From CRUD web app dev to SDE in voice assistant — My ongoing Journey to Machine Learning

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

(This post is also available in my blog)

Start — Inspired by a YouTube channel

Back in 2016, I was inpired by a YouTube channel sentdex to start keeping eyes on machine learning. sentdex is a great youtuber who gives free practical tutorials in his channel. His channel covers a wide range of topics. His machine learning series drew my attention. His content make difficult topic like machine learning so easy to consume. For example Python plays GTA shows how he develops AI to “see” the screens frame by frame and plays the game. Since then, I believe machine learning applications can be fun and it’s not just math formula for scientists.

Self learning

I started to follow sentdex’s Python for Finance series to learn the python basic for data manipulation. Alongside, I decided to add machine learning prediction for stock price. I picked up a best seller book Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow to learn what ML algorithms are available for me to use in this use case. It introduces complex algorithm with simple examples that help you get the concepts of how these algorithms work, e.g. why random forest works better than a sincle decision tree in most cases, or in what kind of data set, you should…