As new ideas in machine learning keep piling up, it’s up to engineers to navigate the sea of potential pitfalls and dead ends of software development. In this world, it’s the generalists who can have the largest impact. In this talk I’ll talk about my experiences up and down the stack in Speech Recognition and how each new piece of knowledge changes how I view the whole picture. Finally, we’ll discuss how we can continue to navigate the future whilst the world keeps throwing us curveballs.