The Weekend Project Principle
So, I’m lucky to have a few machine learning and web development certificates, but I’ve noticed a trend recently that there’s a far better strategy to follow. Perhaps it’s best to avoid my mistakes.
Through Programmer Eyes
- Problem
- Find a team and strategy to solve the problem
- Build software to solve the problem
OR
- I wonder if I can build that
- Learn a ton online, talk to experienced people, and get the tools that might be useful
- Attempt to build it
These are general paths most programmers follow to build awesome stuff. Path 1 is used by most companies since there’s a clear problem and they need skillful teams to tackle it. Path 2 is used by many of the best technology-driven companies and programmers in the world, but it’s also the beginner’s default choice.
Step 2 of Path 2 is where students would jump into certified online courses to learn what they need to; although this is a great idea, it becomes a problem when the goal becomes getting a certificate to feel less confused, rather than getting to Step 3.
A much worse strategy would be to not learn at all and jump straight to step 3:
The Solution
This Quora post on online certificates got me thinking initially.
The weekend project principle is working on anything you can say, ‘I’m working on X’ or ‘I built this.’ And then being able to tell a story about it.
I can tell stories about how I built a website with Angularjs, Vuejs, Nextjs, how we built a full-stack data application as a team of interns and how I built Unity games, but can’t talk too broadly about how I applied the knowledge from my Coursera Specializations.
This is not the fault of certificates, however. It’s us students who should emphasize building with what we learn, not just learning in an endless loop from online materials. Hopefully, this has been partially useful, and someone won’t have to earn a college-degree worth of online certificates before realizing the mistake.