Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

272•meridion•1mo ago

Thread for 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

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!

Comments

hu3•1mo ago

Learn to make money.

Quite 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.

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Stock trading can be quite lucrative if it's a good match. Have a look at Qullamaggie on YouTube.

> Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was better at following instructions I would 100% be profitable. The YouTuber I mentioned doesn't sell any courses.

> Edit 2, screw you guys for the downvotes. I'm sharing something I've found useful. You don't have to buy into the idea, but there are some people who do very well off of trading. Hence "if it's a match"

qnleigh•1mo ago

I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always.

Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.

[0] https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I?si=5kEkLoUhHDkajlyy

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Statistically speaking, we typically end up with a bell curve right?

So who's on the ends of the bell curve?

qnleigh•1mo ago

No offense intended, just speaking by the numbers you shared above, but it sounds like you are at the lower end of the bell curve. Most day traders are, largely because they don't have access to priveledged information like the datasets that hedge funds buy. If they make better bets than you do, then they literally take your money. Those aren't good odds.

LouisSayers•1mo ago

I'm at the lower end in the same way that a junior dev is at the lower end of the salary band. This is to be expected for anyone just starting out.

You're assuming that you need privileged information that is not available, but what I'm trading is basically the big player moves - indicated by movement volume in a stock.

You don't need all the info, there are emergent patterns that result for stocks that make big moves over time.

Not every stock that matches one of these patterns will be a winner, but you can base a strategy around this that allows you to have enough success, especially when you combine this with other attributes of the stock (and market conditions) at the particular point in time.

I'm openly aware that so far I'm in the negative. However most of this is due to me not having sold when instructed to (holding onto "favourite" stocks). Very close to break even currently, so no harm done after 6 months playing in the market.

smileysteve•1mo ago

Stock "trading" is statistically against the odds. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" was published nearly 50 years ago and remains generally true. No YouTuber or perfect instruction following would make you 100% likely to be profitable.

The most profitable (and effort efficient way) is to routinely invest in a broad basket of stocks over a long period. Ie Voo and Hold.

brcmthrowaway•1mo ago

How about options trading?

LouisSayers•1mo ago

I've seen people on tiktok that exclusively trade options. It's not something I've looked into but my take after 6 months is that you basically find an approach that works for you, whether that be trading stocks, commodities, options etc and the time-scale that you trade.

Personally I like to do primarily tech stocks and mix it up doing swing trading (holding multiple days) with a bit of scalping as well (buy / sells over minutes).

At first I lost a lot of money scalping but now I seem to have a much higher success rate - you start to notice certain patterns in the way stocks move if you watch the charts long enough, and I've been learning to have more conviction in my positions.

brcmthrowaway•1mo ago

Maybe algotrading is the answer

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Yes, I might consider doing this but need to consistently feel confident doing it manually first. I did set up a docker instance to connect to my broker, so perhaps a goal for this year!

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Yes generally speaking, statistically most people will not beat the index.

Does it follow then that no-one is beating the index consistently?

Of course there are people who are not a statistic. Maybe not everyone is made for it, but that doesn't mean noone is out there beating the market.

Maybe its hard if you're a hedge fund, but I'm talking about individuals with relatively small accounts.

stuffn•1mo ago

The EMH is provably false.

Moreover if you can get an edge that is even 2-3% over a coin flip all you need is risk management to make money.

Not understanding this is how you go broke. I traded for a number of years and did well. It was not hard to regularly beat the market, especially in futures and options.

amha•1mo ago

* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* 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!

jimbob45•1mo ago

Out of curiosity, why are you quitting teaching? If you’re a high school teacher, I have to assume that it’s not the money.

amha•1mo ago

Mmmm it's something I've done for a long time; I've been at the same school for seven years; it's a ton of fun but also gets repetitive... I want more challenges!

bawis•1mo ago

For complex analysis, I recommend using Stein's book (the whole series is good).

medbar•1mo ago

Visualizing Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham is another good one IMO

radeeyate•1mo ago

For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.

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.

swgeek•1mo ago

I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

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.

exasperaited•1mo ago

> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)

> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year

But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).

Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?

(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)

I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.

Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.

I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.

Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.

I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.

bartvk•1mo ago

How did you develop your CAD and 3D printing skills? Did you use any online courses?

exasperaited•1mo ago

No courses on the 3D printing side really — I think I did go through one of the Prusa ones after getting enough free "meters" on Printables but I don't remember it telling me much I hadn't already learned. There is a blog post that has been posted here before that really covers almost everything important about design for 3D printing:

https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/

I really just ADHD'd the hell out of it, I suspect [0], and absorbed everything I read. I was in financial difficulty and things were expensive so it took me a couple of years to get me from "I'd like a 3D printer" to "this 3D printer is affordable but viable and even if I never learn design there are plenty of tools I can make with it that will save me money".

In that time I read everything I could about what I'd need to learn, convinced myself that I was not so clumsy and inept I couldn't maintain a printer. These days printers don't need so much mechanical knowledge to get started.

On the CAD side of things, I learned a bit of OpenSCAD, found it basically helpful to make one simple thing but also frustrating and disappointing, joined really useful non-public Facebook groups where people were working on similar things, decided to get properly into FreeCAD, and dug in with the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube (which actually are now organised into a course structure, but weren't really then).

The thing that motivated me mostly was having simple real things I wanted to make for a project I was working on (though my brain being what it is, I still haven't got round to that exact project...)

If you have a need for a thing you would like, and you're able to break it down into simpler projects, particularly if they are things you might find useful along the way, it's not very difficult to find the motivation to learn these two things.

The positive feedback loop is so strong, and 3D printing is such a concrete way to learn CAD and design because you get to hold your design so quickly: I designed this thing in CAD, I printed this thing, wow it works but I could improve this, I need to learn this new thing in CAD, I printed it, it works but… etc.

Pretty soon you find yourself staring at some real world object on your desk and modelling it in CAD for fun.

The really interesting thing is when you begin to understand that the design of things is fundamentally influenced by the tooling used to make them. When you grasp how 3D printing and injection moulding differ, for example, and start designing your own items with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, rather than just to look like an existing plastic part which was moulded, then you're really getting there.

[0] hilariously I am still not formally diagnosed. Though I'm pretty sure I could be diagnosed just based on these two comments.

bartvk•1mo ago

Thanks so much. Going through some of these motions... installed OpenSCAD, made something basic which was easy. But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system. Last month I looked on Udemy and did part of Mango Jelly's course. It's a good one, I actually found out later that he has a bunch of stuff on YouTube.

I'm still reading the rest of this and your other comment, thanks so much. Inspirational.

exasperaited•1mo ago

> But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system.

The problem is exactly that, yes. If you want a simple shape and maybe to stick a thread on it (one of the first things I printed) then OpenSCAD has the basics and there are really interesting libraries.

But if you get into something complex, you end up building your own scheme and then constantly gardening it. The complexity never gets truly abstracted away because you can never truly work in a higher order way.

FreeCAD is a long way from perfect, but what it is, that you need, is a space where you can reason about geometry in a way that lets you learn. And if you want code-CAD, you can do it with python macros, or limited bits of OpenSCAD in that workbench, or you can use CadQuery/Build123D and generate STEP files for some of it, and then build on those.

I would still say I don't know CAD anywhere near as well as I'd like to. But I know where to start, I've learned the terminology, and I am able to think in CAD in a way I never expected to.

bartvk•1mo ago

I love free software. However I'm still kinda doubting... should I want to take a commercial job, aren't we expected to use Solidworks or something?

But yeah, thinking in CAD is probably the major step here.

exasperaited•1mo ago

I am no expert but my take on this is:

FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).

I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.

But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.

There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.

bartvk•1mo ago

I didn't know about Solidworks for Makers, thanks so much for the tip. Watching the Deltahedra video right now, pretty interesting.

computerfriend•1mo ago

Talk to a psychiatrist about ADHD.

exasperaited•1mo ago

Indeed.

AdieuToLogic•1mo ago

> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

> 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)

Therein lies the problem.

To want to "focus on the task at hand" and then express the desire to "try being a bit of a jack of many trades" is a mutually exclusive goal set.

If you want to improve focusing skills, then it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another. If the "ability to focus on the task at hand" is not really all that important in the grander scheme of things and topically bouncing around is where you find happiness, then I humbly suggest to not beat yourself up about focusing on "the task at hand."

Either is an equally valid choice which none need judge, since it is your own after all.

swgeek•1mo ago

Good point, but I don't think they are mutually exclusive spread out over a year, only if I try to do them all at once.

This month my focus is on full-stack, and I don't move on to the next project until I get the basics right on that.

> it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another

Exactly this thanks, but my aim is only "get comfortable", not "master"

banbangtuth•1mo ago

I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

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.

hsuduebc2•1mo ago

Heh same here. Get stuck in crud apps because it's easy, comfy and well paid. I would like to start something entirely different than computer related but I'm limited to a flat. So something like mushroom growing, or hydroponics seems good.

Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho. Anyway happy new year!

moltar•1mo ago

I was in a similar situation a few years back. I wasn’t only focusing on CRUD, but it was a large part of my work too. Mostly working on web-based SaaS projects.

I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.

caro_kann•1mo ago

Looks like I'm in that path you've already passed. From January I have to learn CDK because my current job requires me to do. Also planning on to obtain those AWS Cloud Certificates.

handoflixue•1mo ago

Build a few simple applications for yourself!

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.

ryanchants•1mo ago

I had a lot of with Code Crafters. It's a paid platform, but they give you a basic walk through of different technologies, with full test suites. For example, you implement some basic Redis. It doesn't spoon feed you what to do, but breaks it down into manageable chunks.

https://codecrafters.io/

kondov•1mo ago

I feel the exact same way and my career path and years in the industry are pretty much the same as well. What's usually blocking me from giving other programming niches a try is that I can't imagine ever building something in them that people actually use. Everything I've studied so far has been grounded in practicality and building a compiler, for example, seemed like something that only a select few can build with good quality.

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.

kenrick95•1mo ago

I want to learn driving.

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

busymom0•1mo ago

I plan on learning driving this year too! I think I will still continue using public transit because I enjoy doing research things while on transit (which of course can't be done while driving) but I want to learn driving.

canpan•1mo ago

Same here! I lived in big cities all my life and am used to the convenience of good public transport. Want to travel and rent a nice car, just when needed.

sokoloff•1mo ago

I always feel the jump in price from standard to nice rental car is too much to bother with (like a factor of 2.5-5x). So I drive a lot of crappy rentals, but they’re just a way to get from point to point.

Nextgrid•1mo ago

Automatic transmissions (for EU where manual is popular - I guess this doesn’t apply in countries where everyone drives automatics already) are generally only available with higher trim levels and yet don’t cost much more to rent, so this might be an option to get a “nicer” rental.

AdieuToLogic•1mo ago

> I want to learn driving.

Two low-risk and cheap ways to develop relevant driving skills are bumper cars[0] and go-karts[1]. This may appear to be silly at first, but both involve the same hand-eye coordination and decision skills of vehicular driving (though the latter is no where nearly as fun as the others).

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_cars

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-kart

Fhch6HQ•1mo ago

This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car. It would probably help, but at some point they're going to need to drive something with more weight and horsepower.

AdieuToLogic•1mo ago

> This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car.

A unique simulation bumper cars can provide is in collision avoidance and real-time steering/acceleration/braking skills. The value of this is relative and dependent upon a person using time in a bumper car with intent to hone driving skills.

globular-toast•1mo ago

The real way is just to ride a bike. You can ride it on the road so you'll learn how the road works as well as how to operate a vehicle. When I got in a car the only things that took time to learn were operating the clutch and manoeuvres in tight spaces (you need to develop spacial awareness that you won't get from cycling). If I had learnt to drive an auto it would have been trivially easy after years of cycling.

smileysteve•1mo ago

The biggest pro of a bike is it teaches you to read the road and traffic ahead for energy conservation (and defensive driving).

On a bike, this mostly reduces pedaling; in a car this can reduce unnecessary braking, safer driving distances, which make you a more predictable driver.

globular-toast•1mo ago

It also gives you a lifelong respect for people so if you do drive you won't treat humans like annoying obstacles that might ruin your paintwork if you hit them.

I believe 100% that nobody should be allowed behind the wheel of a motor vehicle before obtaining cycling proficiency.

reorder9695•1mo ago

Honestly I found it the other way around, learning to drive made me a significantly better and safer cyclist as I realised what drivers are expecting to happen, and actually had to learn the rules of the road. Before I learned to drive I didn't really know what was expected or legal in a lot of situations in the city especially.

globular-toast•1mo ago

It should be taught really, but unfortunately car-centric society means road=car for a lot of people. Cycling is more advanced because road positioning is much more important, plus you have to deal with cars. So it's kinda ridiculous we don't teach it in schools. Apparently they used to back in my parents' day (it was called cycling proficiency).

yallpendantools•1mo ago

I've been driving for about a year (with my first car too) when I drove a bunch of friends to an out-of-town amusement park. It's some kind of car-warming thing for me. It's about an hour-long drive without traffic.

In the park, I made it a hard point not to ride the bumper cars because I thought it would mess with my muscle-memory as the designated driver. If not for that, I really love bumper cars. However, I've found that responsiveness of bumper cars vary a lot per park; it either depends on the maintenance or the maker of the rides. And IME, none of them are really comparable to even the shittiest cars I've driven (e.g., the ones from the driving school, the assigned car for my license test).

But my bigger concern that day was the fact that the bumper car mindset is not the roadcar driver mindset. For learners, the free-for-all chaotic nature of the track is not even a good simulation! Not even if you're driving somewhere like India or China.

Speaking of simulation, I really want an affordable but legit way to practice dealing with outlier driving scenarios. Like, what if my brake fails in the highway, what if I get a flat while doing 100KPH---stuff even the safest, most defensive drivers can't entirely rule out. Anyone know of games that might fit the bill?

biztos•1mo ago

Great idea!

Although I have "known" how to drive for a long time, I didn't get my formal license until much later in life than most people, for similar reasons to yours.

Now that I have it, I kick myself for not doing this earlier, but as they say: the best time was ten years ago, the second-best time is now.

Owing to the city life I often go up to six months without driving anywhere, but when I finally get out on the road again it feels great. Country driving is amazing, in any country where people drive safely. It's even pretty nice where they don't. City driving still stresses me out, but I'm determined to get better at it.

Good luck! If you find yourself having trouble getting the license in Singapore, there are other countries where you could get a license more easily, and with that license you could drive in third countries.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

This is a great idea. Countryside driving is lovely in many places in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Since you are based in Singapore, you can easily go across the border in JB, rent a car and drive into the countryside. There so much beauty in a slow drive through the Malaysian countryside. I use Google Maps (satellite view) to find interesting nature, then try to drive to it.

handzhiev•1mo ago

I learned this year at 45 - before that I only had a moped license and used a moped. I am not a "car person" and did not expect I'd like driving. I turned out wrong! I enjoy it and especially enjoy the benefits and freedom a car gives you. You'll most likely not regret it too.

ChuckMcM•1mo ago

I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.

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.

thijson•1mo ago

The latest over the air TV spec. is using OFDM, it's called ATSC 3. That's if you're looking for real signals to test your receiver on.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

    > Become conversational in Ukrainian.

This one caught my eye! What is your motivation?

drmpeg•1mo ago

There's some thought that Ukraine could become a tech hub after the war due to their drone technology.

ChuckMcM•1mo ago

I believe that the outcome of the Ukraine-Russian will shape the world for decades just as WWII did. It is my hope that the Ukrainians succeed in throwing the Russians out of their country. In a post war Ukraine, I'd like to help it rebuild in any way I can, and to do that I have to speak Ukrainian at least conversationally.

drmpeg•1mo ago

Here's my ATSC 3.0 transmitter in C++.

https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-atsc3

ChuckMcM•1mo ago

Nicely done.

