In 2018 Harry Dry went viral with his Kanye West fans dating website. Since 2019 he has been establishing himself as an expert in digital marketing with his excellent Marketing Examples website and he recently added Copywriting Examples to the mix. I interviewed Harry to find how he taught himself to code, tips for newbie coders, viral marketing campaigns and how to get attention online.
Did you think you'd be making a Kanye West-themed dating website after university? What did you study again?
So I had no idea what I wanted to do after university. All I knew was that when my last exam ended I wanted to put the pen down, run for the hills and never turn back.
University wasn't for me. I "studied" Economics at Durham University in the north of England. To be honest the whole course was a sham. When you go on the open day they make you feel like you should feel privileged to be here and the course is elite level. But it's all a load of rubbish.
Pretty early on I clocked that no one gave a shit. The whole thing was a joke. I couldn’t get into it at all. So the first year I watched the entirety of Breaking Bad, played a lot of video games and ate a lot of ice cream. That’s what most students did.
When did you first write a line of code and what was your first website?
Half way through 2nd year something changed. I don’t know what exactly. I guess I just got bored of laying around. So I suddenly got really, really focused.
I had this idea that I was going to write a book. And I’d made this little video animation to accompany the book which I wanted to autoplay. But I had no idea how to make a website.
I googled a bit and came across this thing called Dreamweaver. What a mistake that turned out to be, haha! I must have spent about one year struggling with Dreamweaver oblivious to all the other text editors out there.
I used to pay this guy to do Javascript for me. And then slowly but surely I started picking it up and came up with Consumers Book.
So after that, how did you first learn to code what with not having a CS background?
So originally I went on a Founders and Coders bootcamp in Nazareth. This was pretty fun, the mentors were awesome but after six weeks I had to leave because something personal came up.
Personally, I don’t think bootcamps are necessary. If you want to have a good time go for it, but just in terms of actual firepower the best teachers are on the internet.
Advice for coders with no CS degree
If I was starting again from ground zero this is what I’d do:
- Net Ninja Youtube tutorials- free HTML + CSS + JS courses
- Javascript 30 day course- free vanilla JS video course by Wesbos *
- Javascript 30 day course again but without the videos. You’re on your own 😀 *
- ES6 - a paid video course on modern Javascript by Wesbos *
- Learn Node- a paid video course by Wesbos *
- React for Beginners - a paid video course by Wesbos * (*Affiliate links)
I think this is about 6 months work. But from here you’ll be able to play with React and Node together and from there pretty much anything is possible. I always bang on about Wesbos, but honestly doing his courses changed my stars. I can’t recommend him enough.
