Self Learning Technology Program 2020

Join us for an industry-relevant technical adventure with SLTP 2020

🗸 It is open to all

🗸 Work towards building industry-relevant skills

🗸 Take ownership

🗸 Build a cool project

🗸 Document it and enhance your portfolio

🗸 Learn how to learn something by yourself

🗸 Learn to think like a self-starter and a product owner

🗸 All you need is a good laptop, stable internet connection, and lots of perseverance and passion.

So, How Exactly Does This Work?

Five simple steps.

1. Think of an idea and pick your dream job, that involves working with something similar
2. Read the job description
3. Formulate a problem statement inspired by the same
4. Execute the project
5. Document it online

And voila! You have worked in the technologies your dream companies use and built an industry-relevant small scale project.

Sounds too simple? It actually is (given you put the required time and effort). A little bit of mentorship and guidance can make all the difference from it being seemingly impossible to you actually building it. We have prepared a road map and feature a few sample problems for you to get a hang of how to proceed further.

The key here is to think in terms of “ideas” and connect the dots backward on how to bring them to reality and learn in each step as you build.

Workflow 1- Google

• Head over to the LinkedIn jobs page of Google (or Google Careers page) and look out for which job excites you the most, and has a good description of the role and responsibilities of that position.
• We have picked up a Job for reference- Software Engineer- Full Stack
• Here are some snippets from the job description.

• Time to formulate a problem statement based on these points. Upon reading this, some ideas we can think of are as follows- How about Bolo for the individuals with hearing loss, where you teach sign language to them or use sign language to teach other topics? You can think of a small module that can convert textual content into sign language automatically.
• For a project in the context of Google Pay, how about making a stand-alone expense tracker module that can be integrated with GPay?
• These are two sample examples. Next, identify the tech stack or infrastructure used in the existing apps and plan your project.
• Think in a modular fashion. What are the inputs, the UI, and the outputs? Think about how your module can be integrated with an external app. You can just implement one specific feature.
• In the case of Bolo for sign language teaching, you can first go through various sign language lessons for beginners and work your way backwards on how you can incorporate it into an app. Google search every step backwards. Observe how the existing Bolo app was built and proceed accordingly.
• For the GPay expense tracker, firstly, identify the data points that can be captured from GPay transactions. For example, how much money was spent, where it was spent, the time and date of spending, etc. Using these parameters, generate a dummy dataset for experimenting. Use this data to create an expense visualizing module. Apps like Wallet can be your source of inspiration here. There are many creative things you can explore here. Brainstorm and get going!
• You can use LinkedIn and reach out to Google engineers who are working in these teams to get clarifications and pitching your ideas.
• Ultimately, when you build the module, document the entire process online, and release the end result as an open-source product, if you wish to.
• Do you think such a project will add immense value to your profile? If you ever get a chance to interview with Google, show them how you managed to create an end to end project on your own, which is related to an actual Google product.

Workflow 2- Twitter

• Head over to the LinkedIn jobs page of Twitter and look out for which job excites you the most, and has a good description of the role and responsibilities of that position.
• We have picked up a Job for reference- Machine Learning Engineer
• Here are some snippets from the job description.

• Formulating a problem statement is relatively easy here. A few sample projects can be the fake news detection model, account clustering model, sentiment analysis, malicious account detection, etc.
• Here, your first step after finalizing your problem statement would be to find the data that you can use.
• You can search for good examples that exist online and try rebuilding them, with some custom improvements.
• For example, https://github.com/KaiDMML/FakeNewsNet has a dataset of fake news on twitter which you can use.
• When it comes to a clustering project, there are so many interesting things you can try. How about, classifying accounts based on their emotion towards a trending incident and correlating it with the geolocation? How about creating a tweet statistics visualizer on any given trending topic? Your creativity is the limit.
• Once you identify what you want to do, create a project road map and finalize on what models, tech stack, and architecture you will use. If you are a beginner, you can simply use existing architectures. Try creating a new application out of them. That will hold good too.
• Likewise, you can network with Twitter engineers via LinkedIn during this process.

In a similar manner, you can pick up an informative job description of any profile of any company of your interest and pursue such a project. Google search is your best friend at every stage of development. We do understand that self-learning is not everyone’s cup of tea. But if you think, this approach is worth a shot, try it out. It is free, and you will surely learn something out of the experience, even if it doesn’t work out for you.

Remember that, the answers to most questions you seek will be there somewhere on the internet.

Search!

Expected Outcomes

• You successfully create your own well-defined problem statement. You learn to be the product owner who can create an end to an end road map.
• You implement fully or partially, a project that tackles your problem statement. This project will be highly relevant to what the industry is working on right now.
• You literally work on things your dream company is working on. At least, on a smaller scale.
• You either release it to the open-source or make your own product out of it, based on your interest.
• The self-learning skills you develop here will hopefully help you in the long run.
• You have an opportunity to document your learning and development to help other self-learners in the future.
• All of this can also help with your own personal brand, catching recruiters’ attention and strengthen your portfolio.

To help you stay focused, motivated, and share your work with like-minded individuals, we are creating an invite-only WhatsApp group for all those who want to participate in this program (we may migrate to Telegram if we get more than 256 participants).

You can fill the google form below for the invite and get regular updates from me about this program. I will be supporting all registered people with ideas, inputs, tips, and tricks throughout.

Note- This program has no time limits or deadlines. This is purely driven by your passion and you work for yourself and when you want to work. Everyone can work at their own pace and we will continue to support you till you reach a tangible outcome in this process. We expect, on average, someone working leisurely on this to be able to create something good in about 3 to 6 months. We hope the community we build here will encourage peer to peer learning as well.

To give a proper demo of how to actually attempt this initiative, I will personally be pursuing a specific project based on a Job description of my interest and document it across all stages of its development. I hope that will give a clear picture to you and future learners. More details will be revealed in a future article.

End Notes

If you plan to try this out on your own, I recommend you keep a record of everything you do, as a developers’ diary. This can be a simple google doc where you write about every step as you do it. You can also store the collection of online resources, articles, StackOverflow links, etc. that helped you. At the end of the journey, all of this can be restructured into a fine article.

If you wish to partner with me in documenting your work, I would be happy to assist you in the same, provided you would be interested to publish it on The Research Nest as a project tutorial. (This will follow the guest blogging guidelines we have, which comes with a lot of added benefits for you)

This program is designed and hosted by me. In case of any queries, you can directly reach out to me on LinkedIn for a quick response, or send an email at the.research.nest@gmail.com.