Eliana Jordan, 35, turned pandemic job loss in Bali into a new career path, learning to code, working through early setbacks in tech, and building a scuba-diving booking app while earning part-time as a scuba instructor.
Eliana Jordan remembers the moment the lockdown trapped her in Bali. She had been on holiday there when the work back in Australia ended—her job told her it was closing—and then the country she was in. and the work she relied on. went quiet. “Everything was closed,” the scuba instructor and software developer said.
Jordan was 30 when she learned to code in Bali. and she credits that sudden pause—savings running out. no income coming in—with forcing a decision she’d been circling for a while. She had an idea for a booking app “like Airbnb for scuba diving.” With time on her hands and no other option to work. she told herself: “OK. this is the time.”.
The learning curve was steep, and it started without the tools the world leans on now. Jordan learned by watching YouTube tutorials because. as she put it. there was “no AI back then.” She even called a developer friend for help and admitted. “I don’t understand anything.” Her friend’s response—“He said that was normal”—became its own kind of permission to keep going.
She later enrolled in a boot camp because self-teaching didn’t feel like it was moving her fast enough. The turning point came early: in the first week, “something in my brain clicked,” and she said she “understood everything.”
That new momentum quickly turned into proof. Jordan began sharing her projects on LinkedIn. and soon a company contacted her because it had hired people from the same boot camp. She started there as an intern. then landed her first full-time developer job after failing two technical interviews at different companies.
The job that followed carried its own warning: she was using a coding language she’d never used before. The company promised training. but after a meeting with human resources. she was fired with the reasoning that she would “never make it.” Jordan said that only pushed her harder—she took the rejection as fuel instead of a stop sign.
She found another developer job. After about two years working in corporate life as a developer, she said she’d learned “a bit, but not everything I wanted.” The work was remote, but she quit to focus on building her app, telling herself that even having experience was not the same as building.
To keep the lights on, she returned to what she knew best: scuba instruction. “I worked part-time as a scuba instructor to pay the bills,” she said. Scuba also gave her a mental break from coding—she described working nights on the app after teaching. with her brain “full of nitrogen. ” and said it could feel “pretty intense.” Yet she kept working anyway. saying. “The mind is quite powerful if you want to do something.”.
She moved back to Thailand and stayed with the part-time teaching model while building. She said scuba offered the breaks she needed: more money was available freelancing as a developer. but for her it was never only about money. In the years since, she has earned income through collaborations with brands on social media about coding.
Her app is still at an early stage. but Jordan says the long grind is starting to come together—“suddenly. after years of hard work. everything seems to be coming together.” The payoff is as much about daily life as it is about product progress. She works a lot of hours some days, but she has the freedom she never had in an office job. If she wants to go scuba diving on a Tuesday morning at 11. or kite surfing because the wind is good. she doesn’t need permission. She can work early in the morning or later in the evening.
Every day, Jordan wakes up very early without an alarm because she loves what she does. She starts with an iced Americano coffee and works on her app. When she worked for someone else. she described the rhythm as one she didn’t choose—checking emails. writing code. fixing bugs. doing tasks she didn’t want to do.
Now, she treats the work like her own. Coding and scuba diving, she said, are the “perfect combination.” She has one clear message for anyone facing a career reset: “Don’t be afraid to start over. It’s never too late.”
Eliana Jordan scuba diving app coding entrepreneur Bali lockdown software developer boot camp LinkedIn projects part-time scuba instructor remote work startup
So she just learned coding and now she’s making an app? Pretty sure that’s fake or like super lucky lol.
I don’t get why everyone keeps saying “no AI back then” like coding is suddenly impossible without it. YouTube existed, people figured it out. Also Bali lockdown… that sounds like a vacation turned into a business? good for her though.
“Like Airbnb for scuba diving” sounds cool but isn’t it just… booking? idk. I read like half of it and thought she was a real estate app at first. But if she was in Bali during lockdown then yeah that would mess up income.
Wild how she said she had “no AI back then” and relied on YouTube tutorials—meanwhile I’m sitting here just trying to reset my router. The scuba instructor part is kinda random too, like you’d think she’d stay doing that and not coding. But I guess stress makes people do stuff. I’m just surprised it says she found a company from LinkedIn so fast, like LinkedIn actually works for that.