NOEL: Our guest this week is Dicko Sow. Dicko is a software developer at a technical consultancy but recently, she's been spending her time building out a side project called Yodi Naturals. We're going to talk about that side project and we're going talk about how she chose to do the project in the first place, what her goals were, how important it was for her to plan the project out before she got started, what kind of technical decisions she needed to make and what Dicko learned in putting together the launch page. If you're trying to decide whether or not to try a side project, this episode is going to have some good information about how to put that together, so it's a great conversation and I think you're going to like it.

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Dicko, would you like to introduce yourself to everybody?

DICKO: Yes, hi. My name is Dicko. I am a software developer at Pillar Technology. I've been a software developer now for about three years, mainly doing some devops work, some development work and most recently, doing some work on my side project, Yodi Naturals.

NOEL: Right and we're here today to talk about the side project. Dicko gave a very nice presentation about side project at a conference that we were both at -- PearConf -- a couple weeks ago as I record this and I wanted to give Dicko a chance to tell her story here, so maybe we should start with what made you want to do a side project? Did you become interested in the project because you wanted the project to exist or did you want to do different things with technology when you were doing your job?

DICKO: I've actually always been really interested in doing a side project ever since I kind of started doing some development work, just because I kind of realized how much freedom that we had in our current work and how much there was to learn. Initially, I was just really, really interested in trying to learn how to use new technologies, specifically doing things that I wasn't doing at work. For example, in my current work, I do some consulting work. A lot of it is you come onto a project and you get something out of the door and then you're out. You don't necessarily see what it's like from the beginning to the end of the project. I've always kind of just wanted to do something to do that.

NOEL: You were interested in doing things technologically that you weren't doing at your job. Let's start with, though with how you decided on which side project to do. Was it the first thing you tried or did you try to couple different things before you picked the one the you wound up putting a lot of time and effort into?

DICKO: Yeah, absolutely. I've had a wide variety of ideas for many years now. I think for like over three years, I've had random ideas here and there and I would say with all of these ideas, nothing really stuck with me. I would be really, really excited about it initially and I would do some research for a couple of days and then eventually, I would just kind of forget about it. That's kind of how it happened for me.
But with the current project that I'm working on now, I came up with this idea I think about two years ago and this was something that I was actually super excited about and I talked to everybody about it. I still didn't actually do anything for about a whole other year. It wasn't until my friends were super tired of hearing me talk about it that they told me, "We really like this idea. We really like what you're doing what you believe in and we want to help you, support you, get this idea," so that was really a kind of thanks to my friends of pushing me that I finally decided to make the jump and do this.

NOEL: What is the project that you're working on?

DICKO: My project is called Yodi Naturals and Yodi Naturals basically is a platform that I wanted to build for black women, specifically with natural hair that are looking for do-it-yourself hair care and for those individuals that don't know what natural hair is, natural hair is basically hair that has not been chemically altered by any chemical straighteners or anything like that. It comes in all shapes, sizes, textures, colors, make a range from wavy to coily. There's a wide range of variety between the two and it can even be straight. It's just kind of predominately something that you would see black women kind of wearing.

NOEL: Is this site meant to be kind of a recipe exchange? Are you trying to raise money from it or are you just trying to provide a clearinghouse where people can say, "This works for me. It maybe work for you as well?"

DICKO: Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually going to take a step back and talk about how I came up with the idea. I was at the hair salon getting my hair trimmed and my hair stylist mentioned that my hair was really dry and she recommended that I look at some maybe natural hair care recipes. She mentioned like using something like honey, for example. I actually had never really heard of using do-it-yourself hair care products for hair, so I was very, very interested. I went home, did some research to try to figure out how I could make my first recipe.

As I did that, I realized that there were a lot of really, really great resources online but they were all scattered and all over the place and it was really, really hard to find a specific recipe. For example, let's say that I had honey at home and I wanted a recipe with honey, maybe like a deep conditioner, you could find something but it was very hard parsing through it. Basically I envision Yodi Naturals as a platform for women to be able to post recipes that work for them and for other individuals to be able to, more easily, find those recipes, so really, just like a centralized location for hair care recipes.

