{"slug": "i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan", "title": "I Finished Machine Learning. And Then Changed The Plan.", "summary": "The author completed a self-directed Machine Learning roadmap, building projects like a customer churn prediction model and learning from mistakes such as data leakage and overfitting. However, after finishing the ML roadmap, the author changed their original plan to pursue Deep Learning and NLP, deciding instead to focus on building practical products with Generative AI (GenAI) first. The author advises beginners to build projects before feeling ready, as most learning came from fixing unexpected mistakes.", "body_md": "A few months ago, I had no idea what feature engineering was.\nToday, I finished my Machine Learning roadmap.\nNot \"mastered ML.\"\nNot \"became an AI expert.\"\nFinished the part where every tutorial starts making sense.\nI built projects, broke models, overfit them, leaked data into them, fixed them, and slowly started understanding why things worked instead of blindly following notebooks.\nMy latest project:\nPredicting which customers are likely to leave a company before they actually do.\nBuilt with:\nProject:\nCustomer Churn Prediction Demo\nThe funny thing?\nThe more I learned, the less interested I became in rushing toward Deep Learning.\nOriginally the plan was:\nML → Deep Learning → NLP\nBut somewhere along the way I realized something.\nI don't just want to understand models.\nI want to build products.\nThings people actually use.\nSo the roadmap changed.\nNow I'm diving into:\nDeep Learning isn't gone.\nIt's just waiting its turn.\nAnd DSA?\nThat was supposed to stay consistent.\nInstead, I keep finding myself opening AI documentation at 2 AM and disappearing into another rabbit hole.\nNot because I have to.\nBecause I genuinely can't stop.\nSomewhere between building projects and studying, curiosity quietly took over.\nSo that's where we are now.\nMachine Learning: complete.\nNext stop: GenAI.\nLet's see how deep this rabbit hole goes.\nIf you're earlier in your journey:\nBuild projects before you feel ready.\nMost of what I learned came from fixing mistakes I didn't know I was making.\nProject:\nCustomer Churn Prediction Demo", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/casperday11/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan-3cnk", "published_at": "2026-05-22 14:51:02+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-22 15:05:39.784334+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "artificial-intelligence", "products", "data"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-finished-machine-learning-and-then-changed-the-plan.jsonld"}}