How I Became a Machine Learning Engineer by Micah Shallom

                                                                                      

 

How the Journey Started

Before the pandemic that commenced in 2020, I had zero knowledge about tech, I was a newly admitted student into Ahmadu Bello University studying computer engineering and had that idea that everything that will make me a great computer programmer was going to be taught in school and so it was okay.

Not until I had a chat with an actual computer science student and he made me understand the concept of self-learning which before then didn’t know was an actual thing in the tech world. A few months later,  I was able to purchase a laptop and after researching on the likely starting point for being a developer I came across web development and I went into it. I learnt HTML, CSS, J-Query, React, Firebase amongst others too and was able to work on a lot of projects too as well.

After spending  7months in web development I started having a feeling that what I was actually doing wasn't fully representative of who I am,  I have always loved things that were quite mathematical and has to do with a lot of logic so I made researches into data science and Machine learning and was overwhelmed by it, seeing that aside being a field I could learn on my own,  it was also an integral aspect of the course I study in school and plus I was also fascinated about AI and things that could be developed with it so I gave it a go.

Machine Learning: The Deep Dive

Getting started wasn't quite easy, reason because the field of machine learning is quite vast and also for a beginner it is difficult to pinpoint what direction one needs to take and also how to plan out a curriculum/roadmap to follow.

I made my researches and found out about the Zero To Mastery Course on Machine Learning on Udemy by Daniel Brooke and Andrei, this course was everything I needed to get started because it incorporated tutorials on python programming and highlighted basic python topics required for one to get started with machine learning. After going through the Python topics, I started taking challenges on Hacker Rank to help me get more familiar with the syntax of Python and how to use the language properly, I made it a regular daily routine to solve at least two challenges daily and after about 2weeks the language stopped looking so weird and I became familiar with it too.

It’s a usual misconception for those wanting to get started with machine learning to think that they need to know all the Mathematics for ML, have to be excellent at python, or/and have a thorough understanding of machine learning algorithms at first but that is not the case, all these things can actually be learnt while you study Machine learning and infact learning as you go is the best approach towards machine learning.

Completing my Project and the Udemy Course

About 3 and half months later I completed the Udemy course and was able to build my first project which involved working on the Heart Disease dataset on Kaggle making use Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn and ScikitLearn which I all learned from the online course. It was quite challenging but was able to complete it, I had to Google a lot of things out and also learn how to perform better at EDA(Exploratory Data Analysis) from other people works on machine learning too. Also I make use of popular sites like Medium, Towards data science, Quora etc where I get vital information and also where I get help too when I run into troubles.

In Conclusion

So simply and in summary, when getting started with machine learning, having a starting point is vital and it is necessary to stick to it. One shouldn't take on too many courses because it can really be overwhelming. The course on Machine learning I shared earlier is a very excellent place to get started with machine learning, after which you can register other courses that teaches more advanced concepts and also focuses on subsets of machine learning that are of interest to you which may include Computer Vision, Image Processing, Natural Language Processing, Robotics etc.

Anything in tech is achievable via self-
learning and it is important to note that consistency, hard work and diligence makes achievers.

I wish you all the best.

Micah is a 200-level student of Computer Engineering at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria