Hi there!

My name is Krista Dotzenrod. I am a 27 year old programmer currently living and working in my homeland, Minneapolis, MN.

It took me a while to get to this career path, so if you are interested in my story, continue reading. If not, cheers and thanks for stopping by!

I pursued my undergraduate degree in Marketing and minored in Management at Loyola University, Chicago from 2008-2012. It was a fun four years to say the least (Chicago will forever hold a spot in my heart), but the jobs I picked up after school left me wanting more.

My first gig was working at a foreclosure firm for South side Chicago properties…I think you can guess how ~fun~ that was. I spent most of my time trying to update the company’s website, but that work was not deemed important enough and I was left to mainly answer phones.

In desperate need for a change, I submitted my resume to a temp agency and shortly after landed a gig at Starcom in Chicago as an ad operations liaison. At this time, I had NO idea what ad ops or ad tech was, but was able to quickly learn the ropes and was excited at the little bit of HTML and JS code and dev tools I needed to pick up for the role.

That experience led me into my first “real” job at OAO’s Chicago office. This ad operations position was much more advanced, and my role became much more technical, which I loved. After about a year into OAO I began realizing that I did not want to just traffic ads forever, I needed a bigger challenge. That is the pivotal moment when I decided to go back to graduate school for computer science. Fortunately for me, OAO fosters an incredibly supportive company culture and I was encouraged to pursue my dream and work remotely from the Denver office as I pursued my degree at Regis University.

Then, my career advanced one step further and I accepted an offer at a programmatic ad tech startup in Boulder called Sovrn as a support engineer. This position was unique as I was able to use my ad tech background and interest in coding together by spending many hours weeding through JavaScript looking for GPT tags and matching up DIV elements.

Upon graduating from Regis University in 2017 and sending my resume to what felt like every entry level software engineering position I could find and participating in multiple interview processes, I was recruited to work for Target headquarters (back in my home state of Minnesota) and could not have been more excited. The position I currently am in is called the Technology and Leadership Program (aka TLP). It could not be a more perfect position for me, as a TLP you are assigned a mentor and have the opportunity to rotate through two teams to learn how different SCRUM teams within Target operate. I am clearly very new to software engineering, so every day thus far has brought me invaluable knowledge and I know I will be continuing to learn more about programming and technology throughout my TLP rotations.

As you can tell, I am not the best writer, but thank you for getting this far! My hope is to keep writing blog posts about my journey as a software engineer and what I do to continue learning on my own time. Cheers!