What Technologies Are You Future Proofing With?

  • I think WebAssembly/WASI will take off if someone wraps it in a shell that supports a powerbox, with logging, debugging, and possibly undo/redo, time travel debugging, etc.

    A way to run ANY random program from anywhere, and just give it a file in a safe and secure manner fills so many needs that most people can't even imagine right now.

    PS: I'd have written it myself, but there's about 1000 items to check off just to get an MVP working on a PC if my survey of the standards is right. 500ish instructions, and a boatload of APIs.

    PPS: I've looked at several implementations, but I don't have the familiarity with the languages they are written in to be able to dig deep into the guts and add the required code to turn the WebAssembly VM into a black box whos interface I can control. Thus, it seems I have to build my own 8(

  • I’m focusing on becoming a beast at systems design and architecture more than specific technologies. Whether that becomes some AI system or yet another glorified overly complex web application.

    Its a much harder skill to master and more valuable imo.

  • Im not sure if it’s future proofing exactly, but I’m placing my bets on Nix powered development systems.

    The conceptual clarity combined with sparse documentation, rough edged user land, and the army of edge cases give me flashes of Docker in 2013/14.

    It’s a pain to use but the promise is there. When setup and working, Nix seems like _the_ way forward for reproducible builds and dev environments at any 20+ dev team.

    I work in dev experience at a larger tech company. I work on many different REPLs, often jumping into unfamiliar projects- in my first three months I’ve worked on go, python, node, terraform, k8s, etc.

    With nix I’m able to clone a repo in an ecosystem I don’t use, create a couple files (flake.nix + .envrc) and reliably create a working, isolated dev environment that works and doesn’t mess my other projects… gaming changing.

    (Plus I took the plunge after system issues to move to a VM running NixOS, defined in my dotfile repo.)

    The language is difficult, the documentation needs to get there, the amount of breaking or confusing api are big hurdles. I think some simple wrapper like https://devenv.sh may be what gets the industry on board.

  • I think AI is really going to rock a lot of fields in the next 5 years. And one needs to adjust.

  • 'Distributed SQLite'. There are so many projects to make SQLite replicable/ horizontally scaling (dqlite, rqlite, sqlfs, litestream, ...), there must be a great need for a simple to administer SQL DB with more horses than the single node SQLite.

  • AI/ML. We can argue what AI/ML really is capable of, but one thing for sure, with current market condition, I only see companies spend more money on AI/ML infrastructure than ever before. My company is putting ton of money into that space. I was planning on doing SICP and Crafting Interpreter this year, but I just might switch over to AI/ML study just to make sure I'm in the conversation for my future.

    Another no so popular take, BlockChain/Ledger type technology in traditional financial market will see an uptick in activities.2

  • CUE ( https://cuelang.org | https://cuetorials.com ) Configure, Unify, Execute.

    I'm building https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof on top of it. I also use it a lot in CI / cloud related things. Tamed the monorepo with CUE too

  • Old warm C :))))

    Joking. In reality, Python and React working well, but sometimes i write chunks of C code for performance critical things, and in some cases have to use jquery, because old browsers.

    And K8s and Docker will definitely live long, because good market fit.

    For Rust, I'm not sure. For me it is not mature enough, so if will learn just now, in half year will need to learn new version.

  • > Docker, Kubernetes, Rust

    These won't go away for a long time. So it's worth picking them up today.

  • Quic sounds like it has a lot of performance potential but hasn't hit critical mass yet

  • vim, shell scripting, Python. ;). (that was a joke.... and not a joke...)