From Android to AI Engineering 👨💻
Many Android Devs know me as the "Coroutines & Flow Guy", since I have the most popular udemy course on that topic. What few people know is that I haven't worked as an Android Dev for more than 3 years now.
Why? Because in early 2023, I decided to transition to Backend Development simply because there is much greater demand and higher earning potential.
I quickly secured a long-running freelance contract as a Backend Developer for a big e-commerce business here in Austria. I was really happy in that project, and I envisioned working there for many years.
However, things can change quickly, and within a day, the company announced that it would completely shut down the service my team was working on by the end of 2025.
One part of me was really sad because I really liked the project. But another part of me was excited because I had always wanted to find out if I could live off online courses, and now I "got" my chance.
My initial plan was to create courses around how to become a Backend Developer. However, I didn't feel I could sell enough courses, since there are already so many courses out there and many Devs already have the knowledge my courses would teach.
I needed a new field, which is rather new, highly in demand, and for which not many people yet have the skills.
So I did another round of research and came across "AI Engineering", which is all about building applications on top of LLMs. Initially, I dismissed it because I thought this was just about how to use the OpenAI API.
But boy was I wrong...
... because while it's easy to build demos and prototypes that integrate LLMs, bringing them to production is what AI Engineering is all about.
There is a fundamental difference to classical software: LLMs are non-deterministic. The same input can produce different outputs every time. This creates entirely new challenges: how do you even know if your system is still working correctly after you change a prompt or switch to a newer model? The answer is evaluations, or "evals" for short. Evals are the unit tests of AI Engineers, and building good evals is one of the most important skills in this new field.
Furthermore, you need to master completely new concepts, such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and new frameworks, such as LangChain and LangGraph.
Everybody is talking about how AI will replace lots of white-collar jobs. But who is going to build all the automations? Right, the AI Engineer. So AI Engineering is probably one of the most future-proof fields in Software Development.
So I decided to go all in on AI Engineering and started working on my first course. Today, after 6 months of hard work, I can proudly announce that "AI Engineering Fundamentals" is out now on udemy!
👉
udemy.com/course/ai-engineer…
For a very short timespan, you can get the course for only $9.99!