My self-taught journey began around September of 2024. At the time, I was spending most of my free time studying for the CFA. In between sessions, I would use this coding app/game called Memo for some productive downtime. I never thought it would be anything more than that.

But then I found myself looking for more material, and carving out time to code on weekends. What kept me hooked, in retrospect, is what I see as coding's uncommonly short learning-to-validation loop.

What I mean is that few disciplines allow learners to see the impact of their knowledge so frequently and so early on. If we define a programmer as someone who writes programs, then we could say that every CS 101 student became a programmer the day they printed out "Hello World".

You could not say the same about master swordsmiths or potters.

To this day I have yet to make a "pot" despite the numerous pottery nights I've gone to. And has this affected my desire to continue going to pottery nights?

Undoubtedly so.

Thankfully I found my pottery nights elsewhere - in The Odin Project, The Complete Web Dev Bootcamp, IBM's Professional Data Analyst Certificate, Full Stack Open, and several other courses and certifications. They helped me build skills in full-stack development, AI engineering, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

More importantly, this journey gave me the confidence, over time, to tackle domains that I previously thought I could never learn.

Currently, I'm learning how to build LLM-driven features in Scrimba's AI Engineering Path and working towards my AWS MLA-C01 Machine Learning Engineer Associate certification.