I am completely bored out of my mind. And bored not because I don't have anything to do - I have plenty (3 Assignments, 1 research, 1 tutoring presentation to prepare and another presentation to submit in lieu of our cancelled exam). I am bored because I am not getting the intellectual stimulation that I was promised when I joined university, bored because I am no longer able to see like-minded peers pushing interacting in intellectually stimulating environments. Of course, it's not anyone's fault. I am not blaming anyone. I just want everything to go back to normal. I miss sitting in class and being just happy that I have the privilege to learn all this stuff. Now I just sit in my room and still learn, but it's not the same. Kudos to the professors who are giving classes via Zoom. It's as close to a real class experience that we can get in the current situation.
The reason I am writing this article is that I have been thinking about certain types of people who are good at product development. I encountered such people when I was an intern at Media IQ. My manager was one such person. He could work on anything and learn anything really fast. My mentor was another such developer who not only specialized in an area, but could also don several hats. And they were and are very valuable to any company. I aspire to be like them someday and here is something of a study plan that I developed for anyone who wants to become a T-shaped individual. Really good at something (a specialist) but also okay at several other skills that complement his specialization (a generalist).
It's a great time to develop your general skills in Data Science or development.
- Get an AWS certification
- Learn Docker
- Learn System Design
- Create an automated data pipeline
- Go back to the basics
This tops my list because Cloud technology is exploding right now. Everyone who is involved in technology will use the cloud sooner or later. Amazon owns 33% of the Global Cloud Infrastructure Services market. This means a lot of companies are using AWS. If you want to increase your employability, I suggest getting yourself one of these. Now, there are several AWS certifications, and getting them all is not only tedious, but probably unnecessary. If you want to find out which one to do, AWS website is probably the best guide. But if you want my advice, I'd say start with the Developer Associate one and then get one of the specialty ones (Big Data or Machine Learning if you are into data science). Free Code Camp is offering free courses to prepare for some of them and they will roll out free courses on all of them in the coming months.
"Why Docker?", you ask. I say, "Why not?". Well, I do have a better argument than that. Docker combined with Docker Swarm or Kubernetes might just be the thing to scale your product. If you are tasked with building a product in a startup, you will have the responsibility to make sure it works on servers and that it can handle a large number of requests. What if a server dies and you have to restart the app? Well, enter Kubernetes. It automates the scaling and management of these servers. Really useful tool under your belt.
My mentor had suggested me a book "Thinking in Systems". Confession - I haven't actually read the book, but anything he recommends is a must read and I can vouch for that. Plus, Jess Holbrook from Google came to our university for a talk and recommended the same book. Great minds think alike!
Sometimes I feel we should have more automation in the way we do Machine Learning. The traditional way is you download a dataset, analyze and clean the data and then write code to analyze and predict from it. But there are softwares that do a lot of these tasks for you (H2O) and although they aren't very sophisticated right now, they are the future. So why don't you create an automation software that can setup a pipeline for your next project fast, probably it can do basic data analysis as well and then you just have to validate it's results or maybe do the data analysis part yourself. Sounds like a fun idea to me.
Maybe it's been a long time since you have done any actual math, maybe it comes so natural to you now that you don't even think about it. But going back to the place it all started (read Math in case of Machine Learning) with a beginner's mindset is always a good idea. You never know what new thing you will learn this time.
Happy Coding and Happy Learning!!!!