NOEL: Okay and so once you had the idea, where did you start? What was the first thing you did with this as a project?

DICKO: First thing I did as a project, so after I had talked to everybody, you're saying? Is that it?

NOEL: Yes. You did a bunch of research, your friends pushed you to do this because they wanted you to stop talking about it basically --

DICKO: Yes.

NOEL: -- which is a great motivating tool, so where did you go first?

DICKO: Like I said, I talked to my friends and they're like, "This is a great idea," but they don't have natural hair, so I just wanted to make sure that this was something that not only would I see a benefit in it but let other people would see a benefit in it, so I talked to my sisters who also have natural hair and they thought it was a pretty cool idea. I went to some events with predominantly women of color -- many of them having natural hair -- and talked about this idea and I was pleasantly surprised at how excited people were about it. That was the fire that got me started -- just like everybody being really, really excited to hear about something like this that I'm building.

NOEL: At this point, it seems like you've come up with an idea, you've sort of given it some social proof, you found other people are excited about it and now it seems to me like you have a couple of different problems. You have sort of a bunch of technical problems to solve and you have a bunch of logistics problems to solve because you also have a full time job, so you have some issues about time management, I suppose in how much time you can put on this. I should say, how far along is Yodi Naturals at this point?

DICKO: It's still pretty early on. So far, we have our launch page out, which I was really excited to get out, finally and now we're actually working on the application itself. We do have an MVP -- a minimum viable product that we are currently building out. It's still early.

NOEL: I guess that's a third issue, is a planning issue to decide what order you're going to do things. Let's talk about the planning part first, I think because that's sort of where we were. Did you try to use similar kind of project management tools that you use in your day job? Did you try out different things? Did you find that you wanted it to run more loosely or that you needed it to run more tightly? How did you come to your MVP set of features?

DICKO: Yes. That's actually interesting because I feel like without even really thinking about it, I kind of just started pulling things that I use from work. For example, when I first started talking about this, we set a lot of initial meetings kind of like Sprint Zero type meetings, where we were just kind of talking about the product, doing some ideation and just kind of like nailing down the value stories or user stories to kind of help drive out the MVP and driving out those features.

NOEL: Who's we in this case?

DICKO: Actually, I mentioned that I had friends that helped me get started, so it's two friends: Connor Sweeney and Paul [inaudible]. These are individuals that I work with and like I said, they were very tired of hearing me talk about it, so they said, "We'll help you every step of the way." They've been really, really helpful in terms of just providing really good technical advice, just being a good-sounding board for ideas.

NOEL: You did your initial ideation sequence, you came up with a bunch of value and user stories and then, did you sort of do a prioritization session to try and figure out which things you wanted to do first? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

DICKO: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, we came up with value stories and based from there, at high level, I started kind of writing down some of the features that I thought what I would have wanted to see and the way that I did that actually was by building out a mock. I don't have a lot of design experience but I am a very visual person, so it was a lot easier for me, in this case to build out the mock of what I wanted to see to kind of help drive out what MVP would be. Based on that, just like I said kind of writing down what I thought would be important and then, we did have a grooming type session, where we kind of talked about what kind of work we estimated each thing would take and from there on, prioritizing what we thought would be priority.

NOEL: What did you learn during this prioritization process that you might pass along to somebody else who is looking to do a side project?

DICKO: Actually, I think we did it a little bit differently than I would generally do it at work. It felt a lot more creative and a lot more fun. Basically, what we did is we got a giant, yellow poster board and a bunch of markers and pens and just kind of started drawing and writing things out. To me sometimes, when just talking about it, it can be a little hard to express myself but the fact that I had a pen and I could draw something or I could write something, it really, really helped, I think, the team, to just kind of really figuring out who were building this for, what we were building and why we were doing it. For some people that don't want to talk about it, like I said, it's a lot easier just to be able to visually be able to see that.

