Elina Kostiainen

I am Elina Kostiainen, born and raised in Australia. I have currently completed the first year of my university degree, which is a Bachelor of Advanced Business (Honours) at UQ. In my degree I have found an interest in Business Analytics. I also I like the colour purple and ice cream. But here’s the story we have all been waiting for. How did I get into coding?

Well, late-mid 2021 I was thinking about my goals and how I want to become an entrepreneur. I was thinking about what skills I would need to learn (the principle of “bird in hand” – skills you have that you utilise to start your own business). The thing that came to me, especially thanks to COVID, was the need to have a website for an online business. So, I researched ways to build websites for free and visited a site called Wix.com. I initially thought that this is amazing. They provided website templates, so I don’t need to learn code. However, the more I considered it the more I realised it wasn’t ideal. Then I became unsure and didn’t give coding much more thought. Until…

A few days pass when a SheCodes Free Express Workshop ad caught my attention on Facebook. I was intrigued even though I still was unsure about learning to code – believing coding was hard. But I am so glad I did. Matt Delac introduced coding to us. He made coding seem fun and easier than I imagined it to be (even though coding can be challenging). He busted the misconception of needing to be a math wizard to code. Matt coded a basic yoga page for us to get a taste of what coding is like with HTML and CSS. After the workshop, I enrolled in the SheCodes Basics Workshop and begun my coding journey.

Since then, I have continued to develop my coding skills. I hope to use my skills in the future and apply what I have learned to work or experience. My goal was to make a website for myself but now I want to make websites for others. Maybe in the future I will be an entrepreneur, but until then I want to continue to grow my coding skills and put it to good use – because practice makes better.