This is the first piece of writing I’m publishing to my tech blog / tutoring site. Publishing this first piece helps me reflect on the direction I’m heading in with my self-taught tech career.
Working in tech ought to be an adventure. If you’re like me, the idea of gaining skills that let you create new things and work with very different organizations is exciting!
My own journey has been filled with eureka moments and imposter syndrome. I’ve made mistakes, done things out of order, and spent more money on courses and failed projects than I’d like to admit. If I could go back, I’d do a lot differently; but pushing through the setbacks makes the breakthroughs all the sweeter.
First Job: Getting A Foot In the Door
When I graduated with a degree in Public Health in May 2017, I had no clear career plan. I just wanted financial independence. I had worked through college in restaurants, bars, and yacht clubs, but nothing that paid much.
That summer, living back in my childhood bedroom, I sent out dozens of resumes. I don’t remember much about the search, except realizing that plenty of entry-level jobs in advertising required little to no prior experience. Bingo.
After about two months, I landed an Account Management role at New York Media, the parent company of New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vulture. The job was mostly reporting and platform operations in DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), the tool used to monetize their sites. At the time I didn’t realize it, but that first exposure to an ad tech platform set me on a path toward Big Tech.
For anyone trying to break into Big Tech in 2025 without a technical background, Account Management at a media or advertising company is an excellent route. You'll get exposure to the technology that funds the free internet, learn what you enjoy, and build a foundation for a career.
A quick LinkedIn search shows more than 10,000 entry-level jobs in Advertising and Marketing Services in the NYC area. These roles turn over quickly, companies are always hiring, and if you are personable, organized, and comfortable in Excel, you have what you need.
Aiming Towards the Technical
In 2021 I decided to make a lateral move from Account Management into AdOps / Tech Ops within my company. This path of moving closer to tech by starting in a commercial role, building trust, and then shifting internally is one I recommend to anyone in a similar position. It requires patience and the ability to spot opportunity, such as an understaffed AdOps team.
To prepare for the transition, I bought Headfirst HTML and CSS. In my day-to-day work I was following “runbooks,” essentially instruction manuals, and had very little understanding of the underlying logic. I felt particularly uncomfortable when dealing with snippets of HTML or JavaScript, even if I was only copying and pasting.
In AdOps I started working directly with code. I trafficked JavaScript “tags” that called ad servers to render ads, and I dropped smaller snippets called “pixels” into tag managers to enable tracking and audience tools.
That work forced me to learn the basics: how pages talk to servers, how HTML structures a site, how JavaScript makes it interactive, and how to trace it all in Chrome DevTools. AdOps was my bridge from business to tech, giving me real exposure to the internet’s plumbing without needing to study to be an engineer.
Some basic concepts that are very relevant to Ad Serving and breaking into tech:
- Client-server interactions in Ad Serving
- HTML as page structure, Javascript as interactivity
- Using Chrome DevTools to analyze network calls (e.g tracking pixels)
Finding Direction
After a few years of working in corporate I began to notice which colleagues knew their stuff, and who didn't. Those who knew carried themselves with quiet confidence, earned respect through great work, and made complex ideas simple. I wanted to be like that: someone others relied on, someone indispensable.
Another thought I had bouncing around my head was that I needed to "find my passion and make it my work." This belief was instilled in me from a young age, and the public perception of Digital Media as “just a paycheck”, i.e not serious work, gave me the sense that I’d better keep looking for something that would impress at dinner parties. At just the right time, I stumbled upon Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and it reshaped my perspective on career development.
Newport’s message reshaped how I thought about career development. Passion is not the starting point. Mastery is. By becoming exceptional at whatever you do, you create meaning, value, and opportunities, along with the financial stability to pursue your other interests. For me, a surfer and music lover without an obvious career-aligned passion, this perspective was exactly what I needed.
Descent Into (Tutorial) Hell
Once I had direction I threw myself into learning. I bought textbook after textbook, probably 30 in all - but I found I was hardly reading them. Collecting and planning to consume learning content felt productive, but in reality I was probably avoiding the harder step of creating and putting things out there for the world to see.
My bookshelf filled up with untouched books that seemed to mock me every time I walked by. I told myself I was preparing, but I was really stalling.
The same cycle played out with e-learning. I signed up for a bunch of Udemy classes, started (but didn’t finish) a Shopify development course, took an Elementor course (which was actually great), tackled some SQL and Python classes at a local trade school, and even came very close to dropping $10K on a coding bootcamp. Looking back, I see that I was satisfying some craving by acquiring all of this learning content, but avoiding the actual creating.
Getting Paid to Learn
Over the last four years I’ve held a few different roles at various tech or tech-adjacent media companies. These jobs had a big impact on my skill development—unlike Tutorial Hell, they gave me practical, hands-on experience with different technologies and concepts. With each new job I had a decent amount of room to grow, while bringing some level of mastered skill to the new role.
A turning point for me was in the fall of 2021 when I landed a TAM/Solutions Consulting role at a proper software company that sold a programmatic DSP. My background in Ad Ops and programmatic was surface-level, and I had no understanding of the software (APIs, databases, data transfers) that powered the platforms I used daily. This new role forced me through a rigorous onboarding where I needed to grasp these topics deeply enough to explain them to colleagues. It was a steep learning curve. I could regurgitate what I read, but it wasn’t until months into the role—actively applying what I’d learned — that I really felt confident enough to explain these concepts in my own words.
I’ve learned a lot about technology in the last 3.5 years by working in technical solutions and program management. I won’t go into too much detail (my LinkedIn sums it up), but since the fall of 2021, I’ve had the opportunity to consult on API architecture and usage, perform commercial data analysis with SQL and Jupyter, hire engineers, and build ETL pipelines based on API integrations. It’s been an incredible experience and has taught me one key thing: I’m a practical learner. I need to work with something day in and day out to truly understand it. Reading books or watching videos isn’t enough for me — I need to do.
Project Work
RockLocations
In 2022 I helped rebuild a friend’s mother’s website for her location scouting business. I moved it from Wix to WordPress with Elementor, reorganized the site around categories and templates, and dealt with plenty of headaches like hosting issues and photo management.
It was my first taste of deployment, CMS design, and analytics. The experience confirmed that I enjoy technical problem-solving more than client-facing web design.
TubeTamer
In 2024 I built TubeTamer, a Chrome extension and analytics dashboard for YouTube habits. I outsourced development to an agency, launched it on the Webstore, and even ran ads, but struggled to find users. The project taught me an expensive but valuable lesson: don't devote resources into building something that seems cool to you, validate the idea with real people first.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve realized that if I am going to build something, I want to be the one doing the work. Outsourcing may be efficient, but it takes away the joy of creating, understanding, and solving problems myself. In a time of generative AI and hustle culture, it is tempting to focus only on strategy and let others handle execution, but that leaves me vulnerable when things go wrong. What excites me is the process of building, and it carries the potential to create something both useful and profitable. In 2025 I am done with over-planning. My focus is on building projects, sharing what I learn, and deploying MVPs.