TheAceOfHearts•1mo ago

I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.

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.

qnleigh•1mo ago

> I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.

What's the plan to make sure that progress in AI leads to predominantly positive outcomes for people? All the people I've asked who work at the major AI companies haven't given an answer, except to say that they don't study safety or societal impacts, but know others who do.

If you don't have an answer, can I humbly suggest that you add finding one to your list?

apostata•1mo ago

Or, fishing. They could take up fishing instead.

busymom0•1mo ago

I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again.

I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.

Any tips are welcome.

tmseidman•1mo ago

Me too! I'm using Alfred's Adult Piano course book.

busymom0•1mo ago

Have you started yet? How is it going? Self learning?

tmseidman•1mo ago

Nope, haven't started yet, since I'm out of town and my keyboard is at home. But yeah, I'll be self-learning! I did it with guitar a few years ago and it worked for me (to a point; I never got amazing at guitar).

kuerbel•1mo ago

What was too hard if I may ask? Maybe your teacher focused on the wrong things for/with you?

mmcconnell1618•1mo ago

Learning to play individual notes from sheet music only helps you learn one song. The breakthrough for me was thinking in musical structure.

- 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.

greenie_beans•1mo ago

> Most pop songs use I,IV,V from a scale

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.

quantpunk•1mo ago

After playing guitar for 25 years, I quit guitar and got a digital piano.

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.

Insanity•1mo ago

GenAI security. I work in the security space as an engineering manager but need to be more versed in LLM focused attack vectors.

Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.

Ocerge•1mo ago

I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.

Trasmatta•1mo ago

I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.

it_is_beautiful•1mo ago

I'm in a similar position but figured out how to work out last year. it's not a panacea, but working out is quite fun and is a great skill. I never had a personal trainer, but the best part about having one would probably be that they could set you up with some plans to follow, removing all the initial guesswork. The hardest part about working out for me is trying to figure out a goal to optimize for that's not too far away but not too simple either.

etrautmann•1mo ago

Working out does SO MUCH to help with depression. There’s a lot of literature to support this, and plenty of anecdata as well. Good luck, you can do it!

ludicity•1mo ago

I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.

Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!

throwaway2037•1mo ago

    > I've written about

If you are willing, can you share a link to any public writing? I'm surprised that we don't see more blog posts shared in HN about people's stuggle with mental health. You definitely see HN posts about it, but I don't see so much blog post sharing.

ludicity•1mo ago

My blog is pretty well-known and linking feels a bit self-promote-y, so I tend to avoid it. But since it might help, here you go!

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-burnout-mental-health-and...

Trasmatta•1mo ago

Thank you. I've been in therapy for 4 years. It's probably helped keep me stable, but the effectiveness has been limited.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

    > Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out.

This is a great idea if you have the money for it. Don't feel guilty about just a few sessions to build up a set exercises that works for you. Then you can circle back 2-4 times per year, do a few more sessions to up your game. For me, exercise was a fuckin' game changer for my mental health. Even when I struggle to get out of bed in the morning, missing a workout makes me feel muuuuuuch worse (mentally and physically).

Edit:

Another thing I just thought of: If a personal trainer is too expensive, consider signing up for a free trial of one of a million different online apps that help you build and structure a workout. Example (no shill here): https://rpstrength.com/. There are lots of competitors. Don't worry about getting everything perfect on the first try. The real trick to exercise is finding what works for you. Dr. Mike (from RP) is constantly banging the drum about experimenting with your own body and health through exercise and diet. Ultimately, you know yourself better than anyone else on this planet.

quantpunk•1mo ago

The language models can give you a good quick program right now.

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.

rewgs•1mo ago

Technical:

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.

quantpunk•1mo ago

Have you ever done anything with tone.js?

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.

spudlyo•1mo ago

I started learning Latin in 2025, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I can read intermediate level pedagogical texts -- mostly adapted Greek and Roman myths. In 2026 I want to get my proficiency up to the point where I can comfortably read the first book of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. This is doable, many of the texts I'm reading now were designed to teach the vocabulary and grammar so High School students could slog through it.

ipnon•1mo ago

De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!

AbstractH24•1mo ago

To expand my knowledge of product management and JavaScript enough to build a strong prototype of app/business i have in mind with the help of Lovable and other ai tools.

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.

pinkmuffinere•1mo ago

- Do the splits!

- 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"

pan69•1mo ago

I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc.

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.

kaizenb•1mo ago

"The decision of all decisions is to reject the default path. To answer the call to adventure. To finally begin writing the first chapter. To leave the tutorial and start level one. That's when your life starts."

Good luck!

imron•1mo ago

How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building?

I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results.

Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not spending enough, or if it’s just my standards are too high for the code that is produced but I usually always end up going back to doing things by hand.

I try to keep the AI focused on small well defined tasks, use AGENT.MD and skills, build out a plan first, followed by tests for spec based development, keep context windows and chats a reasonable length etc, but if I add up all that time I could have done it myself and have better grasp of the program and the domain in the process.

I keep reading how AI is a force multiplier but I’m yet to see it play out for myself.

I see lots of posts talking about how much more productive AI has made people, but very few with actual specifics on setup, models, costs, workflows etc.

I’m not an AI doomer and would love to realize the benefits people are claiming they get.... but how to get there is the question

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

For me, it has gone through stages.

Initially I was astounded by the results.

Then I wrote a large feature (ad pacing) on a site using LLMs. I learned the LLMs did not really understand what they were doing. The algorithm (PID controller) itself was properly implemented (as there is plenty of data to train on), but it was trying to optimize the wrong thing. There were other similar findings where LLM was doing very stupid mistakes. So I went through a disillusionment stage and kind of gave up for a while.

Since then, I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively. I have used it mostly on existing Django code bases. I think everybody has a slightly different take on how it works well. Probably the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. Existing code bases seem easier, as well as working on a spec beforehand, requiring tests etc. basic SWE principles.

imron•1mo ago

> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively

This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)

> the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things.

This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me.

Then I wonder if it’s just my spend? I don’t mind spending $30/month to experiment but I’m not going to drop $300/month unless I can see evidence that it’ll be worth it, which I haven’t really seen, but maybe there’s a dependency and you don’t get the result without increased spend?

Some posts I’ve seen claim spending of $1,500/month, which would be worth it if it could increase productivity enough, but there’s very few specifics on workflows and results.

LouisSayers•1mo ago

You can achieve a lot on the $30 plan.

I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money.

Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.

hawk_•1mo ago

You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Exactly, copy paste related code and files. Give it some background ontext on what it is you're doing and then tell it what you'd like it to do.

fragmede•1mo ago

> You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?

I'm sure you can derive some benefit without doing that, but you're not going to see much of a speedup if you're still copy/pasting and manually prompting after each change. If anybody is copy/pasting and saying "I don't get it", yeah you don't.

dvfjsdhgfv•1mo ago

What do you mean by copy paste? I use copy paste in non-agentic workflows.

LouisSayers•1mo ago

Yeah, copy paste for non-agentic workflows. I'm keeping things extremely simple.

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)

Fair enough :-)

This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the moment the food appeared with the reward.

I think we humans have similar psychology, i.e. we tend to associate superstitions about patterns of what were doing when we got rewards, if they happen at random intervals.

To me it seems we are at a phase where what works with LLMs *(the reward) are still quite random, but it is psychologically difficult for us to admit it. Therefore we try to invent various kinds of theories of why something appears to work, which are closer to superstitions than real repeatable processes.

It seems difficult to really generalize repeatable processes of what really works, because it depends on too many things. This may be the reason why you are unsuccessful when using these descriptions.

But while it seems less useful to try to work based on theories of what works -- although I had skeptical attitude -- I have found that LLMs can be huge productive boost -- but it really depends on the context.

It seems you just need to keep trying various things, and eventually you may find out what works for you. There is no shortcut where you just read a blog post and then you can do it.

Things I have tried succesfully: - modifying existing large-ish Django projects, adding new apps to it. It can sometimes use Django components&HTMX/AlpineJS properly, but sometimes starts doing something else. One app uses tenants, and LLM appears to constantly struggle with this. - creating new Django projects -- this was less successful than modifying existing projects, because LLM could not imitate practices - Apple Swift mobile and watch applications. This was surprisingly succesful. But these were not huge apps. - python GUI app was more or less succesful - GitHub Pages static web sites based on certain content

I have not copied any CLAUDE.md or other files. Every time Claude Code does something I don't appreciate, I add a new line. Currently it is at 26 lines.

I have made a few skills. They are mostly so that they can work independently in a loop, for example test something that does not work.

Typically I try to limit the technologies to something I know really well. When something fails, I can often quickly figure out what is wrong.

I started with the basic plan (I guess it is that $30/month). I only upgraded to $100 Max and later to $180 2xMax because I was hitting limits.

But reason I was hitting limits was because I was working on multiple projects on multiple environments at the same time. The only difference I have seen is that I have hit the limits. I have not seen any difference in quality.

imron•1mo ago

Thanks for the info. I try a mix of things I know well and things I want to play around with.

Swift and iOS was something that didn’t work so well for me. I wanted to play around with face capture and spent a day with Claude putting together a small app that showed realtime video of a face and put dots on/around various facial features and printed log messages if the person changed the direction they were looking (up down left right) and played a sound when they opened their mouth.

I’ve done app development before, but it’s been a few years so was a little bit rusty and it felt like Claude was really helping me out.

Then I got to a point I was happy with and I thought I’d go deeper in the code to understand what it was doing and how it was working (not a delegation issue as per another comment, this was a play/learning exercise for me so wanted to understand how it all worked) - and right there in the apple developer documentation was a sample so that did basically the same thing as my app, only the code was far simpler and after reading through the accompanying docs I realized the Claude version had a threading issue waiting to happen that was explicitly warned against in the docs of the api calls it was using.

If I’d gone to the developer docs in the beginning I would have had a better app, and better understanding in maybe a quarter of the time.

Appreciate the info on spend. The above session was on the $30/month version of Claude.

I guess I need to just keep flapping my wings until I can draw the owl.

fragmede•1mo ago

When did you try Claude and Swift? There was a dramatic improvement (imo, I haven't written my own swift, I'm mostly back end guy) with the latest releases, judging by how many iterations on stupid shit my programs have taken.

If you tried it roughly prior to https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note... give it another shot. f you tried it after and found it lacking then this doesn't apply.

imron•1mo ago

Thanks. Definitely before this. Will try it out again next time I’m playing with swift.

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

> I realized the Claude version had a threading issue waiting to happen that was explicitly warned against in the docs of the api calls it was using.

I am reading between the lines here, trying genuinely to be helpful, so forgive me if I am not on the right track.

But based on what you write, it seems to me you might have not really gone through the disillusionment phase yet. You seem to be assuming the models "understand" more than they really are capable of understanding, which creates expectations and then disappointment. It seems to be you are still expecting CC to work at a level of a senior professional on various roles, instead of assuming it is a junior professional.

I would have probably approached that iOS app by first investigting various options how the app could be implemented (especially as I don't have deep understanding of the tech), and then explore each option to understand myself what is the best one.

The options in your example might be the Apple documentation page. It it might be some open source repo that contains something that could be used as a starting point etc.

Then I would have asked Claude to create a plan to implement the best option.

During either the option selection or planning, the threading issue would either come up or not. It might come up explicitly, in which case I could learn it from the plans. It might be implicit, just included in the generated code. Or it might not be included in the plans or in the code, even if it is explicitly stated in the documentation. If the suggested plan would be based on that documentation, then I would probably read it myself too, and might have seen the suggestion.

When reviewing the plan, I can use my prior knowledge to ask whether that issue has been taken into account. If not, then Claude would modify the plan. Of course, if I did not know about the threading issue beforehand, and did not have the general experience about the tech to suspect such as a issue, nor read the documentation and see the recommendation, I could not find the issue myself either.

If the issue is not found in planning or progamming, the issue would arise at later stage, hopefully while unit/system testing the application, or pilot use. I have not written complex iOS apps personally so I might have not caught it either -- I am not senior enough to guide it. I would ask it to plan again how to comprehenively test such an app, to learn how it should be done.

What I meant by standard SWE practices is that there are various stages (requirements, specification, design, programming, testing, pilot use) where the solution is reviewed from multiple angles, so it becomes likely that this kind of issues are caught. The best practices also include iteration. Start with something small that works. For example, first an iOS application that compiles, and shows "Hello, world" etc. and can be installed on your phone.

In my experience, CC cannot be expected to independently work as a senior professional on any role (architect, programmer, test manager, tester, pilot user, product manager, project manager). Junior might not take into account all instructions or guidance even if it is explicit. But it can act as a junior professional on any of these roles, so it can help senior professional to get the 10x productivity boost on any of these areas.

By project manager role, I mean that I am explicitly taking the CC through the various SWE stages and making sure they have been done properly, and also that I iterate on the solution. On each one of the stages, I take the role of the respective senior professional. If I cannot do it yet, I try to learn how to do it. At the same time, I work as a product manager/owner as well, to make decisions about the product, based on my personal "taste" and requirements.

imron•1mo ago

I appreciate the reply, and you trying to be helpful, but this is not what is happening.

I mean I'm definitely still in the stage of disillusionment, but I'm not treating LLMs as senior or expecting much from them.

The example I gave played out much as you described above.

I used an iterative process, with multiple self-contained smaller steps, each with a planning and discussion stage where I got the AI to identify ways to achieve what I was looking to do and weigh up tradeoffs that I then decided on, followed by a design clarification and finalisation stage, before finally getting it to write code (very hard sometimes to get the AI not to write code until the design has been finalised), followed by adjustments to that code as necessary.

The steps involved were something like:

- build the app skeleton

- open a camera feed

- display the feed full screen

- flip the feed so it responded as a mirror would if you were looking at it

- use the ios apis to get facial landmarks

- display the landmarks as dots

- detect looking in different directions and print a log message.

- detect the user opening their mouth

- play a sound when the mouth transitions from closed to open

- etc

Each step was relatively small and self-contained, with a planning stage first and me asking the AI probing/clarifying questions.

The threading issue didn't come up at all in any of this.

Once it came, the AI tied itself in knots trying to sort it out, coming up with very complex dispatching logic that still got things incorrect.

It was a fun little project, but if I compare the output it just wasn't equivalent to what I could get if I'd just started with the Apple documentation (thought maybe it's different now, as per another commenter's reply).

It's also easily completeable in a day if you want to give it a try :-) Apple Developer reference implementation [here](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Vision/tracking-th...).

> By project manager role, I mean that I am explicitly taking the CC through the various SWE stages and making sure they have been done properly, and also that I iterate on the solution. On each one of the stages, I take the role of the respective senior professional. If I cannot do it yet, I try to learn how to do it. At the same time, I work as a product manager/owner as well, to make decisions about the product, based on my personal "taste" and requirements.

Right, this is what I do. I guess my point is that the amount of effort involved to use English to direct and correct the AI often outweighs the effort involved to just do it myself.

The gap is shrinking (I get much better results now that I did a year ago) but still there.

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

What I meant by "not treating LLM as senior" is that the disillusionment phase culminates in an a-ha moment which could be described a "LLM is not a senior developer". This a-ha moment is not intellectual, but emotional. It is possible to same time think that LLM is not a senior developer, but not realize it emotionally. This emotional realization in turn has consequences.

>The threading issue didn't come up at all in any of this. > >Once it came, the AI tied itself in knots trying to sort it out, coming up with very complex dispatching logic that still got things incorrect.""

