I've spent 8+ years as an enterprise developer — .NET, Oracle, PeopleSoft, the integration trenches. This year I committed to a real transition into GenAI engineering. Not "I watched some YouTube," but a structured, finish-able plan.
The first thing I learned is that the hard part isn't finding learning material. It's the opposite: decision paralysis. Forty browser bookmarks, three half-started Udemy courses, two cohort bootcamps in my cart at \$1,900–\$2,000 each, and five PDFs I "bought to read later."
So before writing a line of Python, I did two things:
Designed my own 25-week curriculum.
Built an interactive tracker for it — into my portfolio — so I couldn't quietly abandon it.