NOEL: Yeah. I think there's an interesting distinction here between a side project that you do just because you want to learn a technology and a side project that you do because you really want this project to exist in the world. That's the kind of thing you're doing and I think in that case, that sort of prioritization is really important. I think people have the sense like, "It's my side project. It's only me, or it's only me and a friend, I don't need to be very precise about planning." But I think in that kind of project planning becomes really important. Was that your experience?

DICKO: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. By treating it like a real project, it became a real project. I didn't see it like, "Oh, it's just like a little side project that I'm going to work on the side." When I used to think about it like that, I never did anything. I never made anything happen but the moment I switch my mindset to say, "This is a priority. I really want this to exist. I want to see this through to the end," I started setting aside the necessary time to actually do this and like I said, use some of those principles that I think are very valuable at work and incorporating them within our planning process.

NOEL: I think that's a really interesting point that as you give something, the trappings and some of the ceremony of what you would consider like a full-fledged project, then you start treating it like one.

DICKO: Absolutely.

NOEL: That reminds me a little bit of if I work from home, I have to actually get dressed and do everything as I'm going to work because I need the ceremony to put me in work mode. Does that makes sense?

DICKO: Yeah. You almost have like trick yourself because the moment that you're like, "This is just a side project," what I found is when I thought like that I, would go home and instead of putting in the work in my side project, I would watch 30 minutes of TV, oh the show is over, "Oh, I just watch 30 more minutes," and before I know it, the day is over. Of course, I do make sure that I still do balance my time, so that I am still able to kind of do those fun things because I want to make sure this project stays fun for me and it doesn't just become another job.

NOEL: Do you limit the amount of time you spend on it per week?

DICKO: I do. It depends on kind of what's going on. Generally, I find myself really excited, so if I'm super excited and I go past 10 hours, which is the minimum that I set for myself, I'll still keep going as long as I'm still enjoying what I'm doing.

NOEL: Yeah. I think it's important in a project like this. If part of the point of it is to be doing something that you enjoy, I guess that's another point -- you can do this because it's a project you want to see in the world, you can do it because you want to learn something or you can do it just because you find working on this thing fun or any combination of those, I suppose. But if you're doing it because it's fun, I guess it's important to try and keep it fun.

DICKO: Absolutely and sometimes, you will have things that are not so much fun to do, which is why I have that 10-hour minimum I need to put in.

NOEL: Where did the name come in?

DICKO: It's really interesting. When I first had the idea for this project, initially I called it 'Naturalista' and Naturalista is a name that is very actually commonly used in the natural hair community. Initially, I was like, "You know, this is a name that everybody knows what it is," and then kind of talking about it with my team, we kind of were wondering whether it was a little too generic and maybe, if I wanted to come up with something that meant a little bit more to us as a team. We kind of had another brainstorming session, where we had that bright yellow poster board that I mentioned before and just kind of used the backside of that. I took markers, pens and I started writing down words that meant a lot to me.

I'm writing down words like identity, things like self-love, healthy, empower, sisterhood, educating others, beauty. I wrote down all those words on the poster board and from that, we just kind of continued writing things down, drawing things, having discussions about things that were relevant to us in this and one of the things that kept kind of coming back to us was the word 'beauty' and beauty was something that kept coming back because for a lot of us black women with natural hair, our hair isn't always viewed as professional, as beautiful by other people. It's something that sometimes you wear it and it's viewed as political, so really, beauty to us was about really defining it for ourselves what we thought beautiful was. We think our hair is beautiful, so we're really claiming that word for ourselves, our heritage, our roots. Like I said, I really like that word.

Another discussion that we had as well was just kind of talking about my own heritage. As a side note, my family is originally from Senegal in West Africa and my native language is Fulani. Some of my team members had heard me speaking Fulani words over the years and like I said, as beauty kept coming back, it made me think what if we use beauty but if we use the Fulani word for beauty which Yodi, so then we ended up coming with Yodi Naturals.

