Two years ago I wrote about quitting a job in a big italian corporation to join a smaller reality that worked in fintech.

My previous company gave me an amazing experience. I worked on two fantastic public-facing products, a payments gateway and a low-cost POS solution for small businesses.

However after two years I felt like I had to change job, to make new experiences.

How ?

Long story short, I wrote an article on my blog that had an impredictable success about an obscure javascript feature and some companies reached out to know weather I wanted to join them.

I did not send any CV in thist first phase. I think they understood my skills from my blog. I'm writing this because I'm super happy that my blog did pay off. It started as a (cheap) long-term investiment and I'm happy it succeded.

Back to the job, a guy reached out from Switzerland, writing to me in italian, asking weather I wanted to have a chat about his company. There was a lot of empathy with this guy, and I evaluate empathy as a bonus factor so when his boss finally asked me to go and have a meeting in person, I accepted.

The interview

So I took a plane one morning and flied to Zurich. The interview was a classic whiteboard interview, and the question was easy (the difference of the two sum of two diagonals of a matrix) but this was just a starting point. We went through writing pseudocode, optimizing, etc. I remember I did not answer very well a question about how DNS works (a critical component in their architecture) but in the end they still hired me.

What they do

The company works in the Advertising space. Their main job is to deliver ads to website visitors, like Adsense; but they organize an auction with many other ad providers, and this happens in the browser, so that the best-paying ads are shown.

So publishers contact the company and ask them to deliver ads to visitors, by injecting some javascript code. Then, revenues are payed from my company to the websites. At the moment they have clients spanning in the whole US market.

Programmatic advertising

In the latest years a new branch in advertising was born, called Programmatic Advertising. Programmatic uses a new approach to deliver ads, Header bidding, and tries to make the website earn as much as possible by delivering the most valuable ad from a variety of sources. It's way more interesting, complex, asynchronous and fast than you think. The web is basically free because of ads. Delivering good ads as fast as possible it's super important: most ads you see on any website are rendered before the DOM is even parsed!

So ... when do you start?

Yes! I'm already working with them. I'm studying all the parts involved in the advertising world (DSPs, SSPs, DFP, GTP... these acronyms make no sense to those who do not work in this area!) and I am already deep diving in the typescript code. So many things happen in one library.