From learning HTML to now.
My first marketing project wasn't for a company. In 2010 my sister ran a gaming server and needed players, so I learned the job: listings on ratemyserver.net and xtremetop100.com, keyword pages, banner spots. Nobody called it digital marketing back then. It was helping family, and it worked.
Full Creative was five years, and it's where the stack got built. I started as a PPC analyst, and the first lesson came quick: a good campaign can still lose when the data behind it is broken. When tracking is off, good work looks like bad work. Fixing the plumbing mattered as much as running the ads. I hated manual reports, so I went looking for faster ways. Excel formulas became scripts, scripts became automation, and that habit pulled me deeper into tech than any job title did. A redesign gone bad hurt us in SEO, and I got volunteered to learn technical SEO, unwillingly at first. That detour led to MozCon 2016 in Seattle, my first US marketing conference, and it opened up the world. I was asked to handle the web development team, and technical SEO became part of every build. The automation habit kept growing: Zapier, APIs, CRM workflows, Tag Manager, SQL, BigQuery.
Sportskeeda brought scale. I managed the eSports department, a personal passion, fixing technical issues on a site with a few million indexed pages. Most meetings ended the same way: someone raised a problem, and the answer was automate it, build a small widget, wire it to a Google Sheet, put a cache in front. That pattern made me their martech manager and put me on projects like the BlueKai implementation. Position2 gave me a glimpse of agency life between chapters. Signeasy taught me to build systems with lean, specialized teams, and the business, finance, and product side of a company, not just the marketing side.
Then ChatGPT closed a gap I'd carried my whole career: I understood code fine, I just couldn't write it from scratch. All the earlier tinkering, the bot scripts, my own sites meant I picked it up fast. I was vibecoding before the word existed. A VP I worked with became a mentor and made sure that code stayed disciplined: structured, easy to troubleshoot, commented, reusable. With his support it ended up handling the company's entire reporting and analytics.
Now I'm the sum of everything I've learnt. I strategize SEO, PPC, and anything inbound, and make sure the systems behind them all work well. Still learning, still implementing, every day. What I care about most is my team spending time on work that grows them and the company, and picking up new skills with the hours they save.
Nearly all of it started with the people around me. An uncle taught me HTML in 6th grade. A sister handed me my first project. A mentor refused to accept dependency problems and taught me to remove them instead of working around them. A VP kept my code clean. I learned more from my mistakes than from any textbook, and that's why I still call myself a relentless learner.
