All of this sounds a bit pre-meditated to me. If you are a "planner" then perhaps this will work for you. The alternative is to just GO NUTS! and pick up whatev

All of this sounds a bit pre-meditated to me. If you are a "planner" then perhaps this will work for you. The alternative is to just GO NUTS! and pick up whatever random stuff you find interesting TODAY and dig in there. Most of these roads lead to rome, and if you find something that makes you curious, even though you have no idea why, that curiosity is likely to make you 10 times faster at absorbing/processing (and creating) new ideas. For example, you want to do some graphics programming, maybe a raytracer, and that leads to thinking about projective geometry and linear algebra and whoah, a few years later all of that stuff is useful when you end up in a machine learning job. (maybe) But back to the plan, if that's your thing. All the blog posts that complain about the "interview process" seem to be about how they don't understand dynamic programming. So, put that at the top of your list! (And by the way it is loads of fun.)