They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Also, that to build a boat, one should not simply gather wood, but teach their ‘men’ to yearn for the sea.

Whelp, after years of looking at the “learn python” on my New Year’s resolution list and wistfully looking at that Stanford Machine Learning course on my Coursera board since about 2013(!), I’ve decided to take the plunge. Of course, we are all yearning for the sea of possibilities that comes with GPT, so hopefully, that will provide sufficient inspiration. The stick to that carrot are the doom and gloom forecasts that we will all be out of a job fairly soon (and I most certainly do not intend to do without my weekly Roederer, so retirement isn’t yet an option). Like most, I really feel like I’ve missed the boat until I remind myself of how many times per day I see “Digital Transformation” marketing messages coming from enterprise software companies, juxtaposed with the facts that ERP systems have been around since the ’70s and e-commerce since late ’90s. I figure it will take some time for businesses to get on board, and the sooner I jump on this wave, the better. Plus, it looks like an exhilarating time to surf!

A little about me; I’m a late 30’s marketing professional in a large corporate tech firm that shall remain nameless. I’ve just had my first daughter and live in the beautiful red dot that is Singapore. I’m writing about my journey because I feel like an unlikely candidate for starting out with machine learning and would like to share how I go, how what I learn impacts my life, and what exciting finds I stumble upon along the way! It’s also a great way to commit to getting things done.

So, here we go! Hope others can join me as I launch onto this slippery slope of applied mathematics, python and infrastructure. And if I manage this as a total com-sci numpkin, anyone should be able to give it a shot.