Web dev lets you build full-stack ML apps and maximise MLEng/entrepreneurial skills. Oh, and you can do it in Python
A few months ago, I met a guy who worked in Marketing at Apple. When I told him I was a Data Scientist, his response surprised me.
“Oh, so you do the backend side of things?”
This response caught me off-guard because I’d never really thought about my job as “just backend stuff”. Within the Data Science/AI hype bubble, we’re used to thinking about AI as the defining technology of our times; sort of like the thing around which the rest of the tech Solar System orbits.
My friend — let’s call him Copernicus — reminded me that, to those outside of the hype bubble, AI is just one piece of the puzzle, not the centre of the universe. This sparked a curiosity in me to try and learn more about other “planets” in the tech “Solar System”, and I eventually decided to learn web development, for four reasons:
- Entrepreneurship potential — I wanted the ability to build entire products and apps “end to end” so that, when I have a product/SaaS idea, I can just build it myself for free
- ML Engineering — An ML model which remains in a Jupyter Notebook adds no value to anybody. For this reason, ML Engineering is one of the hottest areas of Data Science right now, and I wanted to learn skills that will help me move into this area. Web development helps a lot with this because it teaches you to create APIs and productionise models so that people can actually interact with them
- Impress stakeholders — Even for hardcore data fanatics (let alone disinterested business stakeholders!), it’s hard to get excited by BigQuery tables and .py files. I wanted to show people how my models worked by building visual user interfaces so people could actually interact with them, and web dev helps you do this
- Skill stacking — There are lots of fantastic Data Scientists out there, and equally lots of fantastic Web Developers. There aren’t loads of people who can do both, making this a rare and valuable niche. For someone like me who wants to be a jack of all trades, master of one, that’s enormously…