Yes. These kind of loops have happened to me as well. It sometimes requires clearing of context + some inventive step to help the LLM out of the loop. For example my ad pacing feature required that I recognized that it was trying to optimize the wrong variable. I consider this to be partly what I mean by "LLM is a junior" and that "I act as the project manager".

> I guess my point is that the amount of effort involved to use English to direct and correct the AI often outweighs the effort involved to just do it myself.

Could you really have done a complex mobile app alone in one day without knowing the stack well beforehand? I believe this of stuff used to take months from a competent team not long time ago. I certainly could not have done one year ago what I can do today, with these tools.

skydhash•1mo ago

You could. There’s a lot of code samples. But the issue is always quality and that takes time.

imron•1mo ago

I'm pretty sure I have the right intellectual and emotional understanding of the AI and its abilities.

> I consider this to be partly what I mean by "LLM is a junior" and that "I act as the project manager".

And this is partly what I mean when I say the time I spend instructing the "junior" LLM could be just as well spent implementing the code myself - because the "project manager" side of me can work with the "senior dev" side of me at the speed of thought and often in parallel, and solving the challenges and the design of something is often where most of the time is spent anyway.

Skills are changing this equation somewhat due to the way they can encode repeatable knowledge, but not so much for me yet especially if I'm trying things out in radically different areas (I'm still in my experimental stage with them).

> Could you really have done a complex mobile app alone in one day without knowing the stack well beforehand?

No, but that's not what happened here.

The mobile app wasn't complex (literally only does the things outlined above) and I've done enough mobile development and graphics/computer vision development before that the stack and concepts involved weren't completely unknown, just the specifics of the various iOS APIs and how to string them together - hence why I initially thought it would be a good use case for AI.

It was also an incredible coincidence that the toy app I wanted to build had an apple developer tutorial that did almost the same thing as what I was looking to build, and so yes, I clearly would have been better off using the documentation as a starting point rather than the AI.

That sort of coincidence won't always exist, but I've thinking lately about another toy iOS/apple watch application, and I checked, and once again there is a developer tutorial that closely matches what I'm looking to build. If I ever get around to experimenting with that, the developer docs are going to be my first port of call rather than an AI.

> I certainly could not have done one year ago what I can do today, with these tools.

Right, and if you look back at my original reply (not to you), this is what I'm trying to understand - the what and how of AI productivity gains, because if I evaluate the output I get it's almost always either something I could have built faster and better, or if not faster then at least better and not so much slower that the AI was enabling a week of work to be done in a day, and month of work to be done in a week (claims from the GP, not you).

I would love to be able to realize those gains - and I can see the potential but just not the results.

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

>The mobile app wasn't complex (literally only does the things outlined above) and I've done enough mobile development and graphics/computer vision development before that the stack and concepts involved weren't completely unknown, just the specifics of the various iOS APIs and how to string them together - hence why I initially thought it would be a good use case for AI. > >It was also an incredible coincidence that the toy app I wanted to build had an apple developer tutorial that did almost the same thing as what I was looking to build, and so yes, I clearly would have been better off using the documentation as a starting point rather than the AI.

Ok. I have done similar, too. For example, when starting a new Django project, I will rather copy an old project as basis than create a new from scratch with LLM.

If there already exists full documentation or repo of exactly what you are trying to do and/or it is something you have already done many times, then LLM might not add too much value, and may even be a hindrance.

bonesss•1mo ago

Challenging my own LLM experiences cynically: for a period it really does feel like I’m interactively getting exactly what I need… but given that the end result is generated and I have to then learn it, I’m left in much the same situation you mentioned of looking at the developer docs where a better cleaner version exists.

Subjectively interacting with an LLM gives a sense of progress, but objectively downloading a sample project and tutorial gets me to the same point with higher quality materials much faster.

I keep thinking about research on file navigation via command line versus using a mouse. People’s subjective sense of speed and capability don’t necessarily line up with measurable outcomes.

LLMs can do some amazing things, but violently copy and pasting stack overflow & randomness from GitHub can too.

imron•1mo ago

Right. This is how I feel. I can get the LLM to generate code that more or less does what I need, but if I objectively look at the result and the effort required to get there it's still not at the point where it's doing it faster and better than what I could have got manually (with exceptions for certain specific use cases that are not generally applicable to the work I want to do).

The time I save on typing out the program is lost to new activities I otherwise wouldn't be doing.

rkuodys•1mo ago

I am honestly curious about your point on productivity boost. Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can? Or is it the point that tests written by AI is of much lower quality that is not worth using them? I am at the role of solo-preneur now and I see a lot of benefit from AI. But then I read posts like yours that experienced devs don't see much value in AI and I start to doubt the things I do. Are they bad quality(possibly) or is it something else going on.

imron•1mo ago

I’m not faster at writing tests than AI but my own code needs fewer tests.

When I’m writing my own code I can verify the logic as I go and coupled with a strong type system and a judicious use of _some_ tests its generally enough for my code to be correct.

By comparison the AI needs more tests to keep it on the right path otherwise the final code is not fit for purpose.

For example in a recent use case I needed to take a json blob containing an array of strings that contained numbers and needed to return an array of Decimals sorted in ascending order.

This seemed a perfect use case - a short well defined task with clear success criteria so I spent a bunch of time writing the requirements and building out a test suite and then let the AI do its thing.

The AI produced ok code, but it was sorted everything lexicographically before converting to a Decimal rather converting to Decimals first and sorting numerically so 1000 was less than 900.

So I point it out and the AI says good point, you’re absolutely correct and we add a test for this and it goes again and gets the right result but that’s not a mistake I would have made or needed a test for (though you could argue it’s a good test to have).

You could also argue that I should have specified the problem more clearly, but then we come back to the point that if I’m writing every specific detail in English first, it’s faster for me just to write it in code in the first place.

welshwelsh•1mo ago

Try giving this prompt to your favorite LLM:

"Write unit tests with full line and branch coverage for this function:

def add_two_numbers(x, y): return x + y + 1 "

Sometimes the LLM will point out that this function does not, in fact, return the sum of x and y. But more often, it will happily write "assert add_two_numbers(1, 1) == 3", without comment.

The big problem is that LLMs will assume that the code they are writing tests for is correct. This defeats the main purpose of writing tests, which is to find bugs in the code.

lurking_swe•1mo ago

Tip: teach it how to write tests properly. I’ll share what has worked pretty well for me.

Run Cursor in “agent” mode, or create a Codex or Claude Code “unit test” skill. I recommend claude code.

Explain to the LLM that after it creates or modifies a test, it must run the test to confirm it passes. If it fails, it’s not allowed to edit the source code, instead it must determine if there is a bug in the test or the source code. If the test is buggy it should try again, if there is a bug in the source code it should pause, propose a fix, and consult with you on next steps.

The key insight here is you need to tell it that it’s not supposed to randomly edit the source code to make the test pass. I also recommend reviewing the unit tests at a high level, to make sure it didn’t hallucinate.

locknitpicker•1mo ago

> Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can?

I feel this is a gross mischaracterization of any user flow involving using LLMs to generate code.

The hard part of generating code with LLMs is not how fast the code is generated. The hard part is verifying it actually does what it is expected to do. Unit tests too.

LLMs excel at spewing test cases, but you need to review each and every single test case to verify it does anything meaningful or valid and you need to iterate over tests to provide feedback on whether they are even green or what is the code coverage. That is the part that consumes time.

Claiming that LLMs are faster at generating code than you is like claiming that copy-and-pasting code out of Stack Overflow is faster than you writing it. Perhaps, but how can you tell if the code actually works?

jstummbillig•1mo ago

I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work?

You will certainly understand a program better where you write every line of code yourself, but that limits your output. It's a trade-off.

The part that makes it work quite well is that you can also use the LLM to better understand the code where required, simply by asking.

brailsafe•1mo ago

> I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work?

The difference between delegating to a human vs an LLM is that a human is liable for understanding it, regardless of how it got there. Delegating to an LLM means you're just more rapidly creating liabilities for yourself, which indeed is a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the complexity of what you're losing intimate knowledge of.

jstummbillig•1mo ago

The topic of liability is a difference but I think not an important one, if your objective is to get things done. In fact, humans being liable creates high incentives to obscure the truth, deceive, or move slowly to limit personal risk exposure, all of which are very real world hindrances.

In the end the person in charge is liable either way, in different ways.

brailsafe•1mo ago

> all of which are very real world hindrances.

Real world responsibilities to manage, which sometimes can be hindrances at certain levels, but no functional society lets people just do arbitrary things at any speed regardless of impact to others in the name of a checklist. I mean that if I ask a person on my team that I trust to do something, they'll use a machine to do it, but if it's wrong, they're responsible for fixing it and maintaining the knowledge to know how to fix it. If a bridge fails, it's on the Professional Engineer who has signoff on the project, as well as the others doing the engineering work to make sure they make a bridge that doesn't collapse. If software engineers can remotely call themselves that without laughing, they need to consider their liability along the way, depending on circumstance.

Flere-Imsaho•1mo ago

As a technical manager, I'm liable for every line of code we produce - regardless of who in the team actually wrote the code. This is why I review every pull request :)

dynamite-ready•1mo ago

This is interesting. At what level and team size? There's going to have to be a point where you just give in to the 'vibes' (whether it's from a human, or a machine), otherwise you become the bottleneck, no?

9cb14c1ec0•1mo ago

Better a bottleneck than constant downtime.

Flere-Imsaho•1mo ago

Only 4 or so people...so small, but that's how agile teams should be.

brailsafe•1mo ago

I think there's a place for this, it's not rare for one person to be the PR bottleneck like this, but I don't think it would be for me in either position; people should be able to be responsible for reviewing each others work imo. Incidentally "Agile" with a capital A sucks and should die in a fire, but lowercase a "agile" probably does by necessity mean smaller teams.

imron•1mo ago

I’m perfectly comfortable and used to delegating, but delegation requires trust that the result will be fit for purpose.

It doesn’t have to be exactly how I would do it but at a minimum it has to work correctly and have acceptable performance for the task at hand.

This doesn’t mean being super optimized just that it shouldn’t be doing stupid things like n+1 requests or database queries etc.

See a sibling comment for one example on correctness, another one related to performance was querying some information from a couple of database tables (the first with 50,000 rows the next with 2.5 million)

After specifying things in enough detail to let the AI go, it got correct results but performance was rather slow. A bit more back and forthing and it got up to processing 4,000 rows a second.

It was so impressed with its new performance it started adding rocket ship emojis to the output summary.

There were still some obvious (to me) performance issues so I pressed it to see if it could improve the performance. It started suggesting some database config tweaks which provided some marginal improvements but was still missing some big wins elsewhere - namely it was avoiding “expensive” joins and doing that work in the app instead - resulting in n+1 db calls.

So I suggested getting the DB to do the join and just processing the fully joined data on the app side. This doubled throughout (8,000 rows/second) and led to claims from the AI this was now enterprise ready code.

There was still low hanging fruit though because it was calling the db and getting all results back before processing anything.

After suggesting switching to streaming results (good point!) we got up to 10,000 rows/second.

This was acceptable performance, but after a bit more wrangling we got things up to 11,000 rows/second and now it wasn’t worth spending much extra time squeezing out more performance.

In the end the AI came to a good result, but, at each step of the way it was me hinting it in the correct direction and then the AI congratulating me on the incredible “world class performance” (actual quote but difficult to believe when you then double performance again).

If it has just been me I would have finished it in half the time.

If I’d delegated to a less senior employee and we’d gone back and forth a bit pairing to get it to this state it might have taken the same amount and effort but they would’ve at least learnt something.

Not so with the AI however - it learns nothing and I have to make sure I re-explain things and concepts all over again the next time and in sufficient detail that it will do a reasonable job (not expecting perfection, just needs to be acceptable).

And so my experience so far (much more than just these 2 examples) is that I can’t trust the AI to the point where I can delegate enough that I don’t spend more time supervising/correcting it than I would spend writing things myself.

Edit: using AI to explain existing code is a useful thing it can do well. My experience is it is much better at explaining code than producing it.

amitav1•1mo ago

Not trying to downplay your grievances, but isn't this what [Skills](https://claude.com/skills) are for? After going back and forth on something like that, create a skill that's something along the lines of

`database-query-speed-optimization` "Some rules of thumb for using database queries:

- Use joins - Streaming results is faster - etc. "

That way, the next time you have to do something like this, you can remind it of / it will find the skill.

imron•1mo ago

Yeah it is but firstly this example was from before skills were a thing and secondly the rules might not be universally applicable.

In this case the two tables shared 1:1 mapping of primary key to foreign key so the join was fast and exact - but there are situations where that won’t the case.

And yeah this means slowly building out skills with enough conditions and rules and advice.

kukkeliskuu•1mo ago

> It was so impressed with its new performance it started adding > rocket ship emojis to the output summary.

I laughed more at this than I probably should have, out of recognition.

tclancy•1mo ago

There is probably a case of people both being right here, just having gotten to, or found, different end results. For me, Claude has been a boon for prototyping stuff I always wanted to build but didn’t want to do the repetitive plumbing slog to get started, but I have found you hit a level of complexity where AIs bog down and start telling you they have fixed the bug you have just asked about for the sixth time without doing anything or bothering to check.

Maybe that’s just the level I gave up at and it’s a matter of reworking the Claude.md file and other documentation into smaller pieces and focusing the agent on just little things to get past it.

afpx•1mo ago

If anything, the LLM is cool because it keeps me moving forward.

imron•1mo ago

Yes. This is something they are good at. Also helping with brainstorming.

mattm•1mo ago

Wow, you sound exactly like me - except I have a bit less years of experience. Let me know if you want to connect to help keep stay motivated (email in profile)

gremlinsinc•1mo ago

hmu if you need or want a partner...

daliusd•1mo ago

What’s your take on the fact that everyone around gets this boost? I feel the same boost but in our company we had little competition using llm - team I was leading won, but victory was not decisive but quite minimal.

WilcoKruijer•1mo ago

I did the same last year and I’m having a lot of fun. Good luck!

kaizenb•1mo ago

Does being "emotionally strong" is a skill to improve?

esseph•1mo ago

"Villages" help. Lean into yours, or, maybe it's the time to find or build yours.

Best of luck.

kaizenb•1mo ago

Thanks! Actually, I live in a village (: https://x.com/borakaizen/status/2004825887691153795

thot_experiment•1mo ago

I want to be much more publicly unhinged and in general do a lot more art without worrying too much about why or what I'm trying to say. I've found a lot of beauty in shitposts this year and I want to develop my skills to really meaningfully contribute to the corpus.

hsuduebc2•1mo ago

I just wanted I support your enthusiasm for shitposting. The meta irony hidden in these posts is lovable.

brador•1mo ago

Deleted

jesseduffield•1mo ago

The world needs more intelligent shitposting. I support you.

thot_experiment•1mo ago

Bold of you to assume! <3

it_is_beautiful•1mo ago

(Non-technical skill) To live with ambition.

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.

esseph•1mo ago

I'm asking, curiously.

Do you have ADHD?

strix_mahalo•1mo ago

My friend I see a lot of myself in what you wrote, I was in a deep depression and trying to think my way out of it. It didn't work. Honestly I didn't have it as bad as you "sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell" - this is VERY concerning.

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?

it_is_beautiful•1mo ago

Thanks, I appreciate it.

WillAdams•1mo ago

I need to improve my facility with Python and math and geometry sufficiently to finish up my current project, a previewer for G-code which allows creating design files programmatically.

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.

gcanyon•1mo ago

How to build and deploy web apps. I worked as a developer for many years (before becoming a product manager), but always in desktop apps. I still code for fun, but I never made the jump to web apps. Now with AI that's easier than ever, so I'm going to do it.

