There are 3 things to learn at any given time:
1. That which never changes i.e. humans, yourself and others
2. What you need to know to succeed right now i.e. deeper in your current tools and systems, or those you'll need to use next month
3. Whatever intrigues you. Maybe this is what you're asking: what's new to be intrigued by?
To the latter, I would say to start learning machine learning if you haven't already.
For specific programming languages, I think Elixir is a great investment.
Edit: Some systems reading if anyone is curious:
* Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
* Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer. I also recommend anything by Stafford Beer.
* Anything by Christopher Alexander
* Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results: A new to me book that I haven't read but looks promising.
What a gigantic waste of time and effort that field has been. I still have yet to see anything useful come out of it. NFTs always are pointed to as the "useful" thing, but tbh, if I'm buying art, I'd much rather have some well regarded painters work hung in my living room.
Not some monkey as my twitter avatar. Shrug.
- Brushless motor control: has now reached cheap commodity status and would be good to learn more about. In the past I was always stuck between DC toy motors and full 6 wire AC motor control.
- Vision system on a small micro with edge-AI model for deer detection. After decades of classic machine vision I think it's time to overcome my neural net reservations and plunge in with one of those microcontrollers that can run pre-trained models efficiently
- Battery charging dock that robot drives to autonomously: learning goal is Oregon weather capable contacts or even wireless charging
My instinct would be to do all this in C++ with some Python as high-level glue but maybe time to learn some Rust? Not sure yet.
1. What (recently or distantly) acquired skill(s) have proven most useful to you?
2. What skills don't you have but you regret or year for most?
I like @bckr's guidance (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055079>), and suggest that there are abilities with greater persistence which are often underappreciated.
Systems Thinking. It helps you understand how components interact to form a system, and how to change it. Books:
- The Goal: https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...
- Thinking in Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...
Pertinent for 2023, learn about costs. If you're an engineer, understand how much the services you're responsible for are costing. How can you reduce that cost? Can you optimize costs enough to save your monthly salary?
Learning how to learn new stuff
I feel like a low-code platform that can be stood up on infrastructure (cloud or otherwise) owned by a company could provide a lot of value. Many companies and especially local governments have unique infrastructure requirements that make using a random website for a business function a non-starter. If they could bring a properly supported low-code platform to their infrastructure i could see that being super productive for a lot of the simple use cases they encounter.
Stand out to your employers, acquire knowledge and skills that makes you truly special. Not the fastest programmer in the hottest language.
E.g. Be able to use chatGPT to help you code, but not if you're maybe a junior and can't discern good code from crap. It should be basically a subordinate who you do code reviews with, not the other way around, though when it's on it's game if you don't understand a concept it can explain it pretty damn good. Again that's assuming it isn't making things up.
It would be nice if there were a toggle, or slider for: truthfulness, and reliability. Where basically it has little creativity to 'create' things that don't exist, unless reliability is set to 'creative' or 'low'. If I'm writing a fiction novel, that's what I want. If I'm coding it isn't.
I think AI consulting and workflow management will be big in the coming years. It's obvious so many things that we can do with this tech to us, but to many people they just don't 'get' it, and there's money in showing them.
* GPU programming (GPUs have consistently kept up with Moore-like laws)
* FPGA/ASIC design (hard but price for all of these is dropping rapidly, so becoming more accessible)
* Bitcoin/cryptocurrency related tech, including standing up your own miner, full node, or understanding how to build applications on top of it (web3/etc.) (despite the hate, cryptocurrencies are still around and thriving)
* Solar and battery related tech (solar prices continue to drop, as does battery technology. Consumers ROI on solar installations are approaching 2-5 years instead of 10+).
Understanding "fundamentals", either in terms of computer science education or mathematics, I think is also critical but I don't really know what fundamental math should be focused on, in the short term. It's easy to say "neural networks" but proficiency in that area is mostly about learning frameworks (as a snapshot of right now) and little to do with some underlying theoretical understanding.
In terms of specific languages or frameworks, just a word of warning. What language/frameworks that were popular 10 years ago are still relevant today? Many people gain utility both from using and from being paid to manage frameworks (and to a certain extent languages) but they tend to be ephemeral.
One piece of advice that I think was pretty good was to avoid the "stampeding hoards". One can "win" at the game of being the best at what's fashionable now but the greater utility is in understanding more fundamental skills with the added benefit of, should a skill become fashionable later, being well versed in it when it does.
Kubernetes is still incredibly relevant but growth is slowing down (mostly because it ate the world already).
WASM and eBPF are hot new technologies but still niche.
CDK landed last year and will probably become more and more relevant for new projects vs vanilla Terraform.
When used for yourself, it's a tool for thinking, organizing information, and understand your inner workings.
When interacting with others, it can be persuasive but kind, eye opening but focused, or walk on any fine line you can imagine. You can teach, educate, warn, debate,... with the tone you like. It's a skill that enables both strategy and empathy.
Cloud technologies: AWS/kubernetes/docker
Languages: English/any other native lang of country that you are trying to settle in
Related: the ability to radically change one’s mind on things you believe strongly.
* be empathic
* be humble
None of them are new but still trendy
I'm not a fan of any of those :D