On Upskilling and surviving a hard time

It’s been more than a year since I left my full time job to pursue art. After 5 years in the same company giving as much as I can, I decided to give my childhood dream a go: to be an artist. I vaguely remember how odd of a request it was, and how many people told me that I was brave. How they enjoy art too, but with existing commitment and risk/reward analysis, they just dont think it was a thing for them.

In retrospect, I’ve never felt I was brave at all, if not full of naivety. I had no financial commitments, I have enough money saved up. I was confident in my skills and experience to regain employment, and frankly, I was quite burnout and losing the spark. I had to give it a go.

I will discuss my one year journal in detailed manner in the future, but after a year, whilst the business is indeed growing, The uphill battle of being a self-taught artist with lack of portfolio for a more stable freelance career made it really difficult to continue. I had been seeing red for more than a year. My partner mention how negative I’ve been, and I’ve felt constantly anxious all the time about money. I decided to return to the tech foray in search of some safety harbor. Not to mention, being 30, it is just plain financially irresponsible to not secure my self financially first.

The year has been extremely transformative in the industry. GPT3 has gone mainstream with GPT4, LLAMA sparked a rush to build llm everywhere, cloud architecture work has specialized and seeks people with experience, and computer visions are not being tackled with transformers. Surely, I thought, my 5 years of experience in a startup, toiling on all the “ugly” tasks will come to good use in finding a job back.

Not at all. I was rusty with leetcode (wasn’t my strength from the start either), my last tracking model i was familiar was YOLOv3 (it is now YOLOv8), and mlops scene has 10-15 more vendors to play around with. I was struggling to get an interview, let alone an offer. Most calls that I get from recruiters are: What was your last salary, and what is your expecting salary. One even ask if I was laid off instead of career break. Well that did not sit right given how much effor I put into my art brand.

Which brings you to the purpose of this series: To treay myself as a fresh graduate again, document all that I’ve learned, submit code regularly, attend networking events, and build back up my portfolio. In this series, I will work on all the tools and skills that I’ve always find interesting, and I’ll be more than happy to work on a job.

If you’d like to drop my a donation, please head on to my KoFi for a mini commission request here (5-17$) (https://ko-fi.com/casualpanda/commissions)

PS: I’m occasionally open for commissions, and if you are interested in working together, please dm me @_casualpanda on Instagram.