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.

kaz-inc•1mo ago

Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.

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.

eleventhborn•1mo ago

Technical skills:

- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.

- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.

- Do more coding with AI.

- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)

Non-technical skills:

- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.

araes•1mo ago

I find it difficult to read "hand-rolled paper trading solution" without thinking toilet paper. "focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses"

I donno, I think I kind of like somebody else's skill objective about trying out shitposting. It's the age deucine (credit @naasking).

monsecchris•1mo ago

One possible route towards reducing heavy losses might be to minimise correlation. AI might be quite good at optimising for this.

Zambyte•1mo ago

I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.

I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.

wawhal•1mo ago

Try PianoForAll. My experience, fwiw - Pianoforall was instrumental in helping me play real music at parties and make the piano journey rewarding and enjoyable early on. Without that, the early days of learning classical music, music theory, practicing scales, ballads etc were a limbo - you don't feel like you are making progress (even when you are).

That said, PFA only compliments your classical syllabus, not replaces it.

Zambyte•1mo ago

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check it out :)

RonSkufca•1mo ago

I am doing something very similar. Purchased a Yamaha piano for my daughter's Piano lessons and I want to learn as well. I have no music experience and was wondering if PianoForAll is good for learning the very basics?

calvinmorrison•1mo ago

I have done this in 2025. I picked up a few hymnals at the ol library book sale. They're easy enough, there will be familiar tunes and licks that you can just get, and it's great for sight reading. There's usually 4 lines to follow but you can start with 1, 2, and then do them all. It's a fun skill

whatever1•1mo ago

Use transformers to predict prime numbers.

ipnon•1mo ago

Good luck with this!

strangelove026•1mo ago

Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India

I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking

Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.

Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).

Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn

LouisSayers•1mo ago

If you're into the gym and cooking, consider getting a cast iron frying pan.

Not only great for cooking, but it can also help with wrist strength - you may need to ease into lifting the pan with a single hand.

strangelove026•1mo ago

I've got a wok (I make mapo tofu every now and then) and definitely agree!

FarmerPotato•1mo ago

Write an operating system in Forth.

I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.

Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE

araes•1mo ago

That's a very specific skill development. I'd ask why Forth, yet guess because "must be beautiful"?

Seems like kind of strange / yet somewhat appropriate choice since Forth "traditionally use neither operating system nor file system." and "A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself". Bootstrap your own operating system on a computer with literally nothing.

Interesting to read about though as a tangent, very different kind of language. "grammar has no official specification" "looks the word up in the dictionary" and then does whatever the dictionary specifies.

Good luck on the project though, seems like it fell out of use in the 80's and only got recovered recently. The Forth Interest Group comments on the subject are funny too. [1] "What ANS Forths are available?" -> "The simple answer is: none" Apparently somebody (Vincent Hamp) got it to work on Thumb-2 ISA (ARMv7-M and newer) though. Tiny. 7kb flash, 320B of ram. [2]

[1] https://www.forth.org/ansforth/ansforth.html

[2] https://gitlab.com/higaski/Shi

FarmerPotato•1mo ago

The primary virtue of a Forth system is that it is interactive. You can see this on any 1990s system that can start up in Open Firmware.

I've started with a FIG-Forth kernel in 9900 assembler, which fits into 8K. Many authors worked that code up to the 1990s branch I grabbed.

To bring up the board, I cross-assemble to produce two Flash EEPROMs, plug them in, and power up. The Forth kernel looks at block 6 for customizations where I tell it to compile some source packages I want from Flash. One of these is -ASSEMBLER, which lets me create short chunks of native machine code to work on very low-level things like bit I/O, the SPI and I2C peripheral behavior. Very good for debugging initial hardware.

When I'm happy with some code, I add the source to the next EEPROM build.

Block numbers were originally 1K chunks of disk, but can refer to any kind of storage like pages of ROM/RAM, or even to a process' virtual address space.

elcapitan•1mo ago

That sounds like fun! Which is THE paper by Niklas Wirth?

incognito124•1mo ago

Likely Project Oberon

FarmerPotato•1mo ago

You're not wrong... but I was mixed up:

Edsgar Dijkstra, The THE multiprogramming system (1968)

Niklaus Wirth, Project Oberon

fs_software•1mo ago

I want to learn how to be bored again.

I also want to learn how to ask better questions.

intermerda•1mo ago

I didn't realize it was important to be bored until I read/watched this: https://hbr.org/2025/08/you-need-to-be-bored-heres-why. There are some pointers in there that you might find helpful.

One thing that's helped me is solo hikes which I've done many times before. I still do them for workouts and use them as an opportunity to get bored.

qnleigh•1mo ago

These are great. I recently started taking phone holidays, usually on weekends, where for a whole day I don't allow myself to use my phone except to communicate with people.* Sometimes I just wind up bored, sometimes I wind up spending my time better. I've been gradually increasing how frequently I do this.

How would you go about learning to ask better questions?

*Thinking how strange this sentence would sound 20 years ago.

ipaddr•1mo ago

I got a headset and wanted to do vr apps but found the medium to addicting and now I just play with no desire to create.

ekropotin•1mo ago

My #1 goal for the next year is to find a job that would re-ignite my passion for engineering.

I just can’t longer spend my life doing stupid corporate nonsense work contributing to widespread enshittification of the world.

kuerbel•1mo ago

Same here. I really want to stop peddling Microsoft stuff and support m365. Don't know where to go from here though. But if there's a will there's a way right?

ekropotin•1mo ago

100%. You got this, bro or sis!

biztos•1mo ago

Tech:

1. Rust, I quite like it but I still need AI assistance.

2. Desktop app dev, I'm making one in Tauri and love it, now I want to "go native."

3. Lower-level AI stuff, so far everything has been with APIs, and while that's great it feels a little too abstract.

4. Leetcode pattern matching. (Grumble grumble, but when job-hunting in Rome...)

Differently tech:

5. City driving. Thanks @kenrick95 for reminding me!

6. Color grading, and video editing in general.

7. The Thai language (speaking and reading).

8. Writing for the public.

mmcconnell1618•1mo ago

Color grading is pretty interesting. Please share good resources if you find some.

biztos•1mo ago

I’ve found Darren Mostyn’s videos quite helpful:

https://youtu.be/YbDRl_xugJo

Also Daniel Batal, more in the “tips and tricks” category but very accessible:

https://youtube.com/@daniel_batal

These are both DaVinci Resolve specific. For more general info I found it useful to do some googling around LUTs.

I find the big downside of color grading is it makes you really want a camera that records RAW video.

jackyalcine•1mo ago

Tech:

1. Releasing a solo product. 2. Writing more about code and the intersections of the field in history and world events. 3. Trying to do more talks.

Not-tech:

1. PR like there's no tomorrow. 2. Run two half marathons. 3. Move out of Florida.

volk45•1mo ago

Scheduled for Fire 1 (basic Fire academy) in 2026. Looking forward to developing basic fire fighting skills and strengthen my knowledge in this new volunteer undertaking I started in mid 2025.

As for tech skills in 2026, I’d love to develop a photogrammetry pipeline mixing shoulder mounted SLAM scanner, DSLR terrestrial photography, and aerial LiDAR data sets. I’m lucky to have access to these data sets, just gotta put the pieces together.

I’m already familiar with UAS (unmanned aerial systems) photogrammetry and mixing that with terrestrial photos for high detail models. Aerial Lidar and SLAM datasets are something new I’ve been working with over the past 6 months.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

    > new volunteer undertaking

Is your town/village fully volunteer fire fighters, or a mixed bag of paid pros combined with volunteers? Personally, I always thought a first aid course could be very useful in real life.

volk45•1mo ago

Town and county fire service is all volunteer. We all however have to go through pro board accreditation (for classes) which is nationally recognized in the USA.

Check with your local department to see if they offer CPR and basic first aid courses. If your local FD (fire department) doesn’t offer any, neighboring town stations may.

mraza007•1mo ago

I want to go full into indie hacking and learn atleast a new language this year

Lastly I must say with the help of AI i can now finally develop good frontends

ttsalami•1mo ago

My main ones are career focused:

- Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field.

- Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a very desired skill for any new career opportunities.

- Learn how to manage a small SaaS company and the product. I'm in the finishing stages of a platform that I have been developing by myself(while my cofounder is the industry expert). Neither of us has knowledge on what it takes to launch and sell this product, for which we know there is demand in the industry.

- Create practical real life ML workflows. I have only theoretical experience since I never had the need or opportunity to work with a more real scenario. This is both from personal interest and for career growth.

- Start and actually approach university in a meaningful way. I have a respectable career, but no higher education, which has always weighted on me

Some non-technical:

- Force myself into more social situations, especially with absolutely non-tech people.

- Just started treating ADHD, so hopefully wrangle that

whinvik•1mo ago

I think this is how us engineers always do it but it's almost always the other way around.

Sell first. Building the tech is just an excuse to not learn how to sell. You don't really know what customers really want until you start asking for money.

gavinhoward•1mo ago

I have had to put programming aside in 2025, probably for the rest of my life, so 2026 will be the year I reskill and reinvent myself.

But most importantly, I want to finally become as kind, patient, and charitable as I have always wanted to be.

windows_hater_7•1mo ago

May I ask why you have had to put programming aside?

sailorganymede•1mo ago

Marketing so I can show the stuff I’ve been making off

boricj•1mo ago

I want to draw again.

I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.

sandspar•1mo ago

What subjects or style do you like to draw?

boricj•1mo ago

Being entirely self-taught, I'm not sure how to describe my style. If I have to, it's kinda a nondescript knock-off of Gisèle Lagacé's recent webcomics.

As for the subjects, being a horny teenager at the time I mostly drew scantily clad women. Sometimes portraits/caricatures of teachers or other students, mostly on request. All together, that led to an unfathomable number of hijinks.

Thankfully, the one time that a teacher came across their caricature, it ended well. A fellow student requested it while in class (of handwriting Java of all things). She then took my handout and brought it to the teacher, proudly stating with glee "look at what boricj drew!". Cue the laughter. Then the teacher stated flipping pages and stumbled upon the rest of my usual bodywork, so to speak. Cue the laughter again. By that point, I was rolling on the floor, my sides hurting.

I don't think I'll ever top that, but the reception of my doodles at the conference by academics reminded me of that past. Hopefully I'll manage to rekindle it.

nicbou•1mo ago

I was in the same boat and started drawing again at around 30.

Remember that paper is cheap and that experimentation is valuable. Make all the bad art you can. The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza. There is a valuable life lesson in there about being okay with making mistakes so that you can learn from them.

Nowadays I always carry a notebook, and more often than not pens and watercolours. You can build a really tiny kit out of makeup palettes.

I also loved taking painting lessons and going to live nude drawing at one of my favourite pubs. Making art is such a pleasant disconnect from work and digital life.

smokel•1mo ago

> The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza.

Once you get into it, there is an amazing assortment of papers that can cost up to a pizza per sheet. Especially if you're going for the larger formats.

https://arches-papers.com/arches-range-of-papers/watercolor-...

nicbou•1mo ago

Yes, but let's not nitpick our way out of understanding the point. Don't be afraid to soil a notebook with bad drawings, and waste as much paper as it takes. Mistakes are part of the process, not something to avoid.

smokel•1mo ago

Oh, I'm sorry, no nitpicking intended. Just wanted to share some enthousiasm :)

b4ckup•1mo ago

That's awesome! I feel similar, I drew a lot back in the days because growing up in a small town I was bored so often. I did portrait art only but today I struggle because I just don't know what to draw and I'm just not good at doodling. Best of luck to you!

throwaway2037•1mo ago

Thanks for your openness about with struggling with mental health. It is brutal. For me, exercise really helped. For others, it is reconnecting (or getting closer) with friends and family. Keep at it -- you can beat it!

zeusly•1mo ago

I would love to learn how to draw. I have an iPad Pro with a pencil and procreate. Can anyone give me a few good pointers? I draw like a 5 year old.

smokel•1mo ago

I am pretty good at drawing, and would highly recommend starting with traditional media rather than digital tools.

Drawing on paper allows for a wide range of physical setups, such as using a notebook on your lap or on a table, large sheets mounted on a wall, or a board on an easel. Each configuration engages different muscle groups. Large-format drawing relies primarily on shoulder movement, whereas smaller, more detailed work involves the wrist, forearm, and fingers. I'm convinced that deliberately training hand–eye coordination at multiple scales (finger–eye, wrist–eye, or shoulder–eye), is beneficial in learning to draw better.

It is also a good idea to experiment with a variety of media: pens, pencils, chalk, charcoal, and different surfaces such as paper, wood, or canvas. The differing tactile feedback and resistance will improve your motor control. You don't need to spend a fortune on this, but don't limit yourself to the cheapest color pencils and toilet paper.

That said, if your primary goal is accurate photo replication, it's probably easiest to start with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [1], along with some YouTube tutorials.

[1] https://www.drawright.com/

boricj•1mo ago

Practice. Lots and lots of practice. There's no way around that.

Besides that, there are plenty of resources to learn particular topics/techniques out there. For drawing people with any degree of realism, you'll need at least drawing proportions at first and then anatomy later on.

While you can brute-force it from zero on your own like I did, I wouldn't recommend it. You'll learn faster if you study it like a proper discipline.

nicbou•1mo ago

I have the same setup and I like it, but traditional media is just much more pleasant.

In any case, practice. Keep drawing, and try drawing the same thing multiple times. Don't just start over, fix your mistakes. Step back and take time off to let the mistakes come out.

Above all, remember to have fun. Mistakes are an integral part of learning, and if you take yourself too seriously, you will never make any. Waste as much paper as you need, if it means that you will keep practicing.

fainpul•1mo ago

For anybody who wants to get better at drawing, this is a classic:

https://drawabox.com/lesson/0

nkg•1mo ago

Same here!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395540

jachee•1mo ago

I probably need to learn Go.

luiwammus•1mo ago

I would like to learn more about Web development and related knowledge (networking, security). Currently my programming knowledge is primarily system languages+python. I'm thinking of building a few websites / apps from scratch, and perhaps hosting my own server. Recommendations for frameworks or do's/don'ts are very welcome.

Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job. One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.

culi•1mo ago

For self-hosting: Buy a cheap VPS and use something like Coolify, Dokploy, or Dokku if you don't need a UI. These are half way in between "managed" PaaS (e.g. Vercel, Netlify, etc) and "hosting it yourself". Self-hosting is important experience but setting up reverse proxies, nginx, database backups, port-forwarding, firewall rules, secrets management, dependency updates, etc is not trivial. You should absolutely learn how to do those eventually but it's important to get something up and running first and the software I mentioned does just that for you

For building websites: If you don't already know HTML/CSS/JS definitely start with a vanilla site. No matter what framework is in right now, having the fundamentals down is absolutely a huge boost. So start with a simple static site. If you already have that knowledge, don't go crazy. React is basically the "boring technology" at this point and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Use Vite to create a basic React app

s_ting765•1mo ago

For web development I would say avoid high-level frameworks as much as you can. Most of them are built for hand-holding developers which is counterproductive to learning the fundamentals and are usually inflexible to demands outside the "happy path".

yu3zhou4•1mo ago

Good luck to everyone in achieving their goals and exploring new paths!

To me it's deep learning compilers since mid 2025. I am a person who can't learn just from reading books, so 80% of time I learn by doing (contribute to PyTorch) and 20% of time I read books (now: Engineering a Compiler from Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon) and talk to LLMs to fill gaps in my understanding.

