Developer first. Then the ads got me.
I started as a developer with a company of my own. We built software for other businesses, plus a few small products of ours.
Then that company was acquired by a performance marketing agency, and I landed in a world that was the opposite of code: messy, fast, brutally honest.
The market tells you instantly if you're wrong. I loved it.
I've always had a simple belief about work: machines should do the mechanical part, and people should do the part that actually needs a person. The agency was the perfect place to test it. Lead generation at scale, and almost everything done by hand: smart people spending entire days copying data between platforms, launching campaigns one by one, checking accounts one by one.
So we automated everything that didn't need a brain. Campaign creation in bulk, account monitoring, reporting. Work that took eight hours started taking four, and the other four went into strategy and creative, where people actually make a difference. Fewer people could manage more budget, volumes scaled, and when the agency was eventually sold, the technology we had built was part of what made it worth buying.
That became the pattern of my career. Since then I've done the same for other companies, inside marketing and outside it: study how the work actually gets done, find the manual, repetitive, error-prone part, and turn it into software that just runs.
And everything I've just described happened before AI. The line back then was clear: machines did the mechanical work, and people kept everything that needed a brain.
AI moved that line. Today even part of the brain work can be automated, which frees people for the work that's actually meaningful to the business. Every company talks about AI. Very few know where to put it, because using it well takes two things at once: knowing your processes and knowing the machines. Both languages, again.