Initially, I really, really liked the word. I really liked the name Yodi Naturals but I was a little worried that it would be hard for other people because they don't know what it means from the beginning but after kind of thinking about it and talking to other people, we really decided, like "beauty", we're taking this word and we're defining what it means for us for other people.

NOEL: That's really great. That's a great story.

DICKO: Thank you.

NOEL: You have your friends, you have your yellow poster board with all your stories on it, you've done your prioritization and now, you need to start actually building things and as you say, some of these things are things that you don't do in your day-to-day job or at least don't do very often in your day-to-day job. I guess first of all, what did you feel you needed to learn right off the bat just to get this going.

DICKO: Oh, man. Actually initially, it was just getting it started. I've made applications before but never necessarily the right way. It's kind of like, "I'm spinning up this website. I need to make sure that I setup the DNS, which is something that I had never done before," or, "I need to make sure that I use SSL because I want to make sure that we don't get that annoying browser warning saying that my website is not secure."

There are a lot of things that actually I wanted to do. My teammates, there are some things that they had done in the past but I wanted to make sure that this was something that I would do, so that I would make sure that I would know how it worked.

NOEL: How did you pick the technologies that you're going to use?

DICKO: I can kind of talk about our launch page, for example. Our launch page we're using React and the reason that we ended up picking it actually was one of my team is like, "I want to learn React," and then I was like, "Well, that sounds good. I've never really used React, so that sounds like something fun to use." We're also using a lot of AWS services and the main reason is, I hear about AWS everywhere. A lot people are using it, people at my job are using it so I really just wanted to learn more about those services.

For the current app, what we're currently building, we are also still keeping React and also we're using Rails for the backend and the main reason we're using Rails in this case is because it's something that's familiar to us because I really like learning but I also want to make sure that as I'm learning, I'm also going as fast as I can, so it's something familiar and some new things here and there.

NOEL: I normally have a rule in a client project where I allow myself exactly one new technology in a professional project, so that most of it is familiar but I think for a side project, I would allow myself a little bit more but I totally understand that mix of I want something that my feet on the ground -- on known ground -- somewhere but at the same time, I want to learn. Your day-to-day, your Rails is your day-to-day?

DICKO: Actually, no. In my day-to-day -- I work for a tech consultancy -- so really, it varies but for my current project, I am using Angular, actually. Not React but Angular, which is why I was kind of interested in doing React because it's a little bit different.

NOEL: So is Rails coming from other experiences?

DICKO: Yes. Rails is prior experience. Actually, I have a full time job. I also do some freelancing on the side. I am doing some Rails things for a client, so that's kind of where I get some of the experience from.

NOEL: That is a lot of things to keep moving at once.

DICKO: Yes, definitely. It's very hard juggling everything sometimes.

NOEL: You decided to host everything on AWS because you wanted to AWS. What has surprised you about React, for example, like how did you find it, especially since you already were using Angular?

DICKO: Like I just mentioned, it was something that one of my teammates wanted to use. React wasn't completely foreign. It is a little bit different from Angular but it's still kind of a similar concept but I have to say, for me initially, I think the biggest thing that made me really excited to use React actually was styled components. I don't know if you know what that is but it's just basically having CSS in your JavaScript code and this is something that I don't think in the past like if you had told me, "You can put your CSS in JavaScript, that would be cool," and I'd be like, "I don't know about that. I like those things separate," but I really enjoyed that I could do that. That was some cool things that I picked up using React.

NOEL: I have not actually done the CSS styling in React and I have a little bit of that initial reaction of why would you do that but I am not immune to frontend programming being fun when it all works together, so what made that little piece, that part work really well?

DICKO: To me, it's all there. Of course, you're being very careful to make sure that your component is not doing five million things and is like a thousand lines of code. As long as there's a small enough component, having your CSS right there and being able to have all your media queries and everything right there within that component, to me just makes it a lot easier. If I want to go to this component and change its CSS, I can just go directly there and change it and see the code right there.

