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What is the economic moat for a skill that any software engineer can learn with an hour a day investment?
Also, if it puts you at a few levels higher, and you keep learning more, combined with an already strong knowledge base... eventually combined experiences lead to something quite valuable and useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the economic moat for a skill that any software engineer can learn with an hour a day investment?
The moat is you'll be at a level higher than the person who doesn't put in an hour a day. Also, if it puts you at a few levels higher, and you keep learning more, combined with an already strong knowledge base... eventually combined experiences lead to something quite valuable and useful.
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Nice how 1 hour turned into 70 minutes. From personal experience: Learning and understanding the fundamentals via courses and personal projects/implementation is different from keeping up to date with blogs, newsletters etc. I suggest dedicating the full hour to 1 thing, but alternating between courses (i.e coursera), reading (i.e the batch) and building/coding.
If you don't have a solid enough footing to get a job in the field yet, the next best thing in my opinion: find a passion project and keep cooking up new ways to tackle it. On the way to solving your problem, you'll undoubtedly begin absorbing the tools of the trade.
Lastly, consider going back to school (a Bachelor's or Master's, perhaps?). It'll take far more than 1 hour/day, but I promise you, you'll see results far faster and far more concretely than any other learning strategy.
Good luck!
Context: I've been a Researcher/Engineer at Google DeepMind (formerly Google Brain) for the last ~7 years. I studied AI/ML in my BS and MS, but burnt out of a PhD before publishing my first paper. Now I do AI/ML research as a day job.
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Nice how 1 hour turned into 70 minutes. From personal experience: Learning and understanding the fundamentals via courses and personal projects/implementation is different from keeping up to date with blogs, newsletters etc. I suggest dedicating the full hour to 1 thing, but alternating between courses (i.e coursera), reading (i.e the batch) and building/coding.
The single thing which I learned the most from was implementing a paper. Lectures and textbooks to me are just words. I understand them in the abstract but learning by doing gets you far deeper knowledge.
Others might suggest a more varied curriculum but to me nothing beats a one hour chunk of uninterrupted problem solving.
Here are a few suggested projects.
Train a baby neural network to learn a simple function like ax^2 + bx + c.
MNIST digits classifier. Basically the “hello world” of ML at this point.
Fine tune GPT2 on a specialized corpus like Shakespeare.
Train a Siamese neural network with triplet loss to measure visual similarity to find out which celeb you’re most similar to.
My $0.02: don’t waste your time writing your own neural net and backprop. It’s a biased opinion but this would be like implementing your own HashMap function. No company will ask you to do this. Instead, learn how to use profiling and debugging tools like tensorboard and the tf profiler.
I got a masters degree in ML at a good school. I will say there’s pretty much nothing they taught me that I couldn’t have learned myself. That said, school focused my attention in ways I wouldn’t have alone, and provided pressure to keep going. The single thing which I learned the most from was implementing a paper. Lectures and textbooks to me are just words. I understand them in the abstract but learning by doing g…
You say don't write your own neural net and backprop implementation. That makes sense to me. What do you suggest using instead, for your suggested projects? I'm guessing tensorflow, based on your suggestions on profiling and debugging tools? Do the papers / projects you suggest map straightforwardly onto a tensorflow implementation, rather than a custom one?
I got a masters degree in ML at a good school. I will say there’s pretty much nothing they taught me that I couldn’t have learned myself. That said, school focused my attention in ways I wouldn’t have alone, and provided pressure to keep going. The single thing which I learned the most from was implementing a paper. Lectures and textbooks to me are just words. I understand them in the abstract but learning by doing g…
Do you have any starters on how one selects papers in the early days, to implement?
Also - any great papers you recommend beginners expose themselves to?