Hello World!
This is my first blog in series of blogs as I start (or rather restart) my journey to start learning ML/AI. The main idea behind writing this blog is to try and keep myself accountable. I've tried venturing into this area before, but for some reason couldn't continue or gain the confidence of calling myself a ML engineer. So I thought if I blog about it, if I keep sharing tiniest wins I might be able to keep my self motivated, and who knows this might come in handy to someone.
Why Learn ML/AI?
AI IS GOING TO REPLACE ALL SOFTWARE ENGINEERS!!! We need a new profession!!
JUST KIDDING :D
Well there are gazillion reasons to learn something new and "why not" is a valid reason. Apart from dreaming of creating my own "Jarvis" who does everything for me, I am just here for the challenge and fun! Plus as a engineer we are never done learning right, we want to keep sharpening our skills. After 10 years of full stack engineer, I think this is going to be a fun adventure.
What's The Plan
I retrospected the mistakes I made in my previous attempts, one biggest mistake was I kept focusing on theory and less on building. With that in mind I've come up with a path that I think will work for me. I've split my learning into 2 parts,
Courses - Learn the concepts and the build a strong foundation.
Projects - Just create fun projects with ready to use models and tools.
I've finalized following courses (in that order), planning to spend at 10 to 15 hours a week for each course.
Mathematics for Machine Learning and Data Science Specialization
Deep Learning Specialization [5 courses] (DeepLearning.AI) | Coursera
Natural Language Processing Specialization [4 courses] (DeepLearning.AI) | Coursera
And for projects, I've created a list of fun projects I want to do. I am trying to order them by complexity and break them down in a way that I can do each project in let's say 10 to 12 hours. Can't spend more than 2 3 hours a week so one project per week. This is a bit ambitious but I think the projects are the way to keep me excited and motivated.
What is this blog series?
That is a great question grasshopper. I don't have a clear picture on what will I blog about. For projects I am going to start with some simple Python projects just to get comfortable with the language. I've been primary a Node JS developer all my life, and Node is my goto language for any project, I want to become that comfy with Python. So will blog about those, something like "How To" blogs.
Apart from that I know I am going to blog about all the tiniest wins, pit falls, roadblocks that I face. I will also write about some of the concepts that I learn, and will try to simplify for future references. I expect that my "project blogs" are going to be super fun, cause it would be more like step by step guide on how to do something, not necessarily the right way to do things but nevertheless.
I'll try to publish at-least 2 blogs a week, if not more and will share all the resources/links I used.
This is going to be a rough journal of my ML journey so if you are on the same path or would like to follow along just drop in a high and DM me on twitter. Would love to connect with others in pursuit of intelligence (even if its artificial :)).
If there are any comments/criticism/questions regarding my approach and intent, let me know will do my best to answer them.
Cheers!!