My Learning Diaries: AI is a black box to many, but demystifying it has helped me pivot from engineering to software development

A qualifier: I wrote this article with the help of ChatGPT, as I believe lifelong learning is about adapting to new tools and making them part of your skillset.

I was genuinely interested in how products go from design to production, so I picked engineering product development as my undergraduate major at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

After graduation in 2018, I worked as an automation engineer and product development engineer in industries such as manufacturing and medical devices, before pivoting to software development in 2022.

Why the change? When the pandemic happened, everyone started to embrace Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that enabled us to work more efficiently.

While I agreed with them on the benefits of such tools, I disagreed with their skepticism that these tools are complicated and undecipherable black boxes.

I noticed that some around me displayed a fear of programming and software, branding it as something they would never understand.

The scary thing was when I saw a little of myself in them.

Even though I am in my 20s, I felt there was no excuse for me to stop learning new skills.

While my undergraduate degree provided me with relevant industry skills, I knew I should not allow them to stagnate.

I took the plunge and enrolled in the part-time NUS-ISS Master of Technology in Intelligent Systems (MTech IS) programme in 2020.

I picked this course because I believed it would help me demystify the AI buzzword and build up my confidence through learning about concepts such as computer vision and practical programming projects.

Computer vision is a field of AI that turns images or video input into meaningful information which can be used to perform tasks such as classification or recommendations.

Looking back, another perhaps more important skill I use every day at work now is debugging and fault finding.

This was cultivated through the various projects as part of the practice modules which are a key component of the MTech IS programme.

In one such project, my team set out to create an automated rehabilitation exercise assistant to help patients perform guided rehabilitation at home.

Their exercises were tracked using computer vision and automated updates on their progress sent to healthcare professionals.

Through the project, I learnt about how to turn ideas into code to address real world problems.

As I was working as a product development engineer at the time, it was not easy for me to switch between designing and testing prototypes to working with software.

One way I tackled this was to look for similarities in both, such as adopting the same thought processes I used for product design and translating that into software development.

Despite these challenges, I was able to complete the MTech IS programme in 2021. 

I am grateful to be working as a solution developer in Norwegian software company Eye-share since 2022.

It is a very different role from my previous engineering jobs as it involves quite a bit of coding and getting used to the software behind it.

Eye-share develops intelligent “purchase-to-pay” automation software which handles everything from buying and receiving, to paying and accounting for goods and services.

On a day-to-day basis, I work on Eye-share’s software suite using my newfound technical skills such as debugging and computer vision to fix issues for clients much faster than if I tried to do it myself.

Truly, the first step to start typing code was the hardest and I had to push myself to start.

To overcome this, I broke down the programming tasks into smaller, more manageable ones and focused on making incremental progress.

I find that taking small but meaningful steps was the way I became more confident, and this translated well into my career.

My next move is to learn more about AI-powered language models such as GPT and Bard, and how they can help make software development processes more efficient.   

If there are new skills you have been interested in but never had the courage to start, I encourage you to start now.

Nothing is beyond you if you set your mind to it. You will be surprised at what you can be capable of achieving.

ABOUT THE WRITER:

Mr Benjamin Quek, 28, is an engineer turned software solution developer. He enjoys collaborating and designing meaningful solutions for technical or social needs. He is also a long-term volunteer who has had various stints such as befriending patients at Ren Ci Community Hospital, teaching coding to kids from disadvantaged backgrounds at Saturday Kids, and has recently started serving as a youth mentor at Suncare SG.

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