My main quest now is to build a bridge [0] between PyTorch and universal GPU computing world - which I believe WebGPU might become. What it requires is to build is 1) a runtime for executing PyTorch ATen operations on WebGPU by running WGSL shaders and 2) a compiler, so you can use full PyTorch power with @torch.compile

[0] - https://github.com/jmaczan/torch-webgpu

anal_reactor•1mo ago

I want to learn how to sit, stare at the wall, do nothing, and be happy about it.

pdyc•1mo ago

I want to give away my tools for free and take on more ambitious projects, like building more capable browsers and local LLMs to get rid of corporate chokeholds. But that would probably never come true, because I would be tied up making money just to survive, rather than being able to give things away or take on more ambitious projects.

grim_io•1mo ago

I'm still good at what I do, so I'm looking forward to better models to help me atrophy and shrivel my remaining skills :)

gnarcoregrizz•1mo ago

Technical: release a simple, focused product. AI makes it easy to spam things out that look good. I would be psyched if something catches just a little bit of attention. I feel like my main limit is creativity now. Mine has been stifled by 15 years of rote web dev.

Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)

0xMohan•1mo ago

I'm good at coding so hate using LLMs for coding.

but the other things such as writing, just can't do it without LLMs's help. Looking up things, I defaulted to LLMs.

So in 2026, I just want to stop relying on LLMs.

Lol but I do like building LLMs (training from scratch, pre-training, fine-tuning, etc.). as a matter of fact, I'm pre-training a 1b model for last 2 days.

thenthenthen•1mo ago

Reverse engineering. I cannot stand that every product I buy requires an app (that will break with the next upgrade/or lack thereof). I realise this is a problem possibly better suited to be solved on a policy level, but I rather learn some more reverse engineering skills (which can be both very rewarding as well as frustrating) than go into politics.

mft_•1mo ago

Maybe also think about a structure for such things.

As in, it’s all very well to reverse engineer something for your own edification or benefit, but sharing the fruits of your labour with others would be so much better.

And further, serendipitously discovering (possibly abandoned) reverse engineering efforts on GitHub is better than nothing, but having a community working on such things, sharing progress and techniques, and offering a central point of discovery would also be so much better.

thenthenthen•1mo ago

100% find a buddy and have some hacking sharing session/weekend is a great way! Ofc this can be scaled as well!

codybontecou•1mo ago

I hope to explore AI on edge devices and see how far it can get me.

New models like functiongemma are promising and I think we may be at a point where consistent tool calling is all we need.

raw_anon_1111•1mo ago

Get better at Spanish. Reading and writing, I’m hovering around an A2 with decent vocabulary.

https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...

I want to be able to speak and listen at at least a B1 by the end of next year. We will be spending a bit over a month in Costa Rica next year and I want to get as immersed as possible.

Work related get better at pre-sales. Currently, I’m a staff architect at a cloud consulting company leading post sales implementations. While there is some ambiguity when it gets to me, for the most part I know the shape of the business problem they want to solve, working in pre-sales has a higher level of ambiguity. They can’t outsource pre sales since it involves travel

zippyman55•1mo ago

My wife and hired a personal Spanish tutor

scottmcdot•1mo ago

I hired my wife one too. She's really enjoying it [1] [1] www.lacasitaspanishschool.com.au

raw_anon_1111•1mo ago

My wife is going to work with a Spanish tutor remotely who lives in Costa Rica and then work with her in person when we get there.

As far me, I learned a little in school decades ago so I knew basic grammar. DuoLingo gives me a guided learning path to explore. But I use ChatGPT to create drills like creating sentences using words and phrases “at an a2 level using present and past tense verbs” using whatever I need to practice.

I practice speaking using Apple’s voice to text and not ChatGPTs voice to text since it is a lot less forgiving.

kamphey•1mo ago

Wife and I started a 3d printing business. We just started a couple of months ago and have put our items in a few retail stores. Our goal is not to do this super fast but more like supplemental income. Also its fun to print stuff for ourselves. I already designed a finger mini golf game and may start to build my own board games out of 3d printed parts.

So I want to build up 3d modeling skills.

I am not surprised but its much much slower to get a physical product business going than just writing some code and launching.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

This sounds very cool! Can you share a link to your company website, or are you only selling on eBay or Etsy? I think 3D printed stuff can make great creative gifts.

theletterf•1mo ago

Off the top of my head:

— Learn Rust. I'm halfway through the Rustlings exercises and I'll continue with more challenges. Advice is welcome. I might also ask LLMs to pose as teachers and create exercises for me and check them.

- Cooking. This has been something I neglected all my life and I really want to get better at it. It's so fundamental to quality of life.

- Persian language. Studied it for six months, I can read and write the script and I understand basic sentences, but I want to get better at it. If there are any Persian folks reading this, ping me. It's a beautiful language and culture.

maxbond•1mo ago

> Advice is welcome.

Here's some advice I've given about learning Rust in the past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020654

There are also project-based resources beyond Rustlings like Entirely Too Many Linked Lists[1] you might check out. I've found Gjengset's videos[2] great for intermediate content, and they include both project and lecture formats.

Best of luck!

[1] https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@jonhoo

throwaway2037•1mo ago

    > Cooking

For me, what sparked my interest in cooking was two things: (1) getting older (in youth, food was simply fuel, not so much to be enjoyed), (2) wanting to replicate favourites dishes from restaurants (my first first was channa masala). You can learn a lot from middle-aged house wives that have a YouTube cooking channel that show you how to cook classic dishes from various cultures. One thing that has been incredibly liberating is making small tweaks to recipes that will trigger a cultural native to immediately declare: "Oh, that's not authentic." To that I say: "Who cares, it is my food, and I will enjoy it!"

rainonmoon•1mo ago

I really like Rustfully on YouTube. Every video is under 10 minutes long and he goes over one concept and where it would be used in practice. Great for reinforcement learning.

rezlouria•1mo ago

> Persian language

Hey! Iranian here. It’s pretty rare to run into someone learning Persian, so this made me smile. Wishing you the best with it.

theletterf•1mo ago

Mersi khubam!

IamDaedalus•1mo ago

learn spanish and schematic design with pcb I'm self taught programmer blessed to be working in the embedded space this year and I want to take my love for low level further and learn to build hardware from scratc

huhkerrf•1mo ago

I want to learn how to swim. I never took lessons as a kid, and, while I can get from one edge of the pool to the other, I want to feel completely comfortable.

Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.

Rendello•1mo ago

I swam a lot as a kid as my mother was a lifeguard and instructor. Despite that, I was never amazing at it, probably because I was lean and had no buoyancy, but I loved it a lot.

I swam for the first time in years a few months ago, and was surprised how exhausted I was after 30 minutes of treading water! I work out and go on frequent long runs, but I was totally spent from that. I too would love to get into it again, it's definitely a great exercise.

tasuki•1mo ago

Never amazing at swimming because you lacked buoyancy?

I know people who are plenty buoyant: they aren't fast swimmers!

Rendello•1mo ago

Haha yes. Well, I'm pretty sure most pro swimmers are very lean and muscular (ie. not buoyant), so that's not the whole story. I was decent enough at swimming but never great at floating.

b2w•1mo ago

There are plenty of skills involved to develop and improve here like floating, body position, kicking, breathing, etc. Plan it out and make it count!

mschild•1mo ago

- Woodworking. Bit of a cliché for an engineer, I know ;) I renovated my own house from the ground up over the past 2 years but I found the woodworking part always incredibly rewarding. At this point I have quite a good selection of tools and will setup a dedicated workshop in my basement.

- Contributing to Homeassistant community by integrating non-standard zigbee devices. A lot of lighting devices in my house are zigbee. There are some companies that deviate from the standard protocol though to force you to use their hub or software.

Yash16•1mo ago

By 2026, I plan to stop writing code myself and go all-in on AI coding tools like Claude. My focus will shift entirely to marketing, building products, and scaling my own company. AI is changing the game—soon, one person will be able to build a billion-dollar company with AI doing the heavy lifting.

CoffeeDeSanta•1mo ago

I was lost not sure of my career and I put too much focus on it, since now things are more stable, I want to: - Work on projects that actually interest me, not just to fill the CV. - Learn CS fundamentals but I know web development but not how computers work under the hood.

I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.

spit2wind•1mo ago

Do you have any particular resources lined up?

Regarding how computers work under the hood, i can recommend Nand2Tetris.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

spondyl•1mo ago

I'd like to learn a little bit about electronics and hardware. At the moment, I have a child's mental model like you plug something into the wall and then it "powers on". I couldn't really tell you what properties make something a conductor or not, and I also couldn't tell you various components like capacitors do. It's actually quite fun in that I have a pretty clear plan for learning about this stuff but because I've never done it, it's all very new and novel with lots of "Aha!" moments for why things are the way they are.

Cwizard•1mo ago

I can recommend doing this! It really is not hard to learn the basics of electronics and you will have a better understanding of how the things around you work.

pgryko•1mo ago

Sales - especially B2B. I've got a strong technical background (PhD in Physics) and have been writing code for almost 15 years (most domains, with ML more recently). I'm also comfortable with public speaking (talking a conferences, pitching etc). I feel sales is the last piece of the puzzle I'm missing

apexalpha•1mo ago

I want to learn proper programming. Maybe Go, then C(++).

I have never had a proper formal IT education, just learned everything on the go. I can write essentially everything in Python or Bash using AI. I know most (data)concepts and what data to move where in what fashion, I just don't have the hours in it to be able to do it from the top of my head.

I feel the AI is great, but it's also holding me back. Like how driving a automatic transmission is nice, but you'll never learn to drive stick from it.

Also Docker / k8s ecosystem seems to be mostly Go based. And it looks cool, the syntax.

If anyone has any courses that are interactive and can keep an ADHD mind invested in it I'm all ears.

Might be a bit of a tame goal for hckrnews but yeah.

heckelson•1mo ago

I've been learning Go for about 4-6 months. So far I've been really enjoying the language. I'll suggest to you to work through the go tour in the beginning, then gobyexample is a great reference resource. I've also heard good things about the book "100 Go mistakes" which is for advanced users. Obviously, Go has its own quirks but if you can enjoy them and make the language work for you, it's really fun!

apexalpha•1mo ago

Thanks for the suggestions!

heckelson•1mo ago

I remembered a course called "Learn Go through testing" that looks intriguing and also for beginners.

bigpeopleareold•1mo ago

Technical: - Just anything more programming-specific stuff at work. When I get to do something, it's a stress-relief, because the typical day involves dealing with meetings, people, etc. and I can't have that much anymore, now with my health. Even when I can just focus, I want to shake the worry of other people's issues. The programming I do mostly is handling precise reporting requests, but since that is going to be offshored, I can move to something else at least. I am hoping that I can take on anything outside of Java or .NET. I work at a consultancy and those projects do pop up.

- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!

- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)

Non-technical: - I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.

- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.

- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.

onion2k•1mo ago

I want to get better at Systems Thinking. I'm fairly certain that while AI is going to get better and better at most things, it's only ever going to be able to look as far ahead as the prompt it's given and the context available. Architecting a system that can be won't grind to a halt after years of prompt-based additions is going to be a key skill, and the foundation of that is building high quality systems on top of simple foundational systems. That is going to necessitate being good at Systems Thinking.

Also, 'systems' doesn't mean code here. It could be business processes, people processes, ways of working, etc. AI is eventually going to impact all of it (it has already really), and that means being able to think about how to build systems that work well, and especially how to describe systems so that AI can help improve them.

Flere-Imsaho•1mo ago

I too have had similar ideas. Perhaps of interest to you, are the UK's guides on Systems Thinking for Civil Servants [0]. They might be generic enough to apply to what you're interested in?

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/systems-thinking-...

esperent•1mo ago

You're probably already aware of this book but just in case, have you read Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donnela Meadows?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-syst...

scottmcdot•1mo ago

I've just started managing a team and would like to develop my EQ and think more before I speak.

never_inline•1mo ago

SW:

- Architecting larger scale applications

- A project which is related to fundamentals (like compilers, OS) rather than run of the mill web development.

Not SW:

- Motorcycle internals and general repair skills

- Ancient sanskrit grammar

fud101•1mo ago

SQL, Postgres, Pandas, Polars, Airflow, Duckdb, and whatever else shiny object along the way which distracts me from actually doing something productive towards my goals.

Agentlien•1mo ago

I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.

ep_jhu•1mo ago

My wife and I quit our tech jobs and moved from the US to a European country last year to learn/grow/explore. The plan is to renew the visa and continue our exploration.

For 2026, other than more traveling, I have just started a course at the local tech university on solar power, and asset management/O&M of solar installations. The hope is to gain basic domain knowledge for potentially transitioning my career into this field in a year or two, taking advantage of my SWE, data analytics, and PM experience.

I'm also planning to take my host country's driving exam. That means I first need to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission, after 30+ years driving in the US.

throwaway2037•1mo ago

Nice post. Without doxing yourself, can you share the European country and your visa situation? If you want to stay and work in European as US citizens, I highly recommend you look at the DAFT treaty which allows US citizens to live and work (by starting a business) in the Netherlands.

Honestly, I could not do what you have done. Hats off. I am a bit jealous! I really need the daily structure of a regular office job. (Hold your tomatoes folks!) How do you fight they tyranny of structurelessness? Or maybe you don't have it at all...

hithre•1mo ago

Pro: After 10 year I feel that I am becoming a specialist of the software I work on rather than a software specialist. Needing to work in different domains where I am not the expert.

Other: Better time management and micro napping. After a working day sucking mind and kids energy, the brain stops working for anything but doom scrolling or TV.

MangoToupe•1mo ago

i wanna learn to play the kora. I've been listening to a ton of asake and it really sticks out as a defining sound

Also it'd be nice if a bunch of data centers burned down but... odds are against this

dvh•1mo ago

I want to improve my Nase fishing skills and finally catch 50cm one (46cm atm).

EliRivers•1mo ago

The Running Man. It's really the foundation action in a good shuffle dance and it really has to flow naturally and consistently.

Nextgrid•1mo ago

Tech skills:

* Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChain?)

Non-tech:

* Sales - from feedback it seems like I’m not actually that bad of a salesman/people person but I would like to formalize that skill, maybe getting an entry-level technical sales/solutions engineer position and grow from there.

Personal:

* Letting go of projects and prioritizing: I’ve always had a ton of tech projects going at once which leads to my free time being spread thin across all of them and ultimately wasted as no meaningful progress is made. While it’s been an amazing learning experience when I started it’s since stopped paying off on that front once I mastered the tech involved. I need to let go for good and just delete the unfinished code once and for all so I’m never tempted to get back to it.

jstummbillig•1mo ago

> I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI

I'd be interested to learn more!

Nextgrid•1mo ago

Can’t disclose too much yet without nuking my competitive advantage, but basically it’s using LLMs to parse lots of scraped data to identify prospective customers in a certain niche - not in the way “these guys might need it” but more like “these guys have explicitly said they need it”, just that the “say” can be in many different channels and formats, and the LLM’s job is to ingest that firehose of trash and pick out the gems.

All in all a pretty basic and boring use-case that I’m sure I’m not the only one doing, but it’s frankly the first use-case I have where the probabilistic and imperfect nature of LLMs is actually fine.

lewiscollard•1mo ago

I am going to get good at TIG welding. This is mostly because there's a lot of subprojects of my car that would really benefit from me doing TIG - stainless, aluminium, etc (I already got pretty good at MIG for mild steel).

But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.

LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.

gremlinsinc•1mo ago

I'm going to learn to ship things. I can build a full SaaS in 5 days using Claude so there is no excuse for me not to ship.

I've been out of work 2 years, had to do a GoFundMe just to survive the winter, and I raised 5k which gave me a runway to get off Uber and Lyft and focus on finding clients to build for add with chatGPT I think I'm in the verge of figuring this freelance thing out ..

other things to learn: I want to get AWS certified and work on other certifications like Service Now... or sales force...

