Should you move away from traditional programming areas such as web development, desktop applications, games development, and focus more on things like a big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence? Let’s talk about that today.
Should you be focusing on things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data (those sorts of things), instead of core, more traditional areas such as web development, desktop applications, and so on? Well in general, my answer would be, it depends. Now the reason that it depends is because it’s really up to you as to what you want to specialize in. Also keep in mind that a lot of these other areas, artificial intelligence, machine learning, et cetera, well, they use common components in these other areas.
For example, an artificial intelligence application may be actually called and used within a web development or a web architecture application. So in other words, having skills in those areas as well as moving into artificial intelligence would be quite useful. The other thing to keep in mind is with some of these more advanced areas, again, artificial intelligence, machine learning, et cetera, they do require more skill, that’s a reality. So you’ll need to be trained in those areas and have a good core set of programming skills before you get to that stage.
So it can be a good idea to learn the basics first, perhaps in some of these other more common areas as I’ve talked about, web development, et cetera. Build up your skills in that first, and then move over to these more advanced areas, because they’re not for everyone, and they do, again, require specialized skills. You don’t need to necessarily get into those areas to become a productive programmer and to be paid well, but it’s something you can do if that’s something that interests you. But I would suggest you also try and give yourself a good set of broad skills, and that will really help you as you transition into these more advanced roles if that’s something you want to do.
I hope that helped. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.