What are your risky knowledge investments?

Question

In _The Pragmatic Programmer_ by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt (20th Anniversary Edition), the authors compare maintaining technical knowledge to investing. In particular, they suggest when learning new skills that it's good (sometimes) to "By low, sell high." Here's the quote:> Learning an emerging technology before it becomes popular can be just as hard as finding an undervalued stock, but the payoff can be just as rewarding. Learning Java back when it was first introduced and unknown may have been risky at the time, but it paid off handsomely for the early adopters when it became an industry mainstay later.What are your risky knowledge investments?

derivagral · Accepted Answer

Javascript, back in jQuery era. Dart and a million other things were going to replace it! Already having hit most of the basic language pitfalls was helpful while learning React and all the other fancy new things.
MongoDB. Plenty of reasons to not use it, but it is great for fast projects.
Some basic solidity and erc20, because that whole space is going nuts right now. I got to advise a founder against using a blockchain, which was kind of fun.
Deepfakes. Nothing nefarious, but if this is going to be the new pop culture I might as well at least know how they work, how hard they are, and what's actually doable as an individual vs a major corporate entity. I'm still convinced there's going to be value in customizing ad pictures or video as a service on top of a commoditized faceswap stack.
Caveat you haven't mentioned: sometimes a technology can come out and you've learned the wrong version. Java 1.0 (applets!) comes to mind.