Hi. I’m Janice. I am a software engineer. I quit my job this year to shift my career towards Machine Learning. My husband runs dev-notes, and I plan to use it to chronicle my journey. I’m hoping this will also help keep myself accountable to my goal.
My Background
So, why am I doing this?
I’m not new to this field. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science from 2002. I’ve been programming since I was in high school. I worked for nearly 8 years at IBM Research as a software engineer on speaker recognition, speech recognition, gender detection, keyword search, etc. You’d think this would be easy for me, right? Don’t I know what I need already?
Not quite. (Or, maybe I lack the confidence?)
I paused my career to start a family right around when the state of the art for these sorts of systems shifted from HMM-based models to neural networks. When I worked at IBM, I interacted daily with proprietary code and tools. While I know how to solve problems in general, I don’t have the confidence yet to find a job. I have no portfolio. All of my experience is dated and very specific. I need to address these shortcomings. Artificial intelligence has become so accessible these days that folks with less experience have already found their place. I’m confident that someone like me should be able to do this. (Do I sound confident?)
When I decided to go back to work again after my career break, I had to relearn how to work with the constraints of having a young family. For me, this was a big deal. I timidly took roles at universities in hopes of maintaining a good work-life balance. However, I was doing primarily web development in Ruby on Rails with bits of python thrown in, and it wasn’t fulfilling. Looking back at my career, I was happiest when I was working on machine learning problems. I want to be back there.
My Plan
I just enrolled in the Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree, with a start date of April 16, 2019. The time commitment is 2 three-month terms for about 10 hours a week. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to complete the course in less time, but I’m a mom to two young kids. We’ll see how it goes. I chose Udacity because I do much better when there’s a structure to my learning. They stress that the course will help build my portfolio, which I’m sure will be useful once I start applying for jobs. This will cost me $999 for two terms, so basically $2k.
I’ve already subscribed to a year of datacamp, so I’m making my way through as many of those courses as I can. A year subscription cost me $180. I think it’s worth it so far.
I hope to at least try a Kaggle competition. Even if I fail, it looks like a great way to get my hands dirty and learn.
Finally, I plan to take the famous Coursera course with Andrew Ng. I hear that this is a great foundational course. I’ve only just started it.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I plan to have regular updates in the coming months.