My wife and I have two young children. I’m around 40. I’ve been a lawyer for ten+ years. My previous career was as an editor (MS tech writing). Before that I was (early days of the web) a website designer. The days of table layout, HTML and CSS by hand, Macromedia Dreamweaver, etc. I was just getting into the bad old days of PHP3 when I decided to make the change to editing.

I learned Java and C in college; no Java since, but a bit of C still. I started Python a couple years ago. I’m probably of intermediate skill level. A.k.a., not my full-time job. I also have a certain level of sysadmin (Linux machines, AWS, Linode, etc) that char restrictions won’t let me account for.

This has been a long time coming. I am tired of being a lawyer, and I now regret not going into software engineering like my father before me. Well, maybe not SWE exactly.

A few months ago, I picked up a couple of machine learning books. I am hooked. I think I missed my calling.

The catch, of course, is that my wife and I want to move to Europe form the US. She has lived in Germany. We have traveled extensively in Europe. We’d prefer Germany or Sweden, but we’d be open to alternatives.

So I want both to make a major career change, and do it far far away. I don’t know where to start, really. School? Try to get a job somehow with my existing skillset?

Moving to Europe is more of a priority than starting a new career right now. I think I would like to work in machine learning, or maybe some sort of artificial intelligence field, but I am not above starting with doing some programming work or web development, or even sysadmin.

I’ve got about $70k in cash and liquid assets, and if I plan for it I can come up with another $30k in a few months. My wife can possibly take a job in Munich any time she wants, to support us for a while if necessary.

My German is intermediate-ish.

What’s the fastest way to go about this? What’s the “right, but would take longer” way to do it?