I Finished Machine Learning. And Then Changed The Plan.

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.

A few months ago, I had no idea what feature engineering was. Today, I finished my Machine Learning roadmap. Not "mastered ML." Not "became an AI expert." Finished the part where every tutorial starts making sense. I built projects, broke models, overfit them, leaked data into them, fixed them, and slowly started understanding why things worked instead of blindly following notebooks. My latest project: Predicting which customers are likely to leave a company before they actually do. Built with: Project: Customer Churn Prediction Demo The funny thing? The more I learned, the less interested I became in rushing toward Deep Learning. Originally the plan was: ML → Deep Learning → NLP But somewhere along the way I realized something. I don't just want to understand models. I want to build products. Things people actually use. So the roadmap changed. Now I'm diving into: Deep Learning isn't gone. It's just waiting its turn. And DSA? That was supposed to stay consistent. Instead, I keep finding myself opening AI documentation at 2 AM and disappearing into another rabbit hole. Not because I have to. Because I genuinely can't stop. Somewhere between building projects and studying, curiosity quietly took over. So that's where we are now. Machine Learning: complete. Next stop: GenAI. Let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes. If you're earlier in your journey: Build projects before you feel ready. Most of what I learned came from fixing mistakes I didn't know I was making. Project: Customer Churn Prediction Demo