Over the past year or so, I decided to go on a personal crusade to learn web development from top to bottom. There were many times when I was outside of my comfort zone, especially with obstacles that were more design focused. However, I knew these were the very tasks that I had to push through and master to complete the journey.

I had a pretty good understanding of backend development, databases and APIs using C# and Python, but I knew front end development was going to be most challenging part. I took small incremental steps within different areas. In many cases, as I began working down a particular path another area of focus would present itself, and I would add it to the to-do list.

Along the way I had the opportunity to try out dozens of packages, libraries and frameworks all claiming to do a task better than their competitors. In many instances I would learn a couple of each just to gain an understanding of why those claims were made. In the end, I chose one from each area of discipline to focus more heavily on.

During my last year of college, I had the opportunity to work on a capstone project that would simulate the creation of a product for stakeholders. I happened to get a project that required the use of machine learning algorithms. Python was my preferred language for a couple of years doing basic programing tasks, but nothing on the level of machine learning, image recognition, and neural nets.

Ever since then it has been one of the few programming paradigms that I keep coming back to. Sifting through massive amounts of data, learning about different areas of focus to improve feature engineering, and testing various models with fingers crossed has been an amazing. It gives me the opportunity to understand what it takes to be a data scientist whilst learning about different business domains in the process.

I built my first mobile app that got placed on the Google Play Store in just nine months. I had absolutely zero knowledge on how to design apps, but through trial and error I eventually gained confidence. The app was unique in that it used Googles augmented reality library which, at the time, had just been released. The library was still a bit buggy; the app wasn’t the most gorgeous; but the accomplishment of starting off with nothing and just a short time later having an app people could use was one of the greatest learning experiences.

A short time later I became a cross platform developer in a professional environment. Many of the things that were taught to me were obvious solutions to the areas of struggle in my first app. Though I still prefer native development, learning how to develop an app to work on any device posed new challenges and solutions.