From database administrator to full stack developer
In her blog series, Alice, our Lead Africa, tells us all things Code Blossom from her point of view:
From exciting events happening in our community, to personal stories from her or our students. Stay tuned for this inspiring blog series - you won’t want to miss it!
This time, Alice brings us on a journey through Yuliia’s story, one of our alumni.
This is Yuliia
It is an undeniable truth that I love stories, and one thing I love about Code Blossom is how each participant's story is unique, powerful, and inspiring in its own right. In today’s post, I get to share Yuliia’s story with you.
Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, her journey in IT actually began quite some time ago. However, the story of how she became a full-fledged developer only began to materialize in Switzerland, where she was forced to relocate to in 2022, and where Code Blossom surfaced into her life.
The path before Code Blossom
Yuliia’s professional experience in IT is quite diverse: Starting with database administration (Oracle, MS SQL Server), where she worked on software implementation for banks and private pension funds in Ukraine. Here she closely collaborated with developers, tested products, identified shortcomings, and defined requirements for software that was being built from scratch.
After that, she worked at the National Bank of Ukraine with a software system for receiving reports from banks. In this stride of her journey, she worked with FoxPro, which was later migrated to Oracle.
Her department connected developers and users. This meant training, solving problems, and testing new features. A particularly memorable project was implementing a new reporting system through API and migrating users from another regulator. The work was intense: APIs, XML formats, databases, access rights, and coordination with methodological departments.
All of this, while self-studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even Java, to challenge herself. During this time, she also made educational websites but felt that she lacked structured knowledge for commercial projects.
The story continues in Switzerland - a fresh start
After her move to Switzerland, she completed the Power Coders bootcamp in web development. A big achievement, as from 300 candidates, only 25 get a spot in this program. After graduating from the bootcamp, she was hired by Pictet Bank, where she was entrusted with developing their own service - something that was not part of the initial plan.
And that is how she became a full-stack developer! By designing a database, writing an API and backend in Java Spring Boot, and then visualizing microservice dependencies using Angular, and thus completing her first commercial project
Code Blossom: Systematic Approach and Community
As the dust settled on her contract, whilst in search of an opportunity to systematize and deepen her knowledge, she came across our program, in which she studied from January 2024 to February 2025.
Yuliia shared with me that, as much as the program was valuable on a technical level, allowing her to deepen her knowledge, the most valuable aspect was that it wasn’t just a course. It was a real community, with mentors who are always ready to support and help.
For her graduation project, she developed SYRNYK - an online store for a local Swiss startup producing cottage cheese. She created this online store with a full range of functionality: Ranging from order placement, orders, and customer management, to an admin panel. Using the following technology stack: PostgreSQL for the database, Node.js on the backend, and React on the frontend.
What she’s doing now
Building on her experience of working on her project, Yuliia is continuing to improve it, implementing a sales chatbot and integrating it with a CRM system.
This led to her new passion,AI, prompting her to enroll and complete a Gen-AI course and so once again opening new horizons for her!
She also got to participate in the AITut project - a learning platform with an embedded AI agent. As a team of 5 (including Code Blossom mentor Munk and graduates Desiree and Anam), they developed an AI tutor that will:
Monitor student progress
Provide information to mentors for feedback
Generate tasks and check their completion
In addition to these amazing opportunities, she also recently created a corporate website for Labbel Ladder, the new company of Code Blossom co-founder Marion. Label Ladder works with the Namibian government, training and employing young professionals in Data Annotation, and thereby reducing youth unemployment and helping Western companies receive quality services.
Yuliia’s superpowers and what’s next in store for her
One thing I love is seeing human beings evolve into their best selves, and Yuliia sharing her superpowers truly embodies empowerment. As well as Yuliia coming into her own, which I wish to believe Code Blossom has played a role in.
Some of the superpowers she developed along her journey:
Quickly understanding problems and finding solutions - that's her thing
Easily learning new technologies and making broken things work
Deploying applications (worked with Railway, now with Azure)
Navigating well across a wide spectrum of IT areas
What Code Blossom gave her
In the end, Yuliia outlines and shares the key things that Code Blossom gave her, such as:
A community of like-minded people
Confidence in her abilities as a developer
Real commercial experience through the graduation project
Connection with the industry and opportunity to grow further
Fulfilling our mission to empower and equip women with marketable skills inspires us to continue doing what we are doing and even more.
Yuliia has shared some amazing gems with me for this article but by far my absolute favorite was her parting remarks:
“Most importantly, I realized that my ability to quickly understand new things and solve diverse tasks is not a weakness, but a real strength in modern development!”
Yullia found Yullia, and if that isn’t worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.
