Over on question and answer site Quora, a student with a long winter break ahead of him wants to know: "What are some useful technical skills I can learn within a day?"
How very Benjamin Franklin of him.
Anyway, Quora users came up with lots of answers.
These answers include lots of jargon that I, a non-technical keyboard button presser, do not understand.
But maybe you do.
If so, here are some skills you could learn before going to bed tonight:
- Version control:- Git, GitHub and SVN
- Regular expressions
- AWK
- sed
- Grep
- Learn how to do things with Vim that you never knew could be done.
- Set up a crawler that can scrape some webpages and parse some basic data.
- Set up a bigger crawler that has to fill out a form or two.
- Program a basic linear algebra library (matrices, vectors, multiplication)
- Add SVD to this library.
- Add matrix inversion to this library.
- Add least squares regression to this library.
- Make your library work efficiently with sparse data.
- Learn how to use list comprehensions in Python.
- Get a Stack Overflow account and learn to use the site.
- Read the freaking manual for your favorite language.
- Implement a simple machine learning algorithm on your own, with a whole pipeline.
- Learn the how to make a simple line graph in Excel.
- Get your eclipse installation fully pumped up.
- Learn the basic functionality of a NoSQL database.
- Learn the most basic functionality of SQL
- Getting comfortable with Linux.
- One or two sorting algorithms.
- D3 (JavaScript library)
- Learn how to effectively develop unit tests for your code.
- Familiarize yourself with some of the AWS services and their API in the language of your choice
- Basic graph theory
For each bullet point above, there is a full Quora answer explaining why, and how, you might learn each skill in a day.
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