This is part 1 of a series that follows Julia’s journey at the bootcamp, and looks at the ways coding can strengthen leadership and teamwork and how companies can encourage this.

Co-Founder of Mindly (made in Silicon Valley), Madrid native, woman and, of course, Ironhacker, Marta Fonda tells us about her Ironhack experience as a student of the Web Development bootcamp in Madrid.

When I was 21, I started having doubts about my career. I was 2 and a half years away from getting my BA in Economics, and doing well. It’s not that I didn’t like economics, or that I didn’t find it challenging, but I just didn’t feel like it gave me the fulfillment I felt I needed. I thought a career change may be what I should do. But I decided not to do it, and just stick with economics. I thought I was too old to do a career change by then, and the idea of taking first year classes with a bunch of 17–18 year olds just didn’t feel right. Now that I’m 28, the idea of a 21 year old feeling like they are too old for anything feels ludicrous.

Rafael Coomonte is an impressive guy. He’s a Doctor in Philosophy and he’s got a PhD in telecom engineering, but decided to turn his professional career completely around. For us, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have him as a student and we’re honored that he gave us a few spare minutes from his very busy schedule to answer a few questions about his Ironhack experience.

In 2017 I graduated from a Business School after a master in Marketing. My first job experience was as an e-commerce manager for a small French shoe brand. Then I decided to pursue as an e-learning and mobile learning project manager for luxury brands.

Getting out of your comfort zone is no easy thing. It is only after a lot of hesitation and around 50 “pros & cons” lists that I decided it was time for a career change.

This whole mess started a long time ago. I was only 12 years old and my father, a quite successful computer science engineer, was making a superhuman effort to try to answer my question: why did a single 3.5-inch floppy disk (known back then as a “micro-disk”) could hold as much information as 18 of the larger, decade older, 8-inch predecessors? (A reasonable question that every 12-year-old kid needs have answered to go on about life.) It did not make sense to me how something a quarter as small in size could be in fact be several times larger in data storage capacity.