Dash is a self-taught developer and an exciting entrepreneur. She learned to code by making a successful wish list business, Wish Tender. The site is doing $14k/m profit after only a year. In this interview Dash talks about the benefits of learning to code with projects. Building something that will be used by real customers means you will learn a lot more than just following tutorials.
Hey, so can you introduce yourself?
I'm Dash, the founder and CEO of WishTender/mom’s basement dweller from Chicago, IL USA.
Why did you learn to code?
Broadly speaking, I always loved creating- fashion, films, costumes, plays. But with code, you could build so much more. With code you can create so many types of tools people use. Coding seemed like a builder’s super power.
While I was living in a van with my spouse traveling the US, I committed to the #365DaysOfCode challenge; learning to code and writing a blog post about what I learned every day.
Since college, I’ve been obsessed with lucid dreaming. When I began my code journey, I specifically had in mind building tech tools related to lucid dreaming. But I was also interested in tech entrepreneurship more generally.
How did you learn coding?
I did the #100DaysOfCode challenge which turned into the #365daysofcode. I was strict about coding every day no matter what.
LinkedIn Learning Pro was helpful because of their many dev courses. I also used a free course called Javascript30 by Wes Bos, as well as many YouTube courses and written tutorials.
After I got the basics of Javascript, HTML, and CSS down, I focused on coding project ideas. Sometimes these were app ideas and sometimes projects dealing with cool tech like AI, AR, deepfakes.
I learned so much more when I started committing to a larger production project. Getting small projects up and running is easy. There are so many tutorials that focus on easy local dev environment projects from start to finish.
When you start building a large project which you plan to put out into the world, you encounter many questions that are harder to answer. Less people write about full-stack production projects. Less people know the answers.
Building harder projects was frustrating. I would run into a wall and think when will I ever solve this? A week? Two weeks? A month? Since I was documenting my journey in a blog, I could see that I would get over the walls faster and faster over time.
That documentation reduced my frustration because it gave me historical proof that I was capable of solving tough problems. I now was optimistic I could eventually solve anything. It’s important to keep that perspective when learning to code. You will figure it out.