I'm wanting a digital agency but need to figure out the sales aspect.

findthebug•1mo ago

I want to develop another game and release it on Switch or Steam. It used to be a hobby...

mitjam•1mo ago

I want to learn to launch and grow a paid app, I‘ve built a few SaaS and installed apps up to a point of „80% ready to launch“, but did not go all the way. I don’t quite know what‘s holding me back but I realized that this is what’s most important for me to learn when it comes to my software side endeavor.

brailsafe•1mo ago

I'd like to get better at time management and relevant math maybe. LLMs are pretty boring already, quality dropped off, trust decreasing.

Also swimming and rope climbing. Can't swim

duckydude20•1mo ago

- "expand my social circle" same here, try to make real world connection not just technical connections but with people i can hang out with, friday night parties, trips, etc. apart from work i don't have any connections. opportunities are lacking and idk how to increase my chance.

if anyone in Bengaluru, India having meetups invite me, duckydude20 at gmail.com

Oras•1mo ago

I want to learn to relax and stop worrying and overthinking.

Will start with the 2 minutes breathing on Apple Watch and try to increase by time.

elric•1mo ago

I should work on getting better at selling myself. I'm doing alright at scoring longer projects (mostly in the Java/Fintech sphere), but I'd like to take on some smaller projects as well. Things like self-promotion and networking don't come easily to me.

rr808•1mo ago

Work solidly at work for 8 hours and then go home, instead of sitting behind a computer for 12 hours and wasting a lot of time.

vittore•1mo ago

Ah you are not alone!

dspillett•1mo ago

Definitely something akin to this for me too. My ability to concentrate has definitely fallen off since my younger years, precipitously since 2020.

That and I'm trying to re-learn Spanish to a useful degree¹ - better attentiveness to the task would help with that too.

--------

[1] I did pretty well at GCSE level three decades ago, then never used it again. I fancy spending time over there in future and don't want to be that guy who turns up and expect everyone to speak some English.

f_allwein•1mo ago

Then check out the Pomodoro technique if you haven’t done so! I’m always amazed how much I can get done in 25 minutes of focus.

Rastonbury•1mo ago

This helped me when I used to dally, but assuming you are salaried, finishing your day in 50% less time means your effective hourly wage goes up as much

quietloop•1mo ago

I'm kinda like this and sometimes even more than 12 hours isn't enough to do a task that shouldn't require 4 hours (at least for me). It was always like this, but it started to worsen in the last few months. I was diagnosed with ADHD a few weeks ago and it improved a lot since I started taking meds.

techInacho•1mo ago

Non-technical skills: Meet more women, lose my fear of flirting with women, being able to have a relationship, lose my psychosis for a single women.

bossyTeacher•1mo ago

1. Sight read (focusing on treble clef) at a decent level

2. Being more effective at using LLMs

3. Being able to improve in multiple areas of my level simultaneously

dielll•1mo ago

Kotlin and Golang. I know it6not advisable to learn 2 languages at the same time but I want Kotlin for android apps and Go for backend. Been working alot with python and I want to shift to a different stack and hopefully get a change of careers from Test Automation/ QA to a more coding focused role(backend, android)

david_allison•1mo ago

I'm co-maintaining an open source Android app (primarily Kotlin, with Svelte & Rust). I'd be happy to mentor in 2026.

Feel free to get in touch if you're interested:

https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBU...

dielll•1mo ago

Thank you David. Definitely going to reach out. Hoping to learn a lot from you

kentrf•1mo ago

I want to learn it all...

But what will happen is that I use my working days writing code/producing software, evenings to make dinner and be with family, and nights gaming with friends.

Weekends are for recharging.

And that is completely OK.

It is a healthy balance between getting stuff done, recovery, and enjoying life.

To avoid burnout again, I take a day or two off whenever I feel like I need some time off.

jimkleiber•1mo ago

To me it seems you not only want to learn how to code/write software but also to learn how to make dinner and be with family, how to game with friends, and how to recharge on weekends.

Learning it all is also about learning those other things, too.

This has helped me a lot, makes me realize I want to learn how to relax better, to sleep better, and to slow down better.

Thank you!

kentrf•1mo ago

I guess that is a valid interpretation. I was thinking about tech and maths, not "everyday life".

"Life" is also a skill that needs practice.

jjude•1mo ago

I want to get good at "taste"

I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].

If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.

I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.

[1]: https://jjude.com/substack-for-apps/

pdimitar•1mo ago

- MANDATORY: Re-learn focus. I will not self-diagnose but I exhibit ADHD symptoms and I started actively fighting them back (they mostly come from the phone). I am not going to just deny myself access to apps on schedule -- my brain never clicked schedule, not even once in my life -- but through a persistent and sustainable self-change from deep within. It's slow but it's beginning to work.

- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.

- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.

- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.

In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.

dcel•1mo ago

I feel like I could’ve written exactly this myself.

The first point is the hardest. It affects every aspect of my life and I have no idea how to really tackle it. This is the first year where I feel the need to take drastic action to achieve some kind of improvement.

What’s your plan? How is it working?

costcopizza•1mo ago

Seconded. I am also curious to what your ADHD plan is.

pdimitar•1mo ago

Check my reply to your sibling. No good formula. I am just starting (was somewhere at the beginning of 2025). In general: try to reconcile the parts of you that don't feel listened to, with your everyday self.

And be a touch assertive when you need to. I found I can't just put down the phone so I changed what I do on my phone (books instead of doom-scrolling). So far it works okay-ish. I am fine with a gradual progress.

edmundsauto•1mo ago

Adult diagnosis last year for me, bring gentle with myself for past mistakes is part of my plan. I’m also trying adderall under medical supervision, so I can strengthen the habits and systems with a little extra help.

946789987649•1mo ago

For me personally, it's certainly been an iterative process. I like to think of focus as any other habit that I want to form, so from that:

- Schedule time for it

- Understand that I will have slip ups and that's okay

- Make it hard to do the bad things (in this case, I have domain blockers to stop me redditing, I move my phone to another room etc.)

- Make it enjoyable. For me it's finding a particular energetic DJ set and just bopping along while I do the focused work.

And so on.

pdimitar•1mo ago

Iterative process is exactly how I would describe it. Formulate, try, readjust, ad infinitum / until you find a good-enough state.

pdimitar•1mo ago

I would not even know how to call my so-called "technique" if somebody else did not do it for me: awareness.

What I do I would today call "reconciliation" or "making peace". Let me explain.

On the one hand, I start recognizing in a colder, more methodical and mathematical manner, what things I did screw up in my life and why. I drill down and understand what emotions, unmet needs and un-addressed trauma led to these faulty decisions. Then I say: I understand why I did it but this only worked against me, it's time to change it and put myself on a better path. And by "better path for me" I don't mean only financial and career success; I mean those _and_ being happier and calmer.

On the other hand, I allow my more beastly / primitive / emotional / immature side to show up. I don't shun it, I try to sympathize with it and somewhat validate it. That's basically treating a part of yourself like an angry and lost kid: you do feel for them but want them to stop doing damage. But you also want to not force anything on them; you want them to understand and internalize they are only hurting themselves and others (in this case: other parts of you) with zero benefit for anyone involved.

---

It's not easy. I had a very rocky start in life. Sure I did not sleep under bridges but growing up in a shitty Eastern European town with a gay brother and you yourself being the nerd who effortlessly gets all A grades and is also good at karate, physically attractive and liked by girls sadly had a ton of downsides that many people are blind of. Almost everyone hates you for being different and they feel threatened by you while all you want is to fit in and be a part of a friendly group. It was and still is a big tragedy, one I don't claim I have managed to come to terms with even as of today.

---

But what I do lately is talk to my more primal side: "Look, I really understand how much you hate doing X and Y. I hate them too! But what else would you do? We did it your way for so long, you had an almost complete full reign and look what happened -- now we all suffer from severely diminished physical and mental health, we hate our life and often our work, we know that we wasted our best years on pointlessly rebelling against things we could never change. Where did all that bring us? Please, work with me. I understand that you never feel heard because we never achieved the life you wanted. But I can't see any shortcuts. Do you? If not, then let us please take the long but much safer road to our goals. That way we'll still get there one day. If we are not making progress then we'll talk again and readjust strategy and maybe do things more your way. But in the meantime, can we do things my way for a while? Please?"

Or something very similar.

But all that is 99% specific to me. You really have to find your own way to your deeper and more primal / emotional side. It exists and very often sabotages you because you never give it the wheel. Being civilized does this to us and no, I am not saying you should go outside and beat someone to death with a ratchet wrench of course. I mean that you should find a way to do the things you truly want, regardless of the cost.

I am NOT doing this well at the moment. For example I am too chicken to give up programming. But as mentioned above, I am trying to reconcile a few factors the best way I can for the moment. Maybe if that unlocks more energy and more motivation then the time would be ripe for more drastic measures.

One step at a time.

m_fayer•1mo ago

Thanks for your open introspection and wisdom. I learned something from reading it, and wish you well.

jbeninger•1mo ago

I do a lot of local dev using docker. I've taken to adding an image just for agents and using that to make modifications. Agents can install or run anything they need without touching my actual machine. I can also limit what they can read and write.

pdimitar•1mo ago

Yes, that would be the ideal setup indeed, agreed.

But ruined health made me laser-focus on my wife and my work and I ignored many other things. Much to my shame, I don't even have a home media center and I have all the skills to make it happen and have it be much better than f.ex. Netflix or Disney+ UI.

It's all about carefully picking my battles, at least in this stage of life. Lack of focus and trying to be everywhere led to me making dozens, if not hundreds, of easily avoidable mistakes. I am hellbent on never allowing that again.

dannyfreeman•1mo ago

I hope you find that your first and last goals "re-learn focus" and "prioritize body" feed into each other nicely. I worked a lot at my ability to focus on tasks (not just work, but in general) this year, and starting an exercise routine really helped me out a lot. Strength work is a time for me to not be on the phone or computer. Having that time to be in my own head and just think about stuff I find helps sharpen my mind for the rest of the day. Good look!

pdimitar•1mo ago

Oh yes, they are very closely linked!

To be even more precise, regaining focus unlocks many other skills, prioritizing the physical health included. I am still working my way towards that.

arw0n•1mo ago

> MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity.

I'm actually not that convinced of these productivity gains in the context of IDE tricks. The cost of learning + tool-lock seems steep compared to the actual productivity gains. I'm switching fairly regularly between IDE's, and even if VS Code is the default, the only reason I'm considering learning it in depths is because some people incessantly comment on these things during pair programming.

pdimitar•1mo ago

I get your point but I am fairly sure I'll never move away from Neovim or nano (when I really have no choice).

There are Zed and Helix of course and they are on my radar but... not enough focus and energy for such big quests.

As for speed, I know Neovim can do much more than I use it for and I want the speed. When I can code even quicker my thought just flows through my fingers and the result is always good. But I have not been like that for years (ever since I gave up Emacs) and I want it back (and no I wasn't that much faster with Emacs either).

manuel2258•1mo ago

I'm in the same boat as the parent with helix. I like to think that its not about being able to type x chars more per second but rather doing some clever tricks sometimes with your IDE just because they safe you from boring work and is lots of fun. For example repeating the same action with macros across multiple files is so helpful and maybe only needed once a month or so, but oh boy, when you pull it off it is so fun and rewarding!

skydhash•1mo ago

I’m used to both vim and emacs. While I appreciate some IDE power features (debugging, code generation, tools integration,…), ultimately editing is very much a chore with them. You could add emacs or vim keybindings, but then you start to miss some of their features.

But whatever the editor/IDE, There’s always some neat tricks that will help you, especially around editing and tools integration.

mawadev•1mo ago

It's not a skill in particular but I want to decouple the way I think from todays economics. I want to learn skills that give me confidence and well being instead of training me to be a better cog in the machinery, so that I can impress other people or put a price tag next to the value of me as a human. Just enough to be average, but not more to end up living to work to fuel delusions.

I also don't want to be derailed from hyped up technologies that ultimately sell me on a quick path to reach a delusional goal. I want steady and consistent growth and understand the makings deeply.

sonderotis•1mo ago

proper software marketing I guess.

wawhal•1mo ago

Here's mine: 0. Build the habit of taking notes ruthlessly to build a comprehensive second brain. 1. I transitioned to the penhold grip in Table Tennis in Nov 2025 and it has been a fun exploration. My goal for 2026 is to learn to play all the strokes comfortably with the penhold grip, and start competing at the district level. 2. Go from novice-intermediate to upper-intermediate in piano playing. Learn, memorize, and perform flawlessly 30 advanced piano pieces (minimum Henle 7–9) end-to-end, recorded on video, within the next 12 months. 3. Learn to speak Kannada. Been living in Bangalore past 9 years and it's almost embarrassing to not know a single complete Kannada sentence.

mcny•1mo ago

I really need to get better at READING code. I know it has always been true but with vibe coding, it is more important than ever of a skill.

Havoc•1mo ago

- Learn how to design custom PCBs instead of soldering freehand

- Lean into vibecoding. Day job is in finance, and enthusiastic hobbyist coder so despite the happy path nature of it I suspect it may be worthwhile getting good at this from a job market future proofing angle. Whatever comes being able to describe to machines what you want seems like it'll be useful

- Improve non-vibe Rust coding

- Improve homelab. The internet enshittification continues so keen to build out more personal infra. In short term focus is on pipeline to package & deploy. Think docker build -> k8s deploy. If that pipleline is frictionless that'll be good for vibe coded personal tools

mulhoon•1mo ago

Relearning and reconnecting..

Buy the cassette 4-track I had in ‘93 and reconnect with my teenage self - record whole songs on it, not worrying about sound quality and knob tweaking. It is what it is.

timbaboon•1mo ago

I’ve played guitar for 20 years, but I’ve decided to do something different and just got some drums. I need to spend some time away from work lest I suffer from burnout again…

quantpunk•1mo ago

That will be fun. I am actually going to come back to electric guitar in 2026 after 15 years away.

I tried learning piano but that was a total waste. Drums I think make a lot of sense as a compliment to guitar.

Piano just made me feel like I wasted my life practicing guitar.

level09•1mo ago

Here are mine:

- Build something boring that makes money. Excitement is optional; users are not.

- Use AI less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure, background processes that think while I sleep.

- Go back to fundamentals that compound, graphics, systems, taste.

- Experiment selectively; curiosity without commitment.

- Invest in people, not “networking.” Fewer pings, more real conversations.

- Protect focus like equity.

saimiam•1mo ago

If you want users, the requirement is sales skills, not product development skills.

miguel_martin•1mo ago

What about simply providing value?

jononor•1mo ago

At the very least one must connect to people who would find it valuable (either inbound or outbound), and the value has to be communicated to the prospective buyers. People make their decisions based on how they perceive the product, not based on your view. And the value big enough to overcome friction involved in purchasing, including soft factors like people trusting you with their money. There might be habits and other pieces of inertia that has to be overcome also, and why would they pick your thing over the alternatives. And of course you must be able to charge enough to cover the costs of providing said value.

wanderingmind•1mo ago

1. Build AI voice agents for telephony, for personal use and maybe build for one other person

2. Make one cool toy from scratch with my kid using esp32

3. Reduce snacking and junk food to 1 day a week

4. Learn to tumble turn in swimming

nh43215rgb•1mo ago

Find out how to stay employed with AI floods

testing-in-prod•1mo ago

Tech:

- Complete Agile Project Management course and apply this new knowledge to my Scrumban team - Learn Go and Linux in greater detail - Experiment with other frontend frameworks like Remix and Astro.js

Non-tech:

- Make new friends with similar interest and develop my social life a bit (if you're in London, hit me up) - Learn how to promote my side projects - building them is fun but I can't seem to get even 1 user to sign up and use them - Read more Warhammer 40k books

_dain_•1mo ago

>if you're in London, hit me up

hi :)

(email in my HN profile)

greenchair•1mo ago

Bible study

mmcconnell1618•1mo ago

Technical:

- Understand how to deploy teams of agents effectively to accomplish significant goals

- Learn ECS/Dots in Unity to scale a system to hundreds of thousands of actors

Non Technical:

- Improve people management skills for leading technical teams with a target of helping each person grow in 2026 and level up the team

- Automate more of my personal finances to gain leverage from systems instead of hoping I make good decisions consistently

bapo•1mo ago

- Art of Bonsai:

We are inheriting about 50-100 bonsai plants from father. All my life I’ve been wondering how he’s been caring for them, but never gave a chance to actually learn from him.

