Well, if you keep at all of it then hopefully you'll stumble onto an idea where you can combine it all. Good luck!
mariocarvalho
I completely subscribe.

Dive into mobile world (ios and/or android) and you'll have a lot of job opportunities everywhere.

Good luck!

artie_effim
The rest of the stack. Spend some time with layers 3&4 and you won't regret it. It was the most boring class I has in school and I use it every day. Read this book: http://goo.gl/ZGifKa (Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol.1: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture (4th Edition)).

Knowing how TCP/IP works will give you an edge over other devs for understanding data movement and endear you to the IT/network/security folks (who do you favors).

dennybritz
No matter which one of these you choose, I'd recommend working on real (preferably open source) projects and putting them on Github so that you have something to show when you apply for jobs after 10 months.
basicallydan
Totally agreed! A recruiter I spoke to yesterday said, "I see that you have a presence on GitHub..." referring to one of my more popular OS projects, and then rambled on for about 15 minutes about his open source friendly client. I'm not saying you want to attract lots of rambling recruiters (because that's boring) but it means that people are recognising hard work and OS contributions as a good thing. It helps.
mh77
I will definitely try to work on my GitHub presence. Thanks!
spreeker
Travel. And play with girls :)
peterwwillis
Pick a job that you want, gather the requirements for that job, and learn them. Aim for something hard.
lnnn
I learned Clojure/Clojurescript the last half a year which was my sabbatical. Coming from design into frontend, functional programming blew my head off and made me a way better programmer :)
enkiv2
It looks like the thing that's going to really blow up soon is IoT (or, at the very least, it looks like it's going to be the most lucrative, un-sexy-sounding thing on the planet in 5-10 years). If you have a good grounding in C, familiarize yourself with contiki (which, although it's not being used now, is likely to become the backbone of any third-party IoT node that isn't running linux) and some basic digital electronics.
JSeymourATL
From a Professional Development & Leadership perspective, tech guys often overlook basic presentation and sales skills, useful if you need to rally project buy-in or gain support for an idea. Here's a place to start> http://pitchanything.com/