<story><title>Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?</title><text>I quit my software development job 4 months ago to take some time to travel, develop some ideas, and improve myself. I have a very flexible schedule, and I&amp;#x27;m eager to make the most out of 2019.&lt;p&gt;What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone in my situation (or anyone else) should consider acquiring in 2019?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Maultasche</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been learning Elixir, which is really good for creating concurrent and scalable systems. Concurrency has always been something that has fascinated me and I see in Elixir a chance to make very concurrent code without having to deal with locks, race conditions, and all the other icky low-level stuff. Elixir is also a functional language, making this is the first functional language I&amp;#x27;ve learned, which is another reason I&amp;#x27;m enjoying it.&lt;p&gt;Over the past couple years, I&amp;#x27;ve heard from developers who were very satisfied with Elixir, so I finally sat down and started to learn it.&lt;p&gt;As I&amp;#x27;ve been learning Elixir, I&amp;#x27;ve been writing a series called &amp;quot;Learn with Me: Elixir&amp;quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;inquisitivedeveloper.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;inquisitivedeveloper.com&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is that anyone else who&amp;#x27;s also interested in Elixir can follow along as I learn it and learn it for themselves as well.&lt;p&gt;Of course, playing around with it has also helped me learn far more than just reading about it. Writing about it has helped me learn a lot better, and my hope is that someone else will also find my writing useful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snake117</author><text>For those who are not aware, Jose Valim (the creator of Elixir) live-streamed all his solutions to this years Advent of Code on Twitch (found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.twitch.tv&amp;#x2F;videos&amp;#x2F;346878345?collection=YDM6eKu6bhV1Nw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.twitch.tv&amp;#x2F;videos&amp;#x2F;346878345?collection=YDM6eKu6bh...&lt;/a&gt;). I found this to be very informative and enjoyable. It is definitely worth checking out regardless of your proficiency in Elixir.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?</title><text>I quit my software development job 4 months ago to take some time to travel, develop some ideas, and improve myself. I have a very flexible schedule, and I&amp;#x27;m eager to make the most out of 2019.&lt;p&gt;What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone in my situation (or anyone else) should consider acquiring in 2019?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Maultasche</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been learning Elixir, which is really good for creating concurrent and scalable systems. Concurrency has always been something that has fascinated me and I see in Elixir a chance to make very concurrent code without having to deal with locks, race conditions, and all the other icky low-level stuff. Elixir is also a functional language, making this is the first functional language I&amp;#x27;ve learned, which is another reason I&amp;#x27;m enjoying it.&lt;p&gt;Over the past couple years, I&amp;#x27;ve heard from developers who were very satisfied with Elixir, so I finally sat down and started to learn it.&lt;p&gt;As I&amp;#x27;ve been learning Elixir, I&amp;#x27;ve been writing a series called &amp;quot;Learn with Me: Elixir&amp;quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;inquisitivedeveloper.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;inquisitivedeveloper.com&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is that anyone else who&amp;#x27;s also interested in Elixir can follow along as I learn it and learn it for themselves as well.&lt;p&gt;Of course, playing around with it has also helped me learn far more than just reading about it. Writing about it has helped me learn a lot better, and my hope is that someone else will also find my writing useful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_asummers</author><text>I love Elixir. There are very few things that it leaves me wanting from other languages, and I am happy for having added it to my professional tool belt a few years ago. I recommend it for beginners and experienced folk alike. The community is pleasant, industrious, and I feel like I get to code in a sane environment every day with escape hatches in just about every spot I would expect them to exist (due mostly to the macros + BEAM). Though I do not take advantage of this as often as I would like, being able to drop down to native Erlang trivially basically doubles the ecosystem size.</text></comment>