Hello world! This is all very new to me.
A chartered accountant by trade, I now find myself transitioning into Data Science, and Machine Learning in particular. The voice in my head just wouldn’t be silenced and I had no option but to take its advice.
I set about changing track in the ‘traditional’ way. I started building the foundations. I signed up for a Maths and Statistics degree with the Open University. It turns out my aptitude had not left me despite a 20-year gap, but I soon found that picking away at this in the evenings whilst working full time was not the quickest route. My progress has been ‘frozen’ at the half-way mark, and I may decide to pick this up again at some stage. I feel like I owe it to my high school maths teacher! In any event, the mathematical and statistical concepts covered certainly gives me a solid foothold for my new path.
I also signed up for the Google Data Analytics certificate, which gave me an introduction to R, SQL and Tableau. The combination of the power and speed of computer programming languages and the beauty of the visualisation tools had me hooked! It reminded me of my very first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464. Seems like yesterday but it was during the times of the BASIC programming language! I can still remember staring proudly at the screen as a flashing purple circle winked back at me 😉
I then quickly followed this up with some Python courses via Data Camp, and was in the middle of yet another course, Machine Learning Specialization taught by Andrew Ng, when I had the fortune to stumble upon Radek Osmulski’s book Meta Learning. He too, had followed a traditional model of learning but found that this wasn’t working out. That resonated with me as, despite the apparent ‘progress’ I was making via all these courses, it where was the tangible output? What did I have to show for all those hours of lectures?
It was Radek’s book that changed my life trajectory, by introducing me to Jeremy Howard and the fast.ai Practical Deep Learning for Coders. The ‘getting your hands dirty’ approach is the complete antithesis of my career path to date and is just what I needed to springboard my transition.
The initial purpose of this blog is to finally have a platform to showcase my achievements, immature and naïve as they are in these first steps. As I dive deeper hopefully I can start to give something back to the community and do some troubleshooting. The road is bumpy out there.
Come join me… Into the Unknown!