How a K-pop Road Manager Became a Developer

It Might Be the Group You're Thinking Of

If you follow K-pop even a little, you probably know them. A girl group under a major label that debuted in 2022 and swept the global charts. They were buzzing before debut and never stopped after.

The person who was that group's road manager is now writing code. The person who built this blog — that's me.

To explain how that's possible, I need to start from pretty far back.

A Non-Linear Life

Class of 2012, civil engineering major. After graduating, I started working in structural design. Drawing blueprints, running structural calculations, visiting construction sites. It was stable, but something felt missing.

Then an opportunity came to step into the K-pop industry. Idol management — a completely different world. Schedule coordination, on-site management, artist care. It was 180 degrees from civil engineering, but strangely, it fit.

After that, another pivot to commercial directing. From planning to filming to post-production. I enjoyed the creative work. But in 2020, COVID stopped everything. The company went on hiatus, and I found myself at a crossroads again.

That's when I returned to K-pop. This time as that girl group's road manager. I joined during the pre-debut preparation period and stayed until just before their second album. Dawn airports, overseas tours, live broadcast waiting rooms. Behind the glamorous stage was constant travel, tension, and unpredictable schedules.

Civil engineering → K-pop → commercial directing → K-pop. The kind of resume that would make an interviewer do a double take. But looking back, I was simply following my gut each time — "this isn't it anymore."

The Turning Point — Picking Up Code

I'd actually been interested in coding for a long time. I'd dabbled with automation scripts while doing structural design work, and the thought "I want to properly learn this someday" was always there.

In 2022, I left road management and started taking web development courses on Udemy. HTML, CSS, JavaScript — step by step. Self-teaching as a non-CS person is slow, but I loved the instant feedback of code making something appear on screen.

In 2023, I landed my first developer job. At a quant firm. Just one year after starting to self-teach.

Three Companies — Quant, K-pop, Racing

I took my first steps as a developer at the quant firm. Working with financial data, I felt the real weight of production coding for the first time. The gap between what you learn in courses and actual production code was significant.

My second company was Modhaus — a place combining K-pop and Web3. I returned to the K-pop industry, but this time as a developer, not a manager. I built fan participation systems for a group called tripleS. Having management experience meant I instinctively knew "what fans want, what's needed on the ground," and that directly informed the development.

Third, my current company is 3Seconds. Automotive CAN data and the racing domain. Yet another completely different world. Processing and analyzing real-time sensor data streaming from vehicles. The systematic thinking from structural calculations in civil engineering found new use here.

But the walls for a non-CS developer were real. Operating systems, networking, data structures — CS fundamentals. Things that CS majors internalize over four years, I had to learn by bumping into them on the job. That feeling of secretly searching for terms during meetings when unfamiliar jargon comes up. If you're a non-CS developer, you know exactly what I mean.

Meeting AI

When AI coding tools emerged, those walls started getting lower. I could ask about unfamiliar concepts and get explanations at my level, get code reviews, and work through stuck points together. The learning speed was on a completely different level from self-teaching alone.

Then during the 2025 holiday season, I tried Claude Code for the first time.

It was an absolute game-changer.

It wasn't simple code autocompletion. It was a pair programmer that understood the entire project, discussed architecture, and built implementations together. If previous AI tools felt like "a better search engine," Claude Code was closer to "a senior developer working alongside you."

The result is this very blog. Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, MDX. I built it from scratch, start to finish. With Claude Code, of course. Design system, dark mode, i18n, RSS, code highlighting — everything. Work that would have taken me months two years ago was done in days.

I also built a Go TUI project called ccfg. It's a tool that visualizes Claude Code's configuration and usage stats. Learning a new language while simultaneously building a production-quality tool — that wouldn't have been possible without AI.

Looking back, there were moments when the non-linear career became a weapon rather than a weakness.

• Management experience → Project management and communication skills. Organizing requirements, setting priorities, coordinating with people — these are core to development too.
• Video/commercial experience → Design sensibility and UX thinking. "How will the user feel when they see this?" comes naturally.
• Civil engineering background → Systematic thinking and structural approaches. The ability to break large systems into small units and define each part's role.

In pure coding skill, I might fall short compared to CS graduates. But in an era where AI bridges that gap, "everything beyond coding" becomes the differentiator.

At a New Starting Line

With hands that once drew structural blueprints, a mind that once organized idol schedules, eyes that once framed camera angles — I now write code.

Looking back, I've come a long way. But at the same time, it feels like I'm just getting started. Three years as a developer. What I don't know still far outweighs what I do. The difference from before is that it no longer scares me. What I don't know, I can learn — and now I have tools that accelerate that learning.

This blog will be a record of that journey. How far a developer with a non-linear career can go, together with AI.

In the Age of AI, Your Experience Is Your Weapon

The era when coding was all that defined a developer is coming. No — it's already here.

With AI handling a significant portion of code writing, what truly matters is the ability to decide what to build. Which problems need solving, what users actually want, what experiences to deliver. This comes from diverse life experiences.

To those who feel anxious about being non-CS, having a weird resume, or starting late — I want to say this:

Your non-linear experience is not a bug. It's a feature.

A civil engineer writes code. A road manager builds blogs. A commercial director designs UX. AI is the engine that accelerates all these transitions. Don't think you started too late. Right now is the earliest it will ever be.