[bondsynth]

I have yet to make the transition in a paid role, but I quit my backend job to start a startup developing realistic text-to-speech for long-form content.

My approach has been to start at a high-level, with a specific goal in mind, and to progressively go deeper and deeper. The specific goal part has been really helpful IMO. It prevents sort of aimless shuffling about and provides a good metric to see if you're making progress. When I started I was basically just focusing on producing training data and treating the models, which were open-source on GitHub, as a black-box. At this point I've made a lot of modifications to the actual model code itself and I'm learning a ton. There's of course a bunch of adjacent skills that are similar to traditional backend skills, but slightly different. Like autoscaling for example, there aren't many autoscaling solutions for GPU VMs yet, there are some startups working on this space, but IMO it's good to have a rock-solid hosting solution that you don't have to worry about too much.

I opened up the beta of my product just last week at https://bondsynth.ai/signup

The goal is to either have my startup succeed or to move into an ML engineer position at a small-to-medium sized company.