Learning to build something?
I’m Sahil Dawka. I spent six years building education software and the teams behind it. Now I help people and teams who are learning to build get from a half-working idea to something that works, and understand why it does.
Sessions are remote.
For you and your idea
Founders, students, creators, anyone building something of their own.
Can someone look at this with me?
Bring what you're building, or what you're trying to learn. We look at it together on a call and work out what to do next.
Afterwards I send you the next steps in writing.
Write to me about an hourCan we just build it together?
You tell me what you want to exist. I prepare beforehand. Then we spend four hours on a call building it together.
We will make it work and have fun doing it.
Tell me what you want to buildFor your team
Companies and departments that want to build it themselves.
Can my team build something real in a day?
First we talk about where the business is trying to get to and what the team is like. Then I turn one of those goals into something the team will enjoy building in a day.
You walk out with something working that points at the goal, and what the team learned building it.
Tell me about your teamCan you build it with my team and leave them able to run it?
A few weeks, part of each week, remote. I build alongside your team and lead the work.
The deal is that when I leave, your team can keep improving it without me.
Tell me what you need builtEach of these starts with an email. Tell me what you need and I reply myself.
What does a half-day look like?
SpoonFedStudy runs a program with a channel called the Mountain of Evidence. Members pair up and post daily proof that they kept their habits.
SpoonFedStudy wanted an AI assistant to run it: pair people up, answer their questions, remind them before the deadline, check in on them, and check that the proof was real. There was a Claude workflow for this, and it was not quite working. It could not tie a reply to the thing being replied about, so it lost track of which proof a message referred to.
We sat down and rebuilt it the way a software developer would. We split it into parts that each do one job, and SpoonFedStudy picked up the ideas underneath as we went, loops among them.
It runs now. About 50 people use it every day.
Have you done this before?
- 2017 to 2019
- M.Eng in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
- 2019
- First production code, at Paper.
- 2019 to 2024
- Six years there, from full-stack developer to software development manager.
- 2023 to 2024
- Started and shipped a human-in-the-loop AI system that served 3M+ students and saved $1M+ a year.
- Free
- Programming as Communication, a course I wrote. Its question: how do I get AI to build what I actually want?
I learned to program before the autocomplete got ambitious.
What else should I know?
- How does it start?
- With an email. Tell me what you're building and where you're stuck. I read it myself and write back with what I'd suggest. Nothing is booked until we've both agreed.
- What should I bring?
- Whatever you have. A repo, a prompt that half works, a sketch, or a list of things you want to learn.
- I'm a beginner. Is that fine?
- Yes. That is who this is for.
- Where does it happen?
- On a call, from wherever you are.
- Do you work with teams in person?
- Remote, for now. If that changes it will say so here.