From a Kitchen Debt to 100 Apps: How a Music Teacher With No CS Degree Built an Ecosystem That Changed Her Students' Lives

This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge : Echoes of Experience Student names and some details have been changed for privacy reasons. The stories are real and documented. The kitchen where it all started In 1999 I was working as a music specialist in Italian elementary and preschools — a position even more precarious and underpaid than a regular substitute teacher. I composed musical fairy tales for children using a keyboard, but it was limited and clumsy. I had never touched a computer in my life. My mother, a furniture dealer, sold a kitchen to the owner of a computer shop. He never paid. To settle the debt, she took a PC instead. I asked for music composition software too. He gave me the programs — but without serial numbers. Useless. I looked up the price of legitimate licenses. Completely out of reach. I didn't even know what Reverse Engineering was. But driven by necessity, I started studying how software worked under the hood. By pure chance I stumbled onto the UIC —