Three months ago I moved back to my hometown. Not for some big opportunity or a career move — mostly I just wanted more peace than the city was giving me. But it changed my week in one specific way: I suddenly had Saturdays free, in a place where I actually knew people, instead of Saturdays free in a city where I mostly worked through them anyway.
So I started a weekend coding class. Nothing formal. No curriculum I'd agonize over, no fees, just a room and a few laptops and an open invitation to anyone who wanted to learn to build things. I figured a handful of people would show up once or twice out of curiosity and drift off. Some did. But a few kept coming back, week after week, and that's when it stopped feeling like a favor I was doing for the neighborhood and started feeling like the best part of my week.
The class that wasn't supposed to be a big deal
I've built software for a living for a while now. I know what "learning to code" actually takes — the boring stretch before anything works, the fifty small failures before the one thing that clicks. I wasn't trying to run a bootcamp. I just wanted to hand people the same starting point someone once handed me: sit down, break things, fix them, and see something real happen on the screen because of something you typed.
Most weekends that means basics — variables, loops, the usual on-ramp. But Damini Chaudhary walked in already past that stage.
Damini's been with LSD since last year, building and customizing stores and sites on Shopify and WordPress for our clients. She's good at it. What brought her to the weekend class wasn't "I want to learn to code" in the abstract. It was more specific than that: she kept running into the edges of what a theme editor and a page builder would let her do, and she wanted to know what was actually happening underneath — the data, the requests, the code the platforms were hiding from her. That's a different kind of curiosity than starting from zero. It's someone who already ships things for real clients, wanting to know what's under the hood.
Damini built a JSON formatter
So she picked something small and concrete to test that curiosity on: a JSON formatter — a tool to paste in messy, unreadable JSON and get it back out formatted, validated, and readable. It's exactly the kind of raw data she'd already been staring at inside Shopify and WordPress without ever really seeing it. Not a toy exercise I assigned her. Something she decided was worth building, scoped herself, and then actually finished.
It's not groundbreaking. Formatters like it exist all over the internet, and she knew that going in. But that was never the point. The point was going from "I want this to exist" to "I built the thing and it works" — end to end, on her own, one level below the platforms she'd already gotten comfortable with. That gap is the whole game, and most people never cross it because they're waiting for the idea that's original enough to justify starting. It doesn't need to be original. It needs to be finished.
Watching her get it working reminded me of something I'd half forgotten.
The feeling I forgot I was chasing
I remember building my first app. It was small and rough and nobody but me ever used it. I also remember, with more clarity than I remember most things from that period of my life, the exact moment it ran without errors and did the one thing I'd told it to do. That feeling doesn't really repeat itself later in your career — not at the same intensity. You get better, you ship bigger things, but the first time software does what you told it to do is a specific kind of high you only get once.
Seeing that same moment land for Damini — watching her paste in broken JSON and get clean, formatted output back — was the closest I've come to feeling it again secondhand. That's a big part of why I kept the weekend class going even on the Saturdays I was tired and had a dozen other things to do. You don't get to watch that moment often. When you do, it's worth showing up for.
Why this belongs on the LSD side
LSD Dev Studio stands for Launch. Support. Develop. — and this isn't a metaphor stretched to fit, because Damini isn't some outside story I'm borrowing. She's part of the studio. What happened in that weekend class is the same thing that happens on client work, just with the training wheels visible: Damini had an idea. We developed it together, piece by piece. She launched it — put it in front of me and said "this works." And the ongoing class is the support: showing up the next Saturday, and the one after that, to help the next idea get finished too.
That's the same instinct behind every product we build at LSD, whether it's for a client or for ourselves. Ship the real thing, not the impressive-sounding plan for the thing. Damini's JSON formatter is live — you can try it yourself here, paste in JSON, and see it formatted and validated instantly, nothing ever leaving your browser. It sits right next to the other tools we've built and shipped on our products page.
It's not the most complex thing we've ever put in front of people. That's exactly why it's a good reminder. The projects that matter most aren't always the biggest ones — sometimes they're the ones where you watch someone else feel, for the first time, what made you want to build software in the first place.
If you're building something and just need to get it finished — whether that's your first project or your fiftieth — get in touch. Or take a look at what we've shipped so far.
LSD Dev Studio — Launch Support Develop. We build web apps, mobile apps, and digital products, and we still get a kick out of watching someone ship their first one. See our products or get in touch.