He is not doing well and we don’t know how many years he has left.

That’s why 2026 will be the year of finally learning the craft from him, taking time to acquire his techniques and in general just spend more time with him.

homeonthemtn•1mo ago

I wish you the best of luck

Maciek416•1mo ago

There are one or two nice people from Switzerland (assuming you are there, just guessing from comments) on bonsainut if you are looking for local resources and helpful people. A decent-sized collection like that is a real testament to unbroken continuity (especially during the growing season where you can't skip a day or even a few hours sometimes), other hobbyists can help you fill the gap when situations come up. Stop by the r/bonsai beginners thread any time if you wanna talk trees!

robviren•1mo ago

I want to explore the space of audio encoding and GPT like understanding of audio. I'm so highly interested in how a simple 1d signal must go through so much processing to be understood by language models, and am curious what tradeoffs occur. Would also be fun to make a TTS Library and understand it.

surfsvammel•1mo ago

I want to:

- Hone my motorcycle riding skills. Curves, breaking and the rest.

- Learn and manage to do some basic home renovation stuff by myself.

- Learn the basics for keeping a garden.

- Start playing table tennis

euparkeria•1mo ago

Back to the basics, relearn linear algebra.

downboots•1mo ago

Get the Lay book

PaulHoule•1mo ago

I’m interested in a subject that, I guess, could best be described as Jane Houston’s work, see

https://www.amazon.com/Possible-Human-Enhancing-Physical-Abi...

but involves martial arts, eastern religion, character acting, Ericksonian hypnosis, and all sorts of things. In my case it I use to express myself-as-a-fox [1] but outwardly as social artistry that functions as a form of ‘witnessing’. I will certainly not advocate that others to do what I do as a whole but I can offer people little useful things out of a large toolbox.

I’ve been working on this for a long time, felt I received an invitation to Kitsune-tsuki 2 years ago but it came together late this year when I got my motivation right and began to see it as a form of activism and service.

[1] a creature of the forest instead of a creature of the engineering school

serf•1mo ago

this comment has a lot of words I find interesting; and I like the book -- but I can say that I have no clue what you're talking about.

As someone interested, though : care to explain in a bit more detail for a layperson?

PaulHoule•1mo ago

Try

https://www.jeanhouston.com/Social-Artistry/social-artistry....

I put on my hood and people see my ears and I wait a beat and then say or do something fox like (comment on smells, a compulsion to chase after squirrels, or raise a paw glove) and it is like the set up and punch line of a joke and they laugh with me and they are in my field -- but it is not a comedy act.

If I have to explain something or do the work of myself-as-an-engineer or talk about my personal history I put the hood down and the detransformation can be startling as I shift from a voice patterned after Michael Jackson's speaking voice (always trying to be as soft as I can and still be legible) to my old booming voice that raises in pitch as emotions get high.

I practice distinctive gaits (collected trot, walking quietly, ...) with an eye on my heart rate monitor to keep my cardiovascular load low to keep it sustainable. It can take a lot of energy, one trot across campus to the Arts & Architecture school [1] I came back to my office drenched in sweat despite it being a cold day. My photo backpack became an essential part of my kit because it functions as my "tail" giving me more control of my center of gravity and a place to put my hood and other parts of my kit if I need them out of my way. When I first went out-as-a-fox with my camera I found I couldn't hold my adjustments but with the counterweight of the backpack it was easy -- but I have to pack lightly to control my cardiovascular load.

To speak in the register of the fox I need to think in the register of character acting but it is not really an act, not really a costume, but an expression of my own liminal nature as a person who has always crossed boundaries wandered between worlds.

If I am against anything it is the trauma theory, when I started looking into the "human potential" movement in my area I found so many people inclined to build an identity and discover meaning by licking their wounds. I think people should "get over it" [2] but telling them to "get over it" will only bring about backlash. I begin by being an example (witnessing as Christians would put it) of getting over it with courage and heart and authenticity in expressing myself but behind that is a vast toolbox of trickery and seduction applied to the greater good.

Does that make more sense?

[1] where i feel least comfortable as-a-fox because there creativity is something you do for a class or a job and needs slotting into a social hierarchy

[2] enjoy the pleasures of the moment, find joy inside themselves, raise their spiritual pressure, increase their "gong" as Falun Gong would put it, etc.

latexr•1mo ago

Explicitly nothing. The overwhelming majority of New Year’s resolutions and goals fail, then people feel bad, then repeat it the year after that. There’s no reason to make such a decision now; make it when it’s relevant in your life and don’t beat yourself over it.

I also find this relentless pursuit of more more more, especially in what relates to productivity, increasingly maddening and (ironically? paradoxically?) counter-productive. We are always doing more in a worse manner with less attention. And what do we do with the extra time we “gain”? More of the same shit we were doing before. To get more time to… do more of it? It’s insane, bordering on societal mass hysteria.

We’re all going to die, and all you did will mean nothing. So stop and smell the roses. Be kind to your fellow human being. Stop trying to get ahead and lift others with you instead.

kylecazar•1mo ago

I'm all for existentialism informing our ridiculous chase of productivity. But... learning new things before you kick the bucket can qualify as stopping and smelling the roses.

latexr•1mo ago

I agree, what I’m rallying against is the notion of feeling you have to learn something. Which is what happens near the New Year, this sudden pressure of having a goal and doing something, this arbitrary point to making grandiose decisions.

What I’m suggesting instead is to not tie a date or a goal to it. Let your interests and desires guide your learning process, not the calendar. I’m also advocating for reflection in the choice of what to pursue. Learning manipulation techniques and scams because you’re interested in the ingenuity of ideas or want to better defend yourself and your loved ones may count as smelling the roses, but learning those same techniques to apply them to other people for personal gain does not.

m_fayer•1mo ago

I like reframing New Year’s resolutions in a more humane way.

It’s an arbitrary day on the calendar, yes.

I want to grow as a person, in terms of character and ability. My desire to evolve is a product of curiosity and vitality and ethics, not some capitalist mania for MORE.

Putting a random day on the calendar where I tell myself that I’m at an inflection point, that I’ve decided to bend my path, it’s useful. There are religious holidays where you atone, forgive, and so on. Those are also just days on a calendar. But they serve a purpose.

latexr•1mo ago

Which is all well and good, and if it works for you, I’m genuinely glad. But we know that’s not the case for most people. We know most set an unrealistic goal in the New Year which is never achieved (if it even lasts a month) then feel worse.

I’m suggesting that those who identify should cut themselves some slack and not feel pressured to have something planned to do in the New Year. Do it calmly. Don’t get hyper specific.

For example, instead of saying (in December) “I know nothing about plants, and in 2026 I’ll grow a giant sequoia”, one day during the year you may be walking around, see a book on home gardening with some seeds attached and decide to buy it to finally start to learn about plants.

m_fayer•1mo ago

Thanks for the thoughtful clarification. I agree that what you’re saying is wisdom many people could use.

kiba•1mo ago

I find that in order to be more "productive", you need to be able to work on a few things for a long time before you could see any payoff.

wslh•1mo ago

Sometimes we only need concentration (and free time).

CornySensei•1mo ago

I got an entry level job doing IT admin and MS Dynamics customizations so I really want to master the stack we use at work: C# for plugins, Python and Powershell for IT admin and JS for frontend. I also want to read the canon of good software engineering books that you get recommended all the time, like SICP, DDIA, CSAPP, etc.

off-script•1mo ago

In order of importance: - chinese: been traveling to china for a few years now, super enjoyable and just joined a company that is half chinese. Comes in handy - get experience in scaling products, especially on the backend side. I feel super comfortable on the frontend and now want to learn more the other side too - learn go and build a full product with it: ive been learning go in my free time and remaking an active telegram bot i have from ts to go. Wanna take it a step further and do something more complex and satisfying. Very happy for how my learning journey has been going so far

simonsarris•1mo ago

Gardening, mostly. I am (slowly) trying to make the second largest rose garden in New Hampshire.

Plastering (walls, ceilings, etc).

Releasing side projects at a faster pace. This gets harder with more children alas. But they're starting to help with the gardening.

jvanderbot•1mo ago

I find myself making this same list every year. About being more healthy, changing this or that bad habits, and embracing some kind of tech and making a side gig etc.

It all kind of adds to the background clutter of my life, by promising I'll "finally" do the "basic" things I need to do to somehow transform my life into a better version of itself, but those things get added to the list of things I feel like I should do every day.

I think I'm done with that. I don't know what I'm doing next year but we will find out in five days.

nmora•1mo ago

I want to finally work through sicp as a means to go back to basics of computing.

Also want to read Designing Data-Intensive Applications as I have worked with things like Kafka and Spark for many years on and off but have never dove into more details that I assume the book could help with.

voodooEntity•1mo ago

My post is very contrary to the most here but maybe there is someone else in a similar situation so i think it may be worth writing it.

Background: I've spend the bigger part of the past 20 years of my life continously extending and enhancing my technical knowledge and skills, mostly in IT/Coding but also in some other fields. Meanwhile i kinda let my social life completely degrade and also always care more about solving others problems than my actual own problems.

Therefor the "skills" i want to improve and develop in 2026:

- Learn to take care of myself instead of always putting others first (its not my job to safe the world)

- Don't try to got 150% all of the time and rather slow down

- Care for my health

- Get back into social life

- Actually try to not spend 95% of my free time in front of a screen and go outside (touch grass)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

While i accumulated alot of knowledge over the past two decades, if i don't start to care for myself more ill probably won't have much benefit of it other than having accumulated it. Health (biological and mental) are important, neglecting it maybe works shortterm but will kick your ass longterm.

phasnox•1mo ago

Learn to control procrastination.

mateusfreira•1mo ago

Technical/Non-technical skills: * Off-grid energy production (Solar, etc.) * Food production on a small scale * Homesteading * 3D printing * And all interfaces of that with technology

rochansinha•1mo ago

Work: 1. Learning about manufacturing processes for high-throughput electroplating. 2. Learn pymatgen and other tools for building a self-driving lab for materials discovery and testing.

Non-work: 1. Improving my writing skills and start my blog with a few technical and non-technical posts.

saltybytes•1mo ago

I used to DJ in the 90's with vinyl on 1210s decks. A lot has changed in the industry and I'd like to spin at home for fun since I'm still a "househead".

Anyone knows a good YT channel that explains my options? Money is tight these days so I'm unable to buy the latest and greatest but I'm curious of the new technology used.

comprev•1mo ago

Look at the Phase Controller [0] if you're looking at spinning again. Amazing milli-second response time even on older hardware. I DJ with a MacBook Air 2017.

Failing that, a second hand Pioneer DJM-250mk2 is the entry level digital vinyl controller which works (via hardware unlock) with Pioneer's Rekordbox software.

Welcome back :)

[0] https://www.phasedj.com/

Myrmornis•1mo ago

Touch-typing. In some countries it's common to learn this at school as a teenager but that's not true of all countries. With LLMs this skill has become significantly more important to programmers.

gregsadetsky•1mo ago

Speaking of, are there resources for people who type fast but want to get competitive, ie into the top 20 on typeracer for example? Beyond "just" practicing.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

doom2•1mo ago

I want to learn two languages in 2026:

* CW (also known as Morse code) - I'm not able to have an amateur radio station at home, so I have to work portable/QRP. Given current band conditions, CW is one easy option to make contacts

* Learn a "low level" programming language, likely C - I never had any kind of formal CS education and kind of fell into the field, initially doing web development and then data engineering. Most of my career has been dominated by Python with a smattering of Java and Scala. Maybe this year will be the year I learn something a little lower down the stack!

ipcress_file•1mo ago

I am also not a professional programmer, but learned enough C to do some programming on hobby projects a few years back. I started with Ashley Mills' videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCNJWVn9MJuPtPyljb-he...

If you've already programmed in Python you'll know enough to recognize that he makes a few logical leaps in the later videos (where you have to read up on topics to fill in the gaps), but overall I thought they were really good.

I also liked NASA's "The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code" and their C style guide from 1994, both of which helped me achieve the simplicity and clarity I was after.

Rendello•1mo ago

I always wanted a reason to learn C, but couldn't figure out a good project for it. I ended up learning TempleOS' HolyC as my introduction to low-level programming, funnily enough.

If you're familiar with web programming and data engineering, WebAssembly might be a good way to get into low-level programming. I've written a few web extensions in Rust, compiled down to WASM, and lots of low-level languages have WASM targets now.

doom2•1mo ago

The project I keep wanting to pair learning C with is an extremely simple IRC client in the terminal. It'd give me the chance to learn the language and the protocol at the same time.

snicky•1mo ago

I'm in the same boat regarding the CS education and the desire to learn C. I find the videos recorded by Antirez (the creator of Redis) that make up something you could call a C course quite interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjXBXBgfKyk&list=PLrEMgOSrS_... . He starts from the basics, but the pace is good and he quickly gets to nitty and gritty. The videos are in Italian, though the automated translations do the job. I think he releases one episode a week.

gregsadetsky•1mo ago

Embroidery!

I'd love to develop an art/tech practice and make custom embroidery pieces, maybe even daily - ie make up some words for a new t-shirt or hat every day?

Speaking of, I also learned during my initial research into this world that a lot of embroidery software seems... expensive/not competitive/a bit arcane? So I'm wondering if I'll get into all of this and start writing & releasing open source software..? Time will tell!

If anyone has played around with entry-level (or pro) machines, and has tips/tricks, I'd be super grateful! Thanks. I'm considering an entry level Brother SE700.

alun•1mo ago

My list:

- General knowledge: by intentionally curating the information I consume

- Chess: by practicing tactics, watching videos, and learning new openings

- Salsa: by dancing a lot

- SEO: by building a side project and trying to get it to rank well on Google

FergusArgyll•1mo ago

> Chess

Depending on your level, I've found that reviewing annotated master games have a high return. Youtube works for this as well.

digitalsushi•1mo ago

This is a new years resolution question barely in disguise, but they're fun cause a lot of us are cooped up, barely 4 days into winter, 86ish to go, and we're champing at the bit for change.

I am pretty sure I'm a 50th percentiler. I'm mid 40s, kinda burned out but still struggling forward in my ok-but-not-hollywood IT career, I still have a passion for doing things well in a technical society that values doing things cheap (and well). The things I am known for being good at, I still google daily, and for a long time, I've been hungry for a change - any change - but especially one that isn't chaotically negative.

So in 2026, I wanna learn how dirt works.

I actually have a giant box of dirt sitting on a shelf at the UNH community co-op soil analysis lab, waiting to give me some kind of data about the soil behind my house. (Or is it dirt? I don't know what I'm getting into).

In 2024 I tried growing some corn. It never sprouted.

In 2025 I tried growing some corn. It sprouted and a few ears had enough kernels to make one full mouthful. Tasty, but maybe 7 calories of food for a year of effort.

