From Code Curious To Shipping My First Website

I became “code curious” when I started building more advanced models in Excel. Something about nested formulas and circular references flipped a switch in my brain. It planted the seed that maybe, just maybe, I could learn to code. That seed sprouted when I was working on an investment thesis on AI coding tools at my previous firm, which eventually led to an investment in Lovable, a tool that helps non technical people build software. It checked all the boxes investors secretly swoon over, a real inflection point, a hungry market, and expanded access.

Naturally, I started playing with Lovable, and that was the beginning of my rabbit hole. My first project was building a website using ChatGPT. To guide myself, I picked up a book by Paul McFedries at my local library. I have built websites before using no code tools like Wix, great templates, but I always felt boxed in by the standard layouts. I wanted to build something from scratch, well… “scratch ish”. Paul’s book helped, but there is still a real knowledge barrier when you are staring at your first empty code editor.

The thing about me, once I focus on something, I get obsessed. So alongside the book, I applied to a free coding bootcamp through Bay Valley Tech. Their prerequisite was Khan Academy’s “Computer Programming, JavaScript and the Web.” My site uses HTML and CSS rather than JavaScript, for now, but the course gave me a foundation for reading, auditing, and editing code without panicking.

I gave myself the week of Thanksgiving to go from 0 to 1, read the book, build the website, and deploy it. It took about one and a half weeks, not one, so consider this my gentle PSA, budget more time than your inner optimist suggests.

My first real challenge, setting up my developer environment. I needed to assemble a starter pack:

• A GitHub account, which I already had because I have reviewed founder repos before, but had never seriously used.
• Git, still confusing, still mysterious. I have had multiple dev friends say “yeah… it is confusing,” which honestly makes me feel better.
• VS Code, my editor of choice simply because researching AI coding tools taught me how central VS Code was to the early days of code generation. I wanted to use the tool I had spent months writing about.
• A Cloudflare account, recommended by Paul’s book, though several friends begged me to use Vercel because it is “easier.” The sentiment tracks with the company’s growth profile I watched closely during my previous role.
• ChatGPT premium, because I love the memory feature so I do not have to re explain who I am every time.

And I was off to the races. My first prompt was a pun generator. It was ridiculous and delightful and made me feel like queen of the mountain.

My workflow quickly became, ChatGPT → VS Code → GitHub → Cloudflare Pages. But when I got to Cloudflare, the site would not load. I tried for longer than my pride prefers to admit.

Then salvation, I had been invited to a Hacks giving coding night hosted by Glo Maldonado. I showed up intimidated, laptop in hand, ready to expose my broken deployment like a confession. The session turned out to be a fundraiser for Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts and Double Union, two organizations that absolutely deserve to exist.

The vibe was warm and kind, which has not always been my experience in technical spaces. Too often, people gatekeep or hide behind arrogance. My theory is that the real experts, the truly great founders, are translators who can explain complex ideas in normal person language and understand why now is the moment for their market.

That night ended up being genuinely fun. High quality builders, real teaching energy, and a perfect guinea pig project, my reading list. I wanted a way to share the books that shape how I think, hoping it would help founders and investors access the ideas behind my frameworks.

Three teams formed organically:

• Team 1, two cybersecurity folks who did not know each other but built like they had been paired for years. They created a library style interface with filters.
• Team 2, led by Soledad Alborno of DiagnoVET, built “ChatVC,” basically a ChatGPT for MDL prototype.
• Team 3, led by her co founder, Fernanda Barbero, designed “Michelle’s Mind,” which merged all the ideas and even let founders upload decks to get feedback aligned with how I think.

Watching three distinct teams interpret the same problem reminded me of something my mom always said, “Every mind is its own world.”

Even after all that inspiration, I was still stuck on my deployment issue. Time to call the big guns, my brilliant friend Devin Guillory, a computer science PhD student at Berkeley. He debugged it with me and discovered it was a syncing issue between GitHub and VS Code. We created a correctly synced repo and, bingo, we were live.

I chose a simple, dev vibes design with “hello world” as my greeting, a nod to the first line of code most people ever write. My goal was to build a home where people can find me, read my thoughts, like this post, and explore the ideas I am currently reading about. It is simple. It is a little rough. As a mother of this digital child, I can say, my baby is not the cutest, but it is mine, and that makes me love it even more.

This project was a learning journey that only pulled me deeper down the rabbit hole. Next, I want to explore automating my investor workflow, maybe not fully building everything myself, but at least knowing enough to patch things together. I am curious what other investors are automating and which tools they use.