Hey All 
I accidentally taught myself Ruby on Rails, left my fairly successful corporate career behind and have been working on a relatively complex rails app for nearly two years now.
I think that in 2013 I took the Coursera Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng and fell in love with neural networks. Well, it was a weird phase in my life and I completed a lot of online MOOCs on a lot of subjects, including some heavy duty machine learning courses (the one from Geoffrey Hinton and Abu-Mostafa come to mind). Not knowing where to channel my appreciation for neural networks, I did some weird things (a prime example being this repository), tried learning a lot of math and failed miserably, probably something like two times thus far 
I even wrote a rather embarrassing post about my failures but well… too embarrassed to post it (and probably it might be boring anyhow) but maybe I will at some point!
Fast forward to part2 v1 of this course where I met @jeremy and @rachel. They do seem to share a lot of useful information on deep learning (lol @ the understatement because what they teach and how they do it is L - E - G - E - N - D - A - R - Y) and they also seem to share a lot of meta on learning. Well, I have been particularly screwed in life by being a very obedient, learning well kid and it sort of carried into my adult life. Unfortunately, I was the sort of person @jeremy described in his lecture yesterday that would find all the theory books they could and would only take any action when they literally understood each and every definition… ah this did lead to some outstanding failures on learning math in my adult life but I digress.
I got frustrated with Deep Learning getting nowhere in the last two or so weeks of the fisheries competition and left for 5 months to deepen my understanding of web dev which is my daily bread and butter that I have grown quite weary of by now.
The interesting thing is that the ideas on learning shared by @jeremy and @rachel and some that I got from this book seem to have incubated in my mind over the course of inactivity and I am back doing things differently now I specifically make it a point to follow @jeremy’s and @rachel’s advice hoping it will get me somewhere I have not been before, though to start blogging and using twitter required quite an epic leap of faith
What am I hoping to get out of this course? That is a tough question. I am willing to give deep learning another go and do it well this time. That is really it. I don’t have any domain knowledge and not sure how I would build it. I am also very appreciative of the market forces and despite so many people being very excited about getting a job in deep learning / machine learning I think my chances of ever getting there are relatively low. I am very familiar with the corporate interview process, having set on both sides of the table, and if the companies are looking of PhD type of people, than regardless if that makes sense for them or not, this is what they do. I think I also make this specifically a point not to keep my hopes up so apologies if I sound overly pessimistic, more so than the situation would really entail! All this leads me to thinking that at some point I might set out doing something on my own, but that is probably also very much down the road for various reasons if ever at all.
So just hoping to enjoy the ride with all of you while it lasts. I put this post together on what I am planning to focus on for next 7 weeks, will revisit it when the course ends and will set set a new course for the interim period before the 2nd part - who knows, maybe I will be extremely fortunate to make it into that session as well, and if I am accepted I will once again set the course for the duration of the course. My plans for now do not reach any further than that
Let’s enjoy the ride, learn as much as we can and see you around on the forums!