Alternatives to a Degree to Prove Yourself

Through a series of Microsoft happenings, I ended up finding and listening to a really insightful Hanselminutes podcast episode with guest Edaena Salinas Jasso. She made the shift from web development to machine learning/AI work with Microsoft Research. In talking about her path, she mentioned a couple resources that she highly recommends: fast.ai’s Practical Deep Learning For Coders, Part 1 and Udacity’s Intro to Machine Learning (course description: “Pattern Recognition for Fun and Profit” ¹).

Both courses come off as hands-on and particularly accessible to anyone with a coding background, so I plan on checking them out soon (and ditching an internal Microsoft Research course series on AI that is a little too research-y). But in visiting the fast.ai site, I found a blog post Q&A entitled, “Alternatives to a Degree to Prove Yourself in Deep Learning” by Rachel Thomas. I really just want to re-blog the entire post here, but I doubt that’s good blog etiquette… so go read it in full over there.

I’ll just say that there’s an entire section on Why you (yes, you) should blog, and Rachel’s points remind me of The Social Developer idea (okay, I’m going to reproduce a small part of the post now).

Here are some reasons to blog:

• It’s like a resume, only better. I know of a few people who have had blog posts lead to job offers!
• Helps you learn. Organizing knowledge always helps me synthesize my own ideas. One of the tests of whether you understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else. A blog post is a great way to do that.
• I’ve gotten invitations to conferences and invitations to speak from my blog posts. I was invited to the TensorFlow Dev Summit (which was awesome!) for writing a blog post about how I don’t like TensorFlow.
• Meet new people. I’ve met several people who have responded to blog posts I wrote.
• Saves time. Any time you answer a question multiple times through email, you should turn it into a blog post, which makes it easier for you to share the next time someone asks.

— “Alternatives to a Degree to Prove Yourself in Deep Learning” by Rachel Thomas

Just a little more validation about this new venture I also need the occasional, friendly reminder to avoid perfectionism.

Footnotes