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

9 points by mh77 12 years ago | 15 comments

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

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

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

Things I am considering:

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

* Backbone.js / AngularJS / Ember.js

* Android development

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

* Or just deepen my knowledge in Ruby/Rails.

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

dennybritz 12 years ago |

No matter which one of these you choose, I'd recommend working on real (preferably open source) projects and putting them on Github so that you have something to show when you apply for jobs after 10 months.

basicallydan 12 years ago | |

Totally agreed! A recruiter I spoke to yesterday said, "I see that you have a presence on GitHub..." referring to one of my more popular OS projects, and then rambled on for about 15 minutes about his open source friendly client. I'm not saying you want to attract lots of rambling recruiters (because that's boring) but it means that people are recognising hard work and OS contributions as a good thing. It helps.

mh77 12 years ago | | |

I will definitely try to work on my GitHub presence. Thanks!

basicallydan 12 years ago |

Lucky you!

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

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

mh77 12 years ago | |

I will surely look into other things too.

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

basicallydan 12 years ago | | |

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

mariocarvalho 12 years ago | |

I completely subscribe.

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

Good luck!

artie_effim 12 years ago |

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

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

MrBra 12 years ago | |

There is 6th edition too: http://www.amazon.com/Internetworking-TCP-Volume-One-Edition...

enkiv2 12 years ago |

It looks like the thing that's going to really blow up soon is IoT (or, at the very least, it looks like it's going to be the most lucrative, un-sexy-sounding thing on the planet in 5-10 years). If you have a good grounding in C, familiarize yourself with contiki (which, although it's not being used now, is likely to become the backbone of any third-party IoT node that isn't running linux) and some basic digital electronics.

JSeymourATL 12 years ago |

From a Professional Development & Leadership perspective, tech guys often overlook basic presentation and sales skills, useful if you need to rally project buy-in or gain support for an idea. Here's a place to start> http://pitchanything.com/

lnnn 12 years ago |

I learned Clojure/Clojurescript the last half a year which was my sabbatical. Coming from design into frontend, functional programming blew my head off and made me a way better programmer :)

peterwwillis 12 years ago |

Pick a job that you want, gather the requirements for that job, and learn them. Aim for something hard.

spreeker 12 years ago |

Travel. And play with girls :)

andrewstuart 12 years ago |

Start a business.