After writing the title of this post, the first question that came into mind is “is that even possible?”. I have been thinking about this question for a couple of days now and this post is the answer to the question and also offers some insight into how I am going to make that happen.
In 2022, I started a journey to officially become a software engineer by joining an online Bootcamp. Throughout that bootcamp, I documented my entire journey publicly and that was one of the best things I have done in the past couple of years. This brought me a lot of opportunities including my current job. It however took me one year to complete that software engineering bootcamp.
The one most important lesson I learned through the ALX Africa Software Engineering program was that I could literally learn anything if I set my mind to it. When I reflect on the entire journey, there are a couple of things that made me successful in the program and also to became a good software engineer.
Some of these factors included:
The fact that I did it with others who kept one another accountable
Documented the entire journey publicly (public accountability)
Showed up consistently for myself and for the people in my community
A structured project-based intensive curriculum
Therefore, I believe that these four elements are key if I want to succeed at becoming an AI engineer.
Over the past two years that I have been working professionally as a software engineering, I have built a lot of AI enabled systems. Through these projects I have learned a lot about Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Also, during my masters degree program in Health Informatics, I also took some courses in AI/ML.
In my current startup, I am using AI heavily and the entire AI-based workflows which includes an intelligent recommendation engine was built by myself. I usually learn the things that I need to build what is needed.
As I keep building these products, I feel a strong desire to master more things about AI. In fact, I recently built a very complex AI multi-agent workflow that blew my mind and made me understand the possibilities hidden in knowing some of these things.
I have therefore decided to learn AI engineering and to officially become an AI engineer. I went online and searched various resources on it. Eventually, I decided to go the self-taught route (if you remember the lesson I hinted at that I took from my software engineering training - I can learn anything I choose to learn).
But I also know that I have a lot of competing priorities right now and I might easily give up on the journey even before I get through with it. So, I decided to engineer the same conditions that enabled me to succeed in the software engineering bootcamp.
First of all, I needed the structured curriculum. But since I have been working on curriculums for the past two years in my full time job, I set out to build my own curriculum. I found a very powerful roadmap on the roadmap.sh platform. Then based on that roadmap, I came up with a 90-day long curriculum.
Each day during the 90 days, contain an overview for the day, multiple concept pages, a knowledge test with about 10-15 questions and some project-based task which all cumulate into a bigger project. The curriculum is focused on making the student job ready as an AI engineer (even though my primary reason for learning this is to leverage the knowledge and experience to elevate my startup’s product).
Once I figured out the curriculum part, I needed to get the other three things. The second most important thing to get was the people who I will be learning with. This is essential because it very easy to give up when you are doing it alone. So, I posted on one of my online communities that people who were interested in a course on AI engineering should indicate their interest. I got quite a number of them but just to ensure that it is an effective team, I had to put a cut on the total number of people I will be working with together on this.
I also went ahead and vibe coded a learning managing system (LMS) that is rooted in the principles of learning in public. As I am writing this piece, I have just finished testing the platform by creating three courses (90 days AI Engineering, 90 days AI Agent Development and 30 days Prompt Engineering) on it and testing with the day one lessons.
Since the first two things are ready, I am left with the other two things which are documenting the journey in public and showing up consistently. Hence, writing this post at 2:50am is definitely a sign that I am ready to put in the work. This is therefore proof of me starting to document my entire journey to becoming an AI engineer in 90 days publicly.
We are looking to officially start the program from the 31st of December 2025 and hopefully complete it by second week of April 2026. I have onboarded the people who qualified to be part of the training and looking forward to doing this with them. Since, I have seen many other people show interest in the courses, I might consider to run future cohorts later.
Everyone in the program is expected to learn in public. In our context, this means, choosing one social media platform for daily update posting and one blogging platform for writing at least once-a-week blog posts. I am also considering getting all participants to do videos (either through livestreams or pre-recorded videos). I believe with the abundance of generative AI tools, one of the best ways to stand out in the overly crowded market is to document the journey through videos.
The logic is that even if you write the best of articles, people might doubt the source and some might think you used a generative AI tool to generate it. But if you do a livestream where we can all see you in real time put what you have learned in practice then it becomes difficult to dispute the fact that you really know the things you say you know.
In order to systematize all of this and make it count for the time and effort I put in, I have put everything under one of my companies (newly formed - yet to be officially launched) called Bozoma Innovation Hub. This is a project in the making with a goal to launch the physical hub in about five years time. But going forward all these trainings will be treated as the virtual components of the hub’s activities.
I will therefore be doing my video documentation and livestreams on the Bozoma Innovation Hub YouTube channel. If you want to follow up on my journey to becoming an AI Engineer then subscribe to the YouTube channel and also follow me here on Hashnode (Dr. Ehoneah Obed) since I will be posting my articles here explaining some of the concepts, lessons, challenges and skills that I gain through this program.
As always, thank you for the support and I wish myself and everyone else on this same journey the very best.
Catch you in the next one.
