Four years ago I wrote my first blog post. July 7th, 2022. I'd just quit teaching, signed up for a CS degree at Queens College, and written out a numbered plan to become a web developer by March 2023. I was terrified.
I want to put that plan next to what actually happened, because the gap between the two is the whole story.
- Complete CS50. Done.
- Potentially complete CS50W. Skipped this, went to Queens College instead.
- Complete Free Code Camp's JS Curriculum. Did this alongside Odin Project.
- Complete The Odin Project Foundations. Done.
- Complete The Odin Project JavaScript Track. Done.
- Complete Full Stack Open. Replaced by a formal CS degree.
- Finish Portfolio Projects. CUNYFirst Enroller, AI Advisor, VegBoom app, and a bunch more.
- Get hired. Google. December 2024.
I did not become a web developer by March 2023. I became a software engineer at Google by December 2024! The plan was wrong in almost every detail and right about the only thing that mattered.
If I could send a letter back to that guy sitting in his apartment writing that first post, I don't think he'd believe any of this. He was grinding precalculus and worried about paying rent. He had no idea he'd end up building his first project for Holly two months later, or winning a hackathon, or learning to ride a bike at 26, or sitting in a Google office getting an Outstanding Impact review. Wild.
A lot has happened since the last few posts. I spent a year in Massachusetts working on ad infrastructure at Google Cambridge, shipped some of the biggest projects of my career, including AI tooling that saved hundreds of engineering hours, and then transferred to a Cloud team so I could move back to New York. New team, new product area, new codebase. Starting over again, but this time with a year of Google experience under my belt!
I've been building a CLI tool in Rust on the side, an agentic harness for Gemini models, inspired by minimalist agents like pi-coding-agent but designed to be extremely customizable. You start with a bare-bones system prompt and create agent profiles that slot right in. It can run multiple agent instances that talk to each other! Rust was a deliberate choice because I wanted it fast and I wanted the excuse to learn Rust properly. The ownership model felt like learning music theory for the first time: confusing and annoying until one day it just clicks.
My mom finished her education program. She's working! The kid she raised alone can take care of her now. I keep coming back to this in every post but I can't overstate how much of this whole thing was about her. She gave up everything so I could have a shot, and now I can give something back. That matters more to me than any job title.
I'm back in Queens with Holly, not far from Queens College where it all started. She's still a public school teacher, which means one of us actually stuck with education. I'm mentoring students through a program for underrepresented people targeting CS careers, doing 1:1 prep to get them interview-ready. I also help run the weekly jazz jam at Google, basically a group of engineers who moonlight as musicians. The band teacher in me refuses to die.
If you're reading this and you're thinking about switching careers, or going back to school, or doing something that scares you: it's going to be harder than you think. I won't sugarcoat that. There were nights where I genuinely wanted to quit. Where I sat in my car after a bad exam and wondered if I was making a huge mistake.
But I kept going. And now I'm here! Four years from Day 1.