From Excel to engineer in eighteen months.

Amelia Okonkwo had been a logistics analyst at a freight forwarder for six years when she enrolled in our Full-Stack Web Developer program. "I was the person on my team who knew the SQL database better than the engineers maintaining it," she told us. "Every quarter the same conversation: I should learn to code. Every quarter I'd flinch at the first tutorial and back away."

What changed was that her company asked her to lead a tooling project that needed a real frontend. She stalled it for two months, then enrolled the same week the cohort opened.

The first three months were the hardest.

"HTML was easy. CSS broke me for two weeks. JavaScript broke me again — async/await is genuinely hard if you're coming from spreadsheets, where everything happens in order. The thing that saved me was the cohort study group. Six of us, every Wednesday at 7pm GMT, working through the same problem set."

Six months in she shipped her first deployed app — a parts-tracker for her warehouse team. "Twenty people used it daily. That's when I knew I was going to finish."

The capstone changed everything.

Her capstone — a real-time freight visibility dashboard — caught the attention of Linework, a Series B logistics platform that hires from our program network. They invited her to a take-home interview, then a full-day on-site. She accepted their offer eight weeks before her capstone defence.

"I was the first non-CS hire on their engineering team. They told me later they'd been looking specifically for someone who'd done logistics before code. I was the only candidate."

What she'd tell someone starting now.

"Don't pretend the hard parts aren't hard. The first three months are a slog. The cohort makes it survivable. The capstone is what gets you hired. Pick a project that matters to you, not one that looks impressive — interviewers can tell the difference and they always pick the first one."

Amelia is now a software engineer on Linework's data ingestion team. She still attends the London cohort meet-up every other month — these days she goes as the senior in the room.