Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc.

So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.

I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.

I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.

I want to be much more publicly unhinged and in general do a lot more art without worrying too much about why or what I'm trying to say. I've found a lot of beauty in shitposts this year and I want to develop my skills to really meaningfully contribute to the corpus.

Write an operating system in Forth.

I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.

Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE

I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.

I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.

I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.

I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.

Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.

I got a headset and wanted to do vr apps but found the medium to addicting and now I just play with no desire to create.

I want to learn driving.

I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels

Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India

I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking

Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.

Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).

Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn

Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.

Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.

The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.

Learn to make money.

Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.

So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.

Finishing projects rather than starting them.

For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.

I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.

On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.

I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.

I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)

I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.

I started learning Latin in 2025, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I can read intermediate level pedagogical texts -- mostly adapted Greek and Roman myths. In 2026 I want to get my proficiency up to the point where I can comfortably read the first book of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. This is doable, many of the texts I'm reading now were designed to teach the vocabulary and grammar so High School students could slog through it.

Technical skills:

- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.

- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.

- Do more coding with AI.

- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)

Non-technical skills:

- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.

* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* Learn complex analysis!

* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!

How to build and deploy web apps. I worked as a developer for many years (before becoming a product manager), but always in desktop apps. I still code for fun, but I never made the jump to web apps. Now with AI that's easier than ever, so I'm going to do it.

Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.

I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.

I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.

Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.

Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.

Become conversational in Ukrainian.

I need to improve my facility with Python and math and geometry sufficiently to finish up my current project, a previewer for G-code which allows creating design files programmatically.

Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).

Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.

I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.

- Do the splits!

- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.

- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.

- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"

I want to learn how to be bored again.

I also want to learn how to ask better questions.

I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.

Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.

I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.

Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.

To expand my knowledge of product management and JavaScript enough to build a strong prototype of app/business i have in mind with the help of Lovable and other ai tools.

Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.

And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.

Does being "emotionally strong" is a skill to improve?

GenAI security. I work in the security space as an engineering manager but need to be more versed in LLM focused attack vectors.

Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.

(Non-technical skill) To live with ambition.

Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.

I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.

As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?

I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.

Use transformers to predict prime numbers.

I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.

Technical:

Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.

Non-technical:

Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.

I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again.

I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.

Any tips are welcome.

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