So in 2026 I'd like to grow: one entire fully formed ear of sweet corn. Anything else is a bonus.

That's what I wanna develop in 2026 - learning how soil works enough to make it make a thing. Small moves, Ellie.

eudamoniac•1mo ago

Read "Start with the Soil"

mythrwy•1mo ago

Great hobby!

A couple of things about corn. It might not be soil at issue. Germination depends on correct temperature and moisture. Too much moisture the seed will rot or not have enough air to germinate. Too little moisture it won't trigger germination. Too deep it won't germinate, too shallow and germination won't happen either because it will dry out instead of staying moist. Seeds vary in depth they require and some even require light to germinate (doesn't apply to corn). It's a bit of an art figuring out what "even moisture until germination" is, and this varies based on soil type. Timing of planting with correct temperature is important.

Each kernel of corn has one silk. The silk is analogous to a Fallopian tube with pollen traveling down into the ovary (or kernel of corn in this case). If you have an ear of corn with only a few kernels it's often because pollen didn't land on all the silks. For this reason corn is usually planted in blocks. It's wind pollinated so wind shakes pollen off the tassels or male flowers at the top, down onto the silk. But if you just have one corn plant in isolation, or a row in isolation it's easier for the pollen to just blow away or miss. Planting in blocks or "array of arrays" configuration helps the pollen to reach the silk more uniformly as pollen from the surrounding plants is released.

ravenstine•1mo ago

That's kinda wild to hear about the corn because I've found corn to be one of the easiest crops to grow.

If you want to try again, these are the seeds I last used which had 100% germination and produced plenty of ears of corn.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MI33BS

I've also had a ton of luck growing corn in 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the side to allow air into the soil which keeps the roots from balling up (wasting energy that should go into growing ears). Used potting mix with a handful of lime and a handful of epsom salt, and topped the buckets with mulch to retain moisture.

If you're willing to try that approach, this was very similar to my system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgJn15TmRM

KellyCriterion•1mo ago

I would be glad if I could get back my old stickiness to my routines, wich were perfectly aligned with me - until my children arrived:

since then, my live became chaos on all levels :-X

(I havent used my new 200 EUR running shoes one time, I bought them 13 month ago)

nkg•1mo ago

It will get better. They grow up.

hmokiguess•1mo ago

I want to start a family, learn to be a better son and husband, become a father, and be more patient with those I cross paths with.

jijath•1mo ago

Off the top of my head:

- Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.

- OSS development: Programming was set aside these couple of years and I want to be active and help the community. Either by contributing to a project or an OS (9front is always on my mind).

- Be a good father and partner: this is one of my primary goals this 2026.

- More time for outdoor sports: As much as I like being indoors, playing with computers, I need to go outside and spend time in nature doing something that I enjoy (ie. running or surfing)

- Mindfulness and spirituality: Grown so much in the past couple of years and now is time for me to meditate on these topics.

- Last but not least, participate in the old-school internet: Be more active and talk to real people, read their blogs, donate to their endevours for a better internet, enjoy their art, etc.

bawis•1mo ago

> Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.

May I ask which languages are you talking about here? and what methods you will follow?

jijath•1mo ago

Sorry, human languages. Progress in my Italian and start learning some of the other more complex languages such as Russian and/or Arabic.

I will try to make the learning process as natural as possible. Italian I already have a base and my native language is similar, so the learning process will be based on immersion and grammar learning. For the other ones, I will try to get a more structured learning path such as courses or programs to get to learn as fast and simple as possible.

grep_name•1mo ago

I've spent a lot of the last four years accumulating tools and building out infra in my home for my hobbies, to an extent that it's blocked me from actually doing things due to being bogged down from meta-work, learning, and research. This year I'm going to put a hard stop on spending and building up new things so that I can:

- Continue to take old-time music classes at the folk school, play more music with people that way

- Finally run some water through my hydroponic setup

- Finish electrifying part of the basement

- Play some noise shows with my friend and the synths I've built over the years (and make some recordings)

- Make a dating profile, setup instagram (which seems necessary for a successful dating profile these days)

- Actually catalogue, export, and post the extensive photography I've done of the last years and continue my black and white development processes

- Get back in the swing of eating from-scratch bread, fermented sauces, mayo, saurkraut, ginger ale, and home-cooked food in general

- Actually make blog posts, improve my web presence

- Finish my woodworking bench, tackle some of the woodworking projects I've had backed up

That's a lot of things, but I already have every piece of the puzzle to tackle all of them stored neatly in my house and the experience to do it all, which cuts down on a lot of it. I also really need to save money, so all that should dovetail nicely. I'm at a point where tech projects crop up and sort themselves out on their own regularly in my life so I'm not mentioning that here. Really, the 'skill' I need to learn is having the mental energy and drive to get things done as I go about my work week, or maybe to realize that I don't need perfect energy / motivation / clarity / whatever to work on something in the afternoon.

sqircles•1mo ago

Paper Credentials: I'm going to stack on a masters degree and some more certs. As a kid I was into development and anything tech, but for some reason resisted formal education or even working in the field. I spent my summers and school breaks working different construction trades as my entire family was spread out amongst the trades. After the military I did an entrepreneurial stint, then I took the comfortable, "guaranteed" route, in regard to career- wherever I could land in the US Fed. Govt, where I did about 12 years in 5 or so different positions... I was raised to, and had always worked hard - but I never really had much risk in regard to losing my job until recently.

Preceding wall of text to explain how hard the realization hit, for practically the first time in my life, when stuff started going crazy in the feds: "damn... I really could be ~6mo away from losing it all." As many of you know, the market was and is ridiculous. Thankfully a few years back, even when I "knew" I didn't need it, I finished my BS:CS before my GI Bill dried up. And then as another challenge took the Security+ exam before I started applying for a job in the private sector. A lot of people in this industry like to say none of that matters-- which might certainly be true, but I can say without a doubt that those pieces of paper are the main reason I was about to get out of the hole I was in. I'd rather not be in that position ever again, but I'd like to be well prepared "on paper" if I am.

gautamsomani•1mo ago

I want to learn how to chillax (chill and relax) no matter what (I have hyper-anxiety.)

Rest all (programming in C and Go, Japanese language, master System Design, get ripped and few more) is secondary.

madduci•1mo ago

I'd like to improve my parenting skills, as well as improving the ability to maximize my (few) free time to dedicate to my hobbies

idontwantthis•1mo ago

I want to be able to play piano at a level where I can turn inspiration into art. I know I'll never be pro level, but I want to be able to create something that gives me joy.

nihiven•1mo ago

I'm going to continue learning Rust by working on my TUI IRC client. I'd like to make some, any, contribution to keeping IRC alive. It was such a big part of my formative years!

tmaly•1mo ago

I would like to improve:

1. storytelling, I think this is still a valuable skill.

2. improve my teaching skills and create better courses.

3. improve my writing skills.

Rendello•1mo ago

I've started re-writing things I like, like passages from books, poems, or even comments. Perhaps too early to say whether it's been effective, but this is called "copywork" and was apparently a common part of education for writers and journalists in the past.

I've been doing it mostly in French since it doubles as language practice. For years I've been at an intermediate level (B2), where reading, writing, listening, and even speaking hasn't improved my skill at all. When you can glean anything (from context) and communicate anything (awkwardly), there's a lot less pressure for things to "stick". I think this is the main advantage kids have with their neuroplasticity, since it'll stick regardless.

So, I've wanted a deliberate way to practice the language that I'd actually stick to and truly learn from. Rewriting things I find interesting has been fun, and I can pick different sources each day: formal or informal, Canadian French or Metropolitan, literary or prose, etc. A variation on this is the "Scriptorium technique" [1], where instead of just copying while reading, you repeat a sentence out loud, then write it out while saying it out loud, and then repeat what you wrote and check it against the original. I like this.

Even for English, it should build up those neural pathways and help you write more like the writers you love, in theory.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo7_5CGcKek

omosubi•1mo ago

I would if answers came with age

nkg•1mo ago

Drawing! I always loved pencil drawing, but it is an activity I had to put aside because it's time-consuming and we have a 3 yo at home that is also very time-consuming. After years of not doing it, I feel I lack the meditative part of it.

I am evaluating drawing tablets, if you have any recommendation. I am thinking about the Huion Kamvas 13.

ItsBob•1mo ago

Two things for me:

1. Develop discipline around the piano

2. Build my side hustle beyond a side hustle (Kopi - replicate a production DB schema and relational subsets of its data for local development in seconds)

tasuki•1mo ago

Ok, fine: ceramics.

I used to go when I lived in Warsaw and there was a pay-monthly-and-stay-as-long-as-you-want. Now I've moved and all the ceramics places charge per hour, which, apart from being expensive, is much less fun.

I hear there's a group of grumpy old women doing ceramics nearby. I want to infiltrate said group and learn from them.

tacone•1mo ago

I'd like to start planning my days and improve self organization, commit to auto hypnosis and stress inoculation, and finally start releasing hobby projects.

orgeohrosne•1mo ago

Wesley Gabriel Caetano dos Santos

bitbasher•1mo ago

I'm going back to the basics.

Going to use C, C++ and Rust for all of my development projects, tools, services, etc. I'm not going to use LLMs or even LSPs.

Read documentation. Understand the tools and languages. Build solid software.

rijavecb•1mo ago

I'm planning to read more, mostly technical books recommended by the fine folks on the Book Overflow podcast and a few books on writing. As someone who's mostly self-taught, I know I have many gaps in my knowledge, so I'd like to fill some of those. And learning new things just feels great.

I'm also hoping to improve my Romanian. While I can get by (my wife is Romanian and we live there), I make waay too many mistakes, and considering I've been living there for a few years now, I feel I should do better.

This year has been pretty busy with personal things and working on my own apps, so I hope next year I can get back to learning things I find interesting and useful.

I_am_tiberius•1mo ago

- Nix OS

- French

Anon84•1mo ago

Get better at finding freelance/consulting gigs. I’ve been doing it on and off on the side for a few years now and want to move to doing it full time.

Advice welcome!

nbbaier•1mo ago

I want to figure out how to focus on something

arwhatever•1mo ago

Embedded software development.

After 18 years of business and web application development, I want to intentionally seek out work that is constrained by physical reality.

jackzhuo•1mo ago

I started indie hacking 6 months ago.

Thanks to AI tools, coding is now the easy part. I can build full-stack apps faster than ever.

But I hit a wall. I realized my problem isn't engineering anymore. It is finding users.

For 2026, I want to shift my focus. I need to stop worrying about "how to build" and learn "how to sell."

Marketing and distribution are now my top priorities.

gsora•1mo ago

CS basics.

darubedarob•1mo ago

I want to get good at exterior cascades. Seeing them. Using them. Detecting potential in the physical world that exist now or soon will exist. Lining up companies and academia with that potential. Organizing funding that unleashes that cascade into companies and change. I think we had way too much focus on interior changes and optimizations, zero sum games at best and exterior cascade preventing at worst.

ifh-hn•1mo ago

Apologies for my ignorance but what is "exterior cascades"?

Without that context I can't make head nor tail of your comment.

Zyten•1mo ago

For the past decade, I‘ve been at basically the same employer, even if in different institutes. Maybe it’s time for a switch, also to grow more experience in the fields I‘ve worked in, lastly mainly HPC performance analysis tools and working with parallel paradigms in such field.

The past few years, I‘ve gotten close to development on compilers and parallel runtimes, such as OpenMP, but never looked into working on them directly. However, I‘m really interested in it. So one of the things I really want to spend time on is understanding more of the compilers and their code base, and start contributing.

Learning another programming language is also high on my priority list. C/C++/Python are languages where I‘m quite versed in, but looking into Rust, Go or Zig would be quite interesting for me as well.

manuj10•1mo ago

Staff engineer, 12 years in. I've had side project ideas rattling around for years but never had the bandwidth to build them end to end. AI tooling has changed that, I can now ship complete apps solo in a fraction of the time. Planning to launch and market a few of these myself in 2026. Mostly as a learning exercise in the non-engineering side of things.

stephenlf•1mo ago

Linear algebra

swsieber•1mo ago

Feeling things without using net-negative coping mechanisms.

Feeling management, time management, weight management, running, parenting, sermon writing, budgeting.

Hobby electronics and circuit board design, Morse code, ux design

qkeast•1mo ago

I want to give a go at learning to make chocolate.

suralind•1mo ago

My incomplete list:

- learn to sew clothes - improve my kitesurfing skills - I want to create and share more online - not to improve, but run more

This last bit is critical, I’ve been working on projects never really finishing them. I think part of that is I really, really dislike sharing unfinished things with strangers. The other part is that I struggle if something just works, I always want to make that perfect (when building for myself, ironically I’m usually the person to advocate for iterative approach). So this next year I’m going to focus more on improving that skill (already started this year).

Agoreddah•1mo ago

Coffee roasting - I've started to roast a coffee for my girlfriend coffee shop as a side job 2.5 years ago and now I start to feel, my learning curve is finally growing up. I want to learn how to make consistently great roasted coffee, how to manage entire process and how to keep pushing quality up.

rldjbpin•1mo ago

quite appreciate everyone chiming in the comments to help others reach their goals.

mine are rehash from this year (which failed!) with a new one:

- focus on health: specifically getting back on track and maintaining a sustainable routine

- consume less, make more: less passive pastime

- explore side hustles: to encourage the previous, try to fill in a (very) small market gap using what i know or want to learn

gethly•1mo ago

I might try to do some work with manually memory managed languages like Odin, Zig or Rust. I just have no use case yet.

bLorax•1mo ago

I really feel like university has drifted me away from the spirit of engineering. The topics sound really fun in theory, but the execution of the professors is so poor that it really makes you want to "just pass" the class. Therefore, I really want to reignite my passion in 2026. Work on my basic skills and get them as close as possible to perfection, maybe dabble in some open source projects. Hell, maybe even start my own. I can see myself getting into theory again, but I want to do it out of passion, and not necessity. In terms of non-technical skills, philosophy is what is on my mind right now. I don't really like the world view that I currently possess and stoicism sounds fun, so I will be giving that a try. Those were the concrete plans. I used to have an artsy side when I was a kid, and that side comes out and gets repressed by me every once in a while. I don't really know what I need to do to reignite that passion, so any suggestion is wholeheartedly appreciated.

ozarkerD•1mo ago

Progress on learning Korean.

Get at least one programming project to the point I can show it off.

Fix my focusing problem and consume much less content.

rock8y•1mo ago

Ice skating! Turning 41 in a week and signed up for classes already. Curious to see how my body copes.

firemelt•1mo ago

anyone know how to be better organized as individuals?

rankiwiki•1mo ago

I want to get better at writing clearly for non-technical audiences. It feels like an underrated skill that multiplies everything else.

idk1•1mo ago

This is going to sound strange, but I simply must decorate a few rooms. I seem to be so obsessive about selecting exactly the right thing in there in case it's wrong. I can't seem to select anything at all. If I carry on like this, I'm going to go another 10 years living in essentially an empty room with a bed in it.

dipiert•1mo ago

I may be adding a few more in the next days. So far:

- Lose 3% of body fat / 2 Kgs.

- Run a marathon.

- Complete a 5.6Km run in less than 32 mins.

- Get my VO2Max to 50.2.

- Read 12 books.

- Get the first 200 subscribers in my podcast about computer science history (not yet published)

Start all of your commands with a comma

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

The Waymo World Model

What Is Ruliology?

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

An Update on Heroku

Dark Alley Mathematics

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Why I Joined OpenAI

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

FORTH? Really!?

Start all of your commands with a comma

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

The Waymo World Model

What Is Ruliology?

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

An Update on Heroku

Dark Alley Mathematics

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Why I Joined OpenAI

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

FORTH? Really!?

Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

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