NOEL: And how have you found working with AWS? Are you using it just as a hosting service? Are you using some of the other server side services?

DICKO: With my current launch page, I am using a few things with AWS. I'm using S3 buckets, which actually I was super surprised at how easy it was. I don't know why I thought it was a lot harder. I have to say that to me, AWS documentation can be slightly intimidating, so maybe that was why I had that impression that it'd be a lot harder but there were a lot of super wonderful tutorials online on how to do it, so pushing up your React build directly to the S3 bucket and making sure that it's configured for website hosting, that part was super easy. I did not expect it.

Then a big thing for me, too is I want to make sure that I don't get overwhelmed because sometimes, picking the technical stack can be very overwhelming. Am I making the right decision in taking this over this? So I try to keep it as simple as possible. Like I said, initially just kind of having the S3 bucket and then, when I realized I really want to get rid of that 'not secure' browser warning, then clearly that means that I need to use some sort of SSL and then, I realized that AWS has a service for that called Certificate Manager that provides free public certificates, which is pretty cool but then I realized in order for me to use SSL, I need to pull in CloudFront, which is a CDN because SSL certificates can only be used on CloudFront distributions.

NOEL: The AWS ones?

DICKO: Any. If you want to use with S3 buckets, you need to use CloudFront... you need to use CloudFront distributions.

NOEL: Yes. The launch page is actually serverless React, effectively. You're serving the React page straight from S3 bucket, is that correct?

DICKO: That is correct, yes. It's like static stuff, so it's really simple but with the application obviously, there needs to be a little bit more dynamic content. That's where we pulled in EC2 instances, which are just virtual machines.

NOEL: How has the implementation part been going? Have you been surprised by anything being harder or easier than you thought as you build out the full site? How far along are you?

DICKO: Very new. I think literally, I'm working on my first feature that I think I'm mostly happy with. Actually, one of the things that we decided to do is we decided to decouple React and Rails. I know that Rails has a webpacker gem or something like that, that allows you to use React within it but initially, we really did not like the idea of those two things being coupled. I think we definitely made our lives a little bit harder because now we kind of have to figure out how to connect those two things. It's something that we haven't done yet. We're still kind of trying to figure out but that's the one thing that I'm a little nervous about but I still think it's a good thing that we're doing it this way.

NOEL: Do you plan to be releasing small features as you go or are you hoping to build up your whole MVP before you put it out?

DICKO: I think we like working in iterations, just kind of releasing some features at a time because feedback is really important and being able to show things to people and making sure that this is something that people would use, so definitely building out small iterations is the plan.

NOEL: How many people do you actually have working on right now?

DICKO: Right now, it's just three people.

NOEL: All three developers?

DICKO: Yeah, all three developers. There's other people here and there that kind of help consult and other things but there's three core people on the team.

NOEL: One of the things that's always stalled me out on working on this kind of side project that would become a real project is design things and what I perceive is my trouble in making a site look good. What kinds of things have you done to learn more about that part of it or to bring in expertise for that part of it?

DICKO: Oh, yeah. I 100% agree with you. Actually to me, design is always something that I've been super interested in -- wanting to do a little bit more but it's a completely overwhelming world. Oh, my goodness. There is just so much so learn about design. But there's a lot of really great UX people that I know that I kind of talk to and one of the strategies that somebody mentioned is go to websites that you really, really like and see what they're doing and try to figure out, are there certain things that you can incorporate in your own designs. That is kind of a strategy that I decided to go through because I am not creative in that sense at all. That has been very helpful.

NOEL: Are you building your CSS from scratch? Well, I guess that's a very technical question about the design. Are you using a framework? Where did you decide to optimize for time, I suppose along that?

DICKO: Actually right now, I am building everything from scratch just because the design has been super simple. But I think as the design gets a little bit more complicated, I may decide to pull in an additional framework here and there. Like I said, I'm just trying to keep things simple and just kind of add as needed.

NOEL: What do you feel like you've learned about design? Does the landing page as is, does it take email addresses or anything like that or have you done anything to try and learn about what on your landing pages is compelling people or working?

