Reflections from kood/Garage48 Empowering Women coding bootcamp
What happens when women who already manage projects, teams, businesses, and chaos decide to look under the hood of the systems they use every day?
At the kood/Empower bootcamp as part of the kood/Garage48 Empowering Women programme, participants spent four focused days stepping into coding for the first time.
We spoke with three participants from very different backgrounds – Susanna, Käbi, and Anastassia – to hear what brought them to the bootcamp, what surprised them most, and what they would say to any woman standing on the edge of curiosity.
Meet the participants
Susanna, 23, works as a spatial planning and sports specialist in Ida-Viru and has a background in geography.
Käbi, 26, holds a master’s degree in civil engineering and currently works in sports management in a non-profit organization.
Anastassia, 33, has a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. Her career spans international corporate logistics, team coordination, entrepreneurship, and now sports infrastructure management in Kohtla-Järve. In 2025, she completed a 64-hour course in AI and business automation.
Though their paths are different, all three were already working with systems long before writing a single line of code.
Driven by curiosity
For Susanna, coding wasn’t entirely new. She had taken a course at university, but it hadn’t fascinated her.
“It was difficult to understand the coding language and I couldn’t really ever debug my code.”
Still, when she heard about the kood/Garage48 project, she decided to try again.
“Since all my work is in a computer, I thought it’s a necessary everyday skill.”
Käbi joined because she enjoys learning difficult things.
“I have always liked learning new and difficult things and coding seemed to be the next difficult field I hadn’t had any experience in… yet.”
For Anastassia, it felt inevitable.
“I’ve been building systems for years: processes, financial models, logistics chains, customer journeys. At some point I realized: I keep managing systems without fully understanding how they’re built underneath.”
She explains clearly:
“Coding isn’t about switching to IT for me. It’s about sharpening strategic thinking.”
“If you can organize a team or design an operational process, you already think in algorithms. You just don’t use curly braces yet.”
Surprises during the bootcamp
In just four days, participants moved from zero to learning to code and building working prototypes.
For Susanna and Käbi, the biggest surprise was vibe coding and the connection between coding and AI.
“I hadn’t heard about it before and when we tried it in the bootcamp I was genuinely surprised. It’s almost too easy to create an app. Of course you need the skills to develop it more but making a prototype requires only basic knowledge.”
Käbi adds:
“The connection between coding and AI for a regular user wasn’t so obvious before, but now, seeing how vibe coding works and how little you actually have to know to already make up a prototype with it is surprising.”
For Anastassia, the biggest surprise was something else entirely.
“How honest programming is. In logistics, sometimes you can negotiate with reality. In life, too. In code you can’t.”
“If something is wrong, it simply doesn’t work. No pretending. No ‘almost correct. There’s something refreshing about that. It’s very disciplining. Almost like sports.”
“What would you say to someone unsure about trying?”
All three encourage women to try.
Susanna says:
“Coding is a very eye-opening activity because it makes you understand how systems work, what to do to fix them. You have to use a lot of logical thinking and I am not too good at it, so if I could do it, then you definitely can.”
Käbi keeps it simple:
“AI helps! 🙂 But in all seriousness, you only need a little bit of logical thinking and persistence to not give up when something doesn’t work.”
Anastassia connects it to everyday life:
“If you have managed people, launched projects, coordinated chaos, raised a child – you’ve already handled complex systems with unpredictable interfaces. Coding isn’t about genius-level IQ. It’s about patience and structured thinking.”
“And honestly, many women already have strong systems thinking, we just don’t label it as a technical skill. We call it ‘just life.’”
From bootcamp to hackathon
The bootcamp is only the beginning.
Susanna and Käbi are planning to join the Garage48 Empowering Women Hackathon with an idea inspired by their daily work.
“Right now we’re doing all grant management manually using Excel and it’s not very convenient so we want to connect all these steps and make one system to administrate everything.”
They plan to create a grant management website and develop it further during the hackathon.
Anastassia is also joining. She’s interested in practical challenges:
“I’m interested in practical challenges: automation for municipal organizations, analytics for sports infrastructure usage, AI assistants for organisations.”
“I’ve seen too many decisions made purely on intuition. I’m interested in systems where data also gets a voice.”
All Ida-Viru women are welcome to join the hackathon, even if you don’t have a specific idea yet, you can refine it or find a totally new one during the event. The hackathon takes place from 20–22 March at kood/Jõhvi.
The kood/Garage48 Empowering Women programme supports women in Ida-Viru in building digital skills and gaining the confidence needed to start and grow their own businesses.
The project is co-funded by the European Union under the Just Transition Fund. In addition, kood/Empower is part of the broader kood/Women initiative powered by Swedbank.