What is your domain expertise and how did you get it?
I'm a developer but my last several jobs or projects have been all in different industries. Since college I went from political tech > education AR apps @ Fourth Wave Studios > blockchain supply chain dev @ ConsenSys > video engineering @ Discovery channel > whatever is next? I'm still interested in all of these different kinds of tech but I don't think I have become a real expert in anything besides general product development.
I'm starting to wonder how not spending a lot of time in any particular sector could be impacting me. So.. What is your domain? How did you become an expert? Why that domain? How long did that take?
UI UX Designing. I never really graduated in design but year 2016, I came across the term for the first-time. I immediately felt a connection there, looked natural at it. I did do a small course in Coursera but the turning point was when I designed and built my first product orcaso.io in 2018. Earned some awards in design, and the next thing I know companies emailed me to work on their products. A few months later, I consulted on projects of banks, and many MNC's like Unilevel, etc., and today I am invited to host design boot camps in colleges. Until 2016, I never knew such a term exist. 😅
Wow thats a great story, very cool.
I always love hearing of people landing in jobs or fields they didn't really know existed and loving it, then contributing so much to the community.
Analytics.
I started at a high-scale e-commerce company that had a solid training program. Working full-time-plus at that job had me at a very good place inside of a year. I applied many of those standards for the first 2-4 years.
I had wanted to be a data scientist, after getting a taste of it in grad school. But, the company didn't have a data science department yet (this was 2012), so they assigned me to the closest thing they could find, analytics. I was mad at the time about not getting to be a data scientist, but in retrospect I think they made the right choice with me.
Now, 8 years in, I define the standards and how the training programs need to work.
Robotics! I've been passionate about this field since I was a kid and I got lucky to do the right studies for it. It's a multidisciplinary field (eletrical engineering, mechanical design, software etc). I discovered I had a natural ability with software so I specialized in embedded software. I worked on drones at Parrot and now I work on a medical exoskeleton. I've since expanded my skills (which where mainly C language on small microcontrollers) to real time c++, but also I love python and do some backend and GUIs. I've recently learned kotlin and released an android app (an expense managment app).
This makes me a swiss knife kind of coder, maybe it's not really coherent but I like it.
Python Developer, more specifically Web Development, Data Mining and Automation.
How I got into it?
I was learning Python for fun, then one day saw a job post saying they want someone to automate Instagram. I applied and got hired. For the next 2 weeks, I learned Selenium and managed to complete the task. I got very much interested in web automation and learned more about it, managed to do things that seems very cool like using gmail api to download attachments from email, bulk messaging on LinkedIn, finding lyrics for a song, etc.
After some time, I made a profile on guru.com and managed to get a client to do some LinkedIn automation. I started earning a lot more for a college student. So gradually I learnt other areas of Python like web development, working with databases, developing APIs. Its been 4 years now and I really enjoy Python as a programming language mainly because of its expressiveness and fairly easy to learn as a beginner.