Episode 100: Carrie Dils

Introducing Carrie Dils

Carrie is a web developer instructor and freelance coach. She teaches front end web development and WordPress courses over at LinkedIn Learning.

Show Notes

Twitter | @cdils

Website | Carrie Dils

Website | The Fearless Freelancer

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 100.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie is a web developer instructor and freelance coach. And she is one of our very first supporters of our podcast. When Tara and I were starting to consider and getting ready to launch this podcast, we reached out to Carrie, who is a very accomplished podcaster in her own right to ask for advice and for guidance. She shared a lot of logistics, and there’s a lot of emotional support as well. Then when we first started to ask for financial support of our podcast, she was the first and dare I say only individual to contribute to the costs associated with running this podcast.

Just one more bit of introduction for Carrie, before I welcome her properly to the show, is to show that when we have guests on to the show, we asked them to complete a form with just some logistics information so we can describe them and read an introduction about them. And one of the questions that we asked our to-be guests is, who in the WordPress community do they respect but have yet to meet? And I can say that Carrie Dils name comes up more often than any others as someone in the WordPress community who people respect, but they’ve yet to meet.

So as we celebrate our 100th episode, it is with great joy and happiness that we welcome Carrie to the show. Welcome, Carrie.

Carrie: Thank you so much. What an intro.

Tara: Carrie, we’re so excited. Thank you very much for joining us on Hallway Chats. For those who don’t know you and for those who do, can you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Carrie: Sure. [sound cut off]  Over the past few years have gone more into education. I teach front end web development and WordPress courses over at LinkedIn Learning. Also, as you guys said, I have a podcast and then run a series of courses called The Fearless Freelancer, just teaching basic business skills to those getting started in their web development businesses.

Liam: Carrie, I’ve looked up to you for years now as a friendly business leader, and certainly my headphones have carried your voice many times as I’ve cut my grass trying to figure out how to make my little practice better. How did you fall into all of this? Because web technology is relatively new, podcasting is new. Figuring out how to be a successful business owner in an environment that’s always changing, how did that come to be? Can you talk us through that story a little bit?

Carrie: Sure. I probably embarked into it a little bit about 20 years ago. Oh, my gosh, I’ve been out of college like 25 years. Oh my gosh. I don’t know. After I graduated college, I didn’t really have too many marketable skills, other than I learned just basic HTML to make websites. So I found out that I really enjoyed that and just kind of fell into freelancing.

At that point in time, you would actually look in the classifieds for web work. And did that. Then maybe six, seven years ago at this point, somebody told me about WordPress. I’d gotten out of the web development industry and was think...