What are the best ways to pick up Deep Learning skills as an engineer?

On the other hand, everything usually feels abstract until you start implementing. It's mostly important to implement a variety of models and make them really work. As Ilya likes to say, you need to be prepared to suffer: expect hours of debugging models that refuse to learn, many passes restructuring your code, and building up your own conventions for changing various hyperparameters. But each time you suffer, know that you've built a little bit of skill that will be invaluable for the future.