Aisha is a Cloud Solutions Engineer at TechData. She co-founded and is a former board member of the Python Nigeria Community, a Python Software Foundation fellow, Django Software Foundation member and winner of the 2016 Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial award.
Aisha is passionate about mentoring African women through PyLadies and DjangoGirls and bringing communities together via conferences such as Pycon. She has helped organised a number of conferences including PyCon Nigeria and Pycon Africa.
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Switching Careers: From Jupyter to the Cloud
Description
While many of us knew what we were passionate about from the get-go, others need to go through different career options to finally decide what they’re really passionate about. And who says we all have to follow one path throughout our careers. For some, they get bored after a number of years and are keen on trying something different. Not to say pursuing breadth (Jack of all trades/Generalist) vs Depth (Expertise in a niche/Specialist) is always going to be in fashion and means financial freedom. But what if we could chart our own path, not follow the crowd or what is in vogue but take advantage of the endless possibilities that exist in the software/technology world. What if we looked at things from a different angle where everything is connected, not an Us vs Them, but where all our experiences are neurons/layers part of a bigger neural network and we constantly take learning from the back propagations.
Here, I would walk the audience through my transition story of how I made the switch from being an attempted Django developer to a Data Specialist, a Network Engineer, and now a Cloud Engineer. I would also give real-life examples of developers turned business analysts/ product designers.
Like a popular African proverb “There are many roads that lead to the market, ” which means that whichever path you take, however long, bent or narrow the road is, as long as you eventually find your way to the market the real story is in the journey and your learning along the way. “To thy own self be true”. But many times thy self isn’t immediately apparent, there is a lot of growth and learning that needs to happen before getting to your end game.
Summary of proposed Agenda
* A brief history and introduction to the speaker’s career options over a number of years
* Key questions to ask yourself when making the move. E.g. financial implication, your WHY/End goal, Networking, and support system, where to begin.
* A list of general steps anyone making the switch can take
* Some good old advice from our African ancestors, and from people who have made the transition
* Standout projects from both worlds and how learning from one domain significantly helped with learning in the new domain
* Conclusion and next steps