DICKO: Yes. That's an interesting question. There's kind of two things. Number 1, I am actually using Mailchimp to host kind of subscriber lists because I do not want to deal with that myself at all and Mailchimp seems like they're doing a really good job on that. The other thing is I actually am using Google Analytics for metrics but this is not really something that I've done much with. This is something that I probably plan on doing something with in the future but right now, with the time that I have, I'm just focusing on trying to get that first feature completed.

NOEL: Did you find either of those tools easy to set up or hard to set up? It's great in a side project to know that this is not part of the part I want to learn or do and if there's any way I can offload it, that's great.

DICKO: Absolutely. I just did some research online and everybody was talking about, "Oh, yeah. Mailchimp is really good at this," and that's something that I had never used before, so actually it was very easy setting that up. As far as Google Analytics, I just ended up using that because that's something that I've seen used on other projects at work. It was also pretty simple to setup as well.

NOEL: What's something that you're looking forward to learning or doing for the first time or almost the first time as you look out over the rest of the project -- the next phase of the project.

DICKO: Like I said, I'm super excited about some of the technical things that we're working on but more so than that, I think one thing that I'm learning about myself is I generally like really staying in my own bubble and I don't really like going out and talking to people as often. I don't want to say I don't like it but I get really nervous about it, so this is really wonderful because this project gives me a chance to talk to people about what I'm passionate about and just get out there and kind of help build up my own self-confidence and talking to people about what I do.

NOEL: Have you learned more about the subject matter itself?

DICKO: Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. There's so much to learn about natural hair and do-it-yourself because initially, I built this out just for me to learn how to better take care of my hair and do my own do-it-yourself recipes. I have just learned so much about that world itself. It's quite amazing.

NOEL: I keep kind of going back and forth between super technical and super non-technical questions. I have a more technical question. It seems to me like search and tags are going to be really important part of the site for users and I know you're not very far along but have you thought about your data model or how you might manage some of those pieces of functionality as the project builds up?

DICKO: You're right. Those are absolutely key. That is something that we definitely have to figure out how to do. This is not really something that we've figured out quite yet how to do, though.

NOEL: So you haven't decided whether to use a search engine? I would recommend against that, personally.

DICKO: I'm not using a search engine --

NOEL: Or like elastic search or something like that. I would recommend against that unless you really wanted to learn --

DICKO: Really? I hear so many people talk about it, so that would have been cool, so no?

NOEL: I mean first of all, you should do what's right for your project and not listen to me in any way. Second of all, I have had bad luck with it but that doesn't necessarily mean -- bad luck is the wrong word -- I've tried to use it in ways where I found it hard to get it to do exactly what I want. You may want to do different things that are easier to do.

One of the reasons I kind of came to that is because I have found in various projects that search always winds up being a little bit more complicated than you think it's going to be and it's very amenable to, at least in my client projects, "I searched for this and why it didn't find that?" from the client in a sort of an endless game of whack a mole with that kind of thing. I guess I'm warning you. I don't really want to be doing that kind of thing but I was just curious what kind of thought you put into it.

DICKO: Not yet but I will let you know, but thank you for the warning.

NOEL: I'm really curious because I think that sort of tag metadata and search things in that weird zone where it feels like it should be generic and you should just be able to plug your project in but every project winds up being just different enough that it never is quite generic.

DICKO: But it didn't never work to kind of the way that you expect it to work, right?

NOEL: Yeah.

DICKO: Maybe, I’ll make another one of my teammates work on that part.

NOEL: Is that how you pick who works on what?

DICKO: No, that's not. I mean, for me this is a good thing to learn. Initially actually, what we do is when we do come across something a little bit more difficult to work on, we will get together and kind of talk about it and then kind of go on our own separate ways from that. That's probably what we do around that portion.

NOEL: That seems like a good plan. I think that database tools, for doing text searches have gotten a lot better but that's... I don't know. I don't really want to keep focusing on that. What other pieces of functionality are you really looking forward to or really dreading having to put in?

