Nina Kolari stood on stage at the Cursor hackathon, her hands shaking slightly as she demoed the app she’d just built in three hours. Around her, 27 teams—many with years of experience—waited to present their projects. She was competing solo, having only started coding six months ago, and she was about to win the entire competition.
But just months earlier, Nina had been sitting at her desk, staring at her computer screen, wondering if she was making the biggest mistake of her life.
The Cage of “Good Enough”
For a year, Nina had felt stuck in her work doing conversion rate optimization for e-commerce companies, spending her days squeezing extra dollars from other people’s businesses. The work paid well and was respectable, but something gnawed at her.
“I felt my work did not matter as much,” Nina reflects. “I was just squeezing another dollar for somebody’s business.”
The idea of learning to code had circled her mind for a long time. She’d look at online courses, bookmark tutorials, and imagine a different future. But every time she got close to starting, one thought stopped her cold: Who’d hire a 50-year-old junior developer?
It’s the fear that keeps countless people trapped—the belief that there’s an expiration date on reinvention, and Nina wrestled with it daily.
“Is this worth it? What will learning this really bring me? Can I even get a job? Do I even want a job as a developer?” The questions multiplied, but she never found answers sitting still.
Plunging Into Unknown Waters
Something shifted, though whether it was another unfulfilling day at work or simply exhaustion from carrying the same doubts year after year, Nina decided to give herself a deadline: January 2026. She’d study iOS development until then and see if “the shoe fits.”
She needed a course that would take her the full distance—from complete beginner to actually publishing apps in the App Store, since most programs stopped short of that final step. When Nina discovered CodeWithChris, one thing stood out: it included the entire journey, right through to App Store submission.
“[CodeWithChris] had a course that would take me from zero to App Store – the full journey,” Nina explains. “Others that I looked at did not have the App Store part in the curriculum.”
That completeness mattered because she wasn’t interested in learning fragments. She wanted to build real apps that people could download.
So she started.
The Valley of Confusion
The first month nearly broke her.
Nina sat through lessons, typing out code line by line and following tutorials precisely, but something felt wrong. She was copying, not creating, and the syntax blurred together while the logic felt foreign.
“I almost quit too in the first month as I felt I was just copying code from the course,” Nina admits.
She’d look at her screen and think: I’m 50 years old. What am I doing? The old fears crept back in, louder now. Maybe she’d been right to wait all those years. Maybe some dreams have deadlines after all.
But Nina made a decision that changed everything. She decided there would be a day when it all made sense. She just had to keep showing up until that day arrived.
The Moment Everything Changed
Then came the Cursor workshop.
Nina had been grinding through traditional coding methods, getting tangled in syntax, spending hours debugging simple mistakes. But when she learned about AI-assisted coding through CodeWithChris’s Cursor workshop, something clicked.
“Once I took that course and realized how AI-assisted coding can help and speed up my journey, I was totally hooked!” Nina says. “That workshop completely changed my approach. Instead of getting stuck on syntax, I could focus on building and problem-solving much faster.”
This was her lightbulb moment. She wasn’t trying to memorize every line of code, but she was learning to think like a builder, to communicate with AI tools, to turn ideas into working products. The shift was seismic.
Within months, Nina was no longer just following tutorials. She was shipping apps.
The Gauntlet of the App Store
Nobody warns you about the App Store submission process. There are forms within forms, guidelines within guidelines, screenshots and descriptions and metadata and privacy policies. Nina followed the CodeWithChris course step by step, determined to see her first app go live.
“Uploading to the Appstore! Nobody talks about how many steps it takes to get a finished app live on the Appstore,” Nina laughs now, but the frustration was real then.
Her first three apps got approved, but the fourth one was rejected.
She could have stopped there, as many do, but Nina had come too far. She adjusted, learned, resubmitted, and approval came through.
By this point, something remarkable had happened—Nina wasn’t just someone learning to code anymore, she was someone who shipped products.
An App Born from Love
Earlier in 2024, someone close to Nina had a stroke. The aftermath left them with aphasia—a condition that impacts the ability to communicate effectively. Nina watched them struggle to express basic needs, to connect with others, to practice the words that wouldn’t come.
When the official Cursor hackathon was announced, Nina knew exactly what she needed to build.
Working solo against 27 teams, she created an app for people with aphasia. It would speak for them when they couldn’t find the words. It would let them copy and paste phrases directly into Messages or WhatsApp. It even included a speech practice feature using Nina’s cloned voice, courtesy of hackathon sponsor ElevenLabs.
Three hours was all she had, but during that intense time, something crystallized for Nina.
“I realized I could take an idea, describe what I wanted to Cursor, understand what it was building, and actually ship a working app to the App Store,” she reflects. “That clicked during the hackathon when I had to iterate and move fast, and actually finish a complete app in a mere 3 hours.”
When the judges announced the winner, Nina’s name echoed through the hall; a solo competitor in her first hackathon with only six months of coding experience had become the champion.
The Woman Who Ships
Today, Nina introduces herself as an iOS developer, though she admits it still feels surreal sometimes.
“At times it feels like I’m not ‘qualified’ enough as I do use Cursor extensively in my builds,” she says. “But practice saying it out loud helps!”
She’s published four apps to the App Store with two more that are 95% ready, and she’s building an app portfolio with a specific mission: bringing more women into the space to build apps for women.
The transformation isn’t just about the apps. Since committing to her January 2026 deadline, Nina has won that hackathon, spoken at a tech event as a first-time speaker, attended workshops at the Apple Developer Center, and flew to Singapore for iOS Conf SG.
But the real shift is internal. Where she once questioned whether her work mattered, Nina now builds apps that can make genuine differences in people’s lives.
“Now the app that I build could make significant improvements in their life,” she says. “That is the best feeling ever.”
Her aphasia app, the one she built in three hours, will soon include Finnish language support so the person who inspired it can finally use it.
Return with Wisdom
Nina’s journey from “too old to code” to hackathon winner took six months, but it easily could have taken zero if she’d listened to the doubts and believed the limiting stories we all tell ourselves about age and ability and second chances.
Her advice for aspiring developers is refreshingly practical:
For those just starting: “Everyone has relevant domain expertise either from work or life itself that can be used to build an app about.” You don’t need a computer science degree. You need a problem worth solving and the willingness to learn.
For those ready to quit: “I almost quit too in the first month as I felt I was just copying code from the course. But I decided that there will be a day when it all makes sense.” Keep going. Try AI-assisted coding to speed up your learning and see real results faster.
And if Nina could talk to her past self—the woman staring at her screen a year ago, paralyzed by doubt—she knows exactly what she’d say:
“Just start and commit to a certain time frame to learn and have fun with it. I initially gave myself till January 2026 to study and see if ‘the shoe fits’… I guess I found my calling since I could not even imagine going back to my previous work.”
She adds: “And each of us have great app ideas from our past life and work experiences that can make a huge impact in someone else’s life.”
Nina built 10 apps in six months, won a hackathon on her first try, and is now speaking at conferences while building a community of women developers. But perhaps most importantly, she’s building an app that will help someone she loves communicate again.
All of this from one simple decision: to stop asking “what if” and start asking “how?”
Nina’s journey from complete beginner to hackathon winner in six months proves that it’s never too late to start coding. Whether you’re 25 or 55, switching careers or exploring a passion, CodeWithChris’s comprehensive iOS development courses can take you from zero to App Store—just like they did for Nina.
Start your journey today and see where six months can take you!