This week on the podcast, Mike and I had a great discussion with Pratham Prasoon, a 16-year-old (at time of recording) programmer and Twitter influencer who has taken a liking to machine learning. During the interview, Pratham describes his passion and interest as the driving force for him to get into programming and computers. Back in 2017, Pratham started taking an interest in machine learning, he describes watching Google's demo of Google Duplex, as a moment that blew his mind and took him down the path of exploring machine learning and how to get involved with it as a programmer.
As many of us know, machine learning is very math heavy, which scares a lot of people away. Pratham believes that the math can be done after getting established in machine learning first. In general, Pratham describes the following procedure to kickstart your journey in machine learning (before all the math):
- Get good programming skills, especially in something like Python since it's used a lot in machine learning
- Learn a framework like Tensorflow or scikit-learn
- You can then use your skills thus far to deploy some machine learning into real world applications
- Once you have all that established and you want to start learning more, getting more involved in how things work under the hood, then you can start diving in to the math
Beyond machine learning, we also discussed getting into programming for passion versus profit, and talked about building a Twitter following.
You can find all these topics, and more, discussed at length in this week's episode - it's available now, click the button below!
