Alejandra Ossa Jimenez did not particularly enjoy her job, but in late 2018, when she knocked on the door of one of the developers who worked at her same startup, she was not performing one of her usual administrative chores. Instead, she sat with the developer \u2013 an Israeli woman called Osnat \u2013 and asked a simple but unexpected question:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOsnat, could you tell me what it is like, to learn how to code?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alejandra had never encountered coding in practice, even though her personal, academic and professional backgrounds were outrageously varied. Born in Cali, Colombia, she had moved to the Spanish Basque country with her family as a child, and then by herself to the UK at the age of 20. In the luminous, festive city of Brighton she\u2019d worked at a small hotel while taking a course for singers, then moved to Manchester for a Bachelors degree in Archaeology and Anthropology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the move yet again in 2014, she signed up for a Masters degree in Global Studies and Political Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, but left the city after one year \u2013 it was too expensive, and, perhaps more importantly, simply much too \u2018clean\u2019 for her rough and tumble taste. So in 2015 she moved to that beautiful mess of a European capital that is Berlin, where she finished her MA thesis, and at the same time found employment in the HR departments of local tech startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was in one such startup that she met Osnat, and began a conversation that would kickstart a massive process of change in her life. Alejandra explained to Osnat that she had been observing what the developers were doing at the startup, that she\u2019d been putting the pieces together, and was now interested in \u201cfiguring out what was going on behind the screen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Osnat took the question with congeniality. As a self-taught developer, she knew what it was like to have no institutional support \u2013 much less someone just saying welcome<\/em> \u2013 when approaching the world of programming. She talked Alejandra through the basics of the field, told her about groups of women who code in Berlin, and introduced her to some of the possible entryways into coding. Seeing the glimmer in Alejandra\u2019s eye, she finished with a simple encouragement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou know, you really should learn how to code yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be a few years of mulling over the decision, all the while dipping her toes in introductory courses, but eventually Alejandra found herself at home, working at her kitchen table (her boyfriend had taken up the bedroom desk), and something just clicked. Almost instantaneously, she decided she would go through with what that senior developer had first suggested years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was going to learn how to code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n