Alex Ficachi's story

Alex started his career as a fitness coach, helping clients achieve dramatic transformations. While building his coaching business, he discovered software engineering through Indeed's top recommended jobs and realized this was where the economy was heading — a field that would use his analytical mind instead of his body.

Determined to break into tech, Alex went all-in. He mastered evidence-based learning techniques like active recall and spaced repetition, then applied them to learn web development. After months of intense study, he faced the harsh reality of breaking in — hundreds of applications and over 1,000 recruiter messages yielded no interviews.

Everything changed when Alex found a mentor who let him apprentice at his software company. Working for free on real features, learning best practices, and gaining actual professional experience, Alex transformed from another entry-level applicant into a skilled engineer with a proven track record.

This apprenticeship approach worked. Alex landed interviews at top companies and accepted an offer at Microsoft for $167,000. At Microsoft, he worked on the Teams product, building React components, optimizing performance, fixing memory leaks, and handling the entire development lifecycle for features used by hundreds of millions of users.

After Microsoft, Alex joined Learning Economy, a smaller company where his role expanded beyond micro-optimizations to building entire products from scratch. He handled everything from architecture to deployment, giving him experience across the full software development spectrum at both enterprise and startup levels.

Having worked at both a massive tech company and an agile startup, Alex saw firsthand the massive gap between what companies actually need and what traditional coding education produces. He created DevBolt to bridge this gap through apprenticeship — the same model that transformed his own career from fitness coach to software engineer.