Internet is the greatest enabler of work and education in human history as per me and the opportunities it opens up in terms of what we can study, learn and work on are amazing. My suggestion to all youngsters in school, college and who recently have started their career in terms of job / startups is to use this enabler in a positive sense to collaborate, learn, absorb knowledge, fuel creativity and build their own ecosystem especially with professional networks like LinkedIn.
I got introduced to computers in standard 4th, 5th, 6th at Air-force School, Gwalior, MP, India. After that stint in LOGO programming building basic shapes & creating rudimentary BASIC language programs in computer labs there was a slow down in terms of access to computers when I moved to my home state. Then again in 1999 I got a HP desktop computer with dial-up modem and good features for that time with an internet connection (ICENET was the first private ISP in Gujarat at that time). Dial up modem would support me for accessing internet at slow speeds and I got introduced to the online world. I never looked back or logged off since then.
Things I have had access to over time:
- ICQ
- Yahoo Messenger & Portal
- Yahoo Search followed Google Search
- Many tutorials, free websites to build web pages which got me freelance contracts for building product pages for few people followed by building my own basic websites and learning CPanel, Web programming & Databases along with DNS and basics of computer networks
- Experts-Exchange.com, ASP, upcoming PHP, VB – I got exposure to all of these in early days of 1999/2000/01/02
- Local portals of Gujarat and so on
- Exploring Linux (Red Hat Fedora) and trying to configure Conexant modem on it (I failed at it)
- Exploring IETF, IEEE, CSI, AIMA, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, News Portals, MSN, etc. as they came onto the scene
- Then came onto the scene – Gmail and I was among the first few to use Gmail in India via invitation followed by YouTube, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on all the while going through Dot Com Bubble and 2008/9 recession
- Post this Coursera, NPTEL, MIT OCW, AWS and so many more sources / portals / websites / apps / universities / products
All the while, my focus was on learning around software, management & engineering. Based on that passion and unending desire to learn, I could succeed in teaching as well as software industry with help of internet and my network. Big thank you to all who have helped / interacted with me over the years directly or indirectly via their work / websites and artifacts over internet.
To me LinkedIn has been one of the biggest sources of learning around Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and many other topics other than for networking with people from across the globe in the last few years.
If you have access to internet, you have no excuse to stay behind. Be thankful to those who created all these amazing things on internet. That’s my message to all in my network. 🙂