DICKO: Now, that you mentioned the searching...

NOEL: Yeah, I'm not trying to scare you.

DICKO: I think you're right. The searching and the tags and all that stuff, it's going to be a little bit more complicated but I do think that a lot of the other stuff should be fairly straightforward and I hope I'm not going to hurt myself by saying this in the future but the idea is we want the user to be able to go to the homepage, view the list of all the recipes and some sort of order that. We haven't really talked about very much yet but a big thing too is we want to make sure that anybody can go to the website and view the recipes without having to log in because to me there's nothing more annoying than going to a website and wanting to see what it's about and having to register.

NOEL: Yeah, I agree with that but you're going to let people upload recipes to you, right?

DICKO: Definitely, yes but there's a difference there. Because in order to upload a recipe, you are going to have to create an account because I think you do have to agree to some terms and conditions and that kind of stuff but just to browse, you don't have to.

NOEL: Yeah and that implies moderation and a bunch of other related topics. Have you given any thought to how you're going to manage that piece of it?

DICKO: Sorry, to manage --?

NOEL: To curate incoming recipes.

DICKO: That's a really good question. That is something that we kind of talked about but we still kind of need to figure out how to go about that. Initially, I think for the first sign ups that we get, it's going to be really easy for us to kind of go in and make sure that everything is kind of conforming to the style that we want but hopefully, we'll scale a little bit more, it might be a little bit more difficult to do that. That's something that we're talking about but we haven't really kind of decided on an approach yet.

NOEL: The first piece of functionality that you got up was your launch page. How hard was that to get together?

DICKO: My launch page actually took me over eight months to complete and really, the blocker for me was the design. I would say that initially, within the first month, I actually had a design up there and I was showing people, "Oh, look at my design," but every time I put something out there, I hated it over and over and over again, so for eight months, I just kind of redesigned this launch page so often and it wasn't until one of my teammates told me, "If you don't get this out to production by Monday --" and I think this is on a Friday, he's like, "I'm going to quit." I'm like, "Okay, great. I guess I am releasing this out to the whole world to see."

I learned something really important there and this is something that we talk about every day at work like you want to build things out, you want to iterate over things, you don't want to do this giant, big upfront design and that is exactly what I did. Now in retrospect, I really should have just released something out Month 1 and just kind of iterated it as I needed. That was a hard lesson to learn.

NOEL: I guess the way I put it in my experience is that shipping things is a muscle and you have to exercises it, otherwise, you totally get out of practice and I see that in all kinds of things like when I'm writing, if I don't write for a while, it gets harder to do it. The habits you build sort of really can affect how you feel about work and how you feel about the things that you put out there.

DICKO: Absolutely. This is a work in progress for me because I really like things to look perfect and it never will, right, so you just have to ship it.

NOEL: If people want to learn more about Yodi Naturals or about you, where can they find you online?

DICKO: If you want to learn more about Yodi Naturals, I do have my launch page out there. It is YodiNaturals.com. I also am on Twitter, I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram. I am currently trying to build up the social media profiles for Yodi Naturals as well -- learning more about that world as well -- but that's kind of where you can find me. You can also email me at YodiNaturals@gmail.com.

NOEL: Great. Thank you very much for coming on the show and telling your story. I really appreciate it.

DICKO: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on.

NOEL: Tech Done Right is on the web at TechDoneRight.io and on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right. We're also available to listen wherever you get podcasts. The show is a production of Table XI, which is on the web at TableXI.com and on Twitter at @TableXI. The show is hosted by me, Noel Rappin. I'm at @NoelRap on Twitter and it's edited by Mandy Moore who's at @TheRubyRep on Twitter and of course, if you like the show, tell a friend, a colleague, a boss, your social media network, tell me, tell anybody. That would all be very helpful and a review on Apple Podcasts helps people find the show.

Table XI is a UX design and software development company in Chicago, with a 15-year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us and we'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode of Tech Done Right.