My Current Situation

I recently left my job as a technical support engineer at a big healthcare tech company. I left so that I could move back to my home state and maybe get back to the biotech side of healthcare. In my recent job, I mostly gained soft skills, but I also led an initiative to create product KPIs. For this initiative, I used Python and Pandas for data manipulation. I also helped organizations implement one of the company's machine learning models, in which I learned that it does not matter if you can predict something if you do not know what to do with that prediction. I've become even more interested in using data science and machine learning to improve and automate processes.

My Plan Moving Forward

So what's next? While I continue to search for my next job, I am going to be working on building out my "hard skills" by completing more courses in Python for data science and machine learning, and I will be showcasing these on a personal website and personal projects.

I will launch my personal website using Django that will host several items:

1. A blog to write about my learnings and projects, which I will use to hold myself accountable for meeting my goals. I will be posting these here on hashnode and creating links on my website for ease of use, and so that I can blog while setting up my website.
2. Personal projects as web apps to showcase my software development skills.
3. My professional resume.

Continuing my software development journey

My goal in becoming a great programmer is to enable automation and scaling of my ideas. As more and more jobs are performed via automation, I believe that there is going to be an inflection point between people's abilities to find jobs that pay enough to support a family and the cost of goods to support a family. Eventually, automation and renewable energy will drive down the cost of goods enough to support a family on a very basic income. However, the goal is to drive the cost of necessities down before there is a large enough decline in the job market. This cost of goods includes the basics for a healthy life: healthy food, housing and utilities, clothing, education, and healthcare (including the ability to exercise regularly).

The need to drive down costs is one of the reasons I did not go to medical school, as a single doctor can only do so much within the constraints of the US' healthcare system. It is also one of the primary reasons I took a job at a healthcare software company, as I wanted to see how healthcare scales. I have been involved in healthcare related education and jobs for six years now, and my two passions are education and healthcare. It makes the most sense for me to focus on healthcare due to my education and professional experience, though I have had several great ideas in the education space for software products and one of these is the reason I got interested in Machine Learning.

To enhance my skills in software development, I will be working on several courses:

1. Kaggle.com Data Science Courses
2. Either the Dive into Deep Learning by D2L.AI or the Practical Deep Learning for Coders by fast.ai
3. Robotics Programming Courses on The Construct.

Why robotics? If we want to drive down the cost of all goods, we will need robots to perform the manual labor that humans now perform -- from farming to consumer goods to biologics and lab work. I believe that most non-government jobs in the future will be in three categories: hardware maintenance, hardware and software programming, and creative work (including product development). Software is going to be able to automate most administrative work going forward (for example, see DoNotPay.com).

I will also be working on several projects.

1. A project that will be directly helping with my job search but also help me improve my Python skills using web scraping/crawling, performing data manipulation, and using machine learning models. I will be writing a blog series about this project in a nondescript manner in order to prevent idea theft, as I may look into launching it as a product. I will be working on some NLP for this project, as well. Long term, knowing NLP will help me in robotics programming and other applications using voice recognition or text analysis.
2. A Kaggle Competition that I will use to enhance my data science and machine learning skills. This will also let me improve may data visualization skill using Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly. I will be showcasing the data visualization as web-apps within my personal website. I will also write a blog series about this one to document my learnings and process.

Mission

I am looking for a job and career that will let me expand my skill set and create products, or enable others to do so, that will improve access to healthcare and education.

Next Steps

I will write a blog post of some of the resources I will be using in my learning and website/webapp development.