Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

13 points by eli5 11 years ago | 11 comments

I have, what I hope, an unusual and possibly beneficial question for anyone here and, hopefully, I can get as many different answers as possible.

I was wondering, what interesting technology, language or tool can I learn in a week or so by reading a book and/or practicing. Something that has a potential to greatly improve my productivity or maybe just my understanding of how things work, or maybe even my life. Anything.

To give you a number of subjects I'm already familiar with, so you don't suggest them: Rails, Javascript, html/css (you can imagine the stack), also quite good with Linux and its tools, using Vim.

logn 11 years ago |

Regular expressions. If you want an in-depth book try Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl. Or for a quick guide, http://regular-expressions.info along with http://rubular.com/

Regex will not only give you new skills for programming (no more splitting strings in weird ways and doing complex indexOf/substr operations), it will help you day-to-day in rummaging through file systems and your code.

And if you already know regex, then I'd recommend Map Reduce Streaming. The Streaming variety is all based on standard in/out and very straight forward. Amazaon Elastic Map-Reduce could be a nice way to test things.

eli5 11 years ago | |

Ahh, already read it long long time ago. Great advice though!

dclara 11 years ago |

Currently, I'm running a free summer camp online to help college students to learn the professional skills as a software engineer according to the industrial standard.

There are various options you can pick and choose to be hands-on. The "main dishes" is to help you run through a process from installation, configuration and deploy a real world web application with the full server stack.

Check it out if you have time. It is described in a Kickstarter project: "How to build a website like an engineer" http://kck.st/SY4CXv.

ScottWhigham 11 years ago |

Without more info about what your work or life are about, it's hard to suggest something too specific. Since we're being generic, I'd say that it's hard to beat the value of learning how relational databases work. Focus on learning the basics of SELECT - that takes months but you can get the rudimentary parts down in a week. If you already know the basics, then look into index design. Why/when/how and all that.

axit 11 years ago |

Faster touch typing? If you're not already great at this you can improve productivity by improving your typing speed.

You can learn and practice on sites like http://ratatype.com/ and http://typeracer.com/

lettergram 11 years ago |

Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office.

You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand from the keyboard.

eli5 11 years ago | |

You do realize I listed Vim as one of the things I'm familiar with?

On a serious note, maybe I should learn Emacs at some point. Just to be sure I'm still in love with Vim.

lettergram 11 years ago | | |

I used Vim previously, I went through a month of Vim and a month of Emacs. I settled on Emacs in part because I enjoyed writing in Elisp

RollAHardSix 11 years ago |

Cooking.

adam-_- 11 years ago |

Cooking.

bolaft 11 years ago | |

I came here to say this. The importance of good food is severly underestimated. If you improve the quality of the food you eat, you improve your life. Also, you can save lots of money. And it's a great skill to have, socially. Being a good cook also makes you more attractive to members of the opposite sex, regardless of gender (that's not even a joke).