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by no_cake 3439 days ago
I have to say, as a student it is very comforting to read this.

I've been worried sick trying to learn the things I see people commenting here or in hackernoon. I had the idea that by the time I graduate, these technologies will be trending or have a good market share.
2 comments
walterbell 3439 days ago
As a student, you can learn how to place "the new shiny" into the context of technology industry history, including academic research papers and industry war stories from teams that built successful products. When you read tech "history" books, the lens of time separates hype from lasting innovations. Also worth going back a few hundred years in engineering history [2] to look at first principles that still apply in the modern world, even though tools have changed.

With historical perspective, you can choose a "v1.0" or even a "v0.1" modern tool with confidence, when you have reason to believe that it's effectively "v255.0" in a lineage of discontinuous improvement that spans centuries.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7952209

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158385

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pjc50 3439 days ago
Glad to be of reassurance. There's more in the world than it's possible for one person to know in a lifetime. The "last man who knew everything" died in 1829 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist) ). So we have to pick who and what we keep up with, and to what depth.

There's a good chance that something else could be trending by the time you graduate. The media mood is very ephemeral. For employment purposes it's better to look at job ads statistics (annoyingly hard to search for phrase) and make your own inferences from there; anything currently popular will take a while to sink. As with any statistics, also ask yourself what is left out.

Stackoverflow dev survey is a reasonable starting point: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016

Javascript frontend has been big for a while, but suffers from a tremendous amount of churn. Maybe the best solution here is what people used to do with music: find someone "cooler" than you and copy their taste.

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