Its weird that Wu never mentions her completely real former career as a programmer when people say she doesn't know how to program. Or how she never brings it up when asked about changing careers from journalism to tech. Or has any anecdotes from this time to show how horrible the tech world can be. Or have friends and contacts from this time that could help with, say, programming a game for another mobile device.
I used to own a Palm 3X back in the day, and I dabbled a bit in writing software for it. I still have the O'Reilly book on the subject, like 1999 vintage. I can tell you that Wu never programmed for Palm OS. Sure, she was obsessed with her Tungsten C, we know that from the Lauren Milovy stuff, but there's no way she took it far enough to actually write software.
Classic Palm OS was a seriously esoteric environment. Essentially a single tasking operating system designed for MMU-less chips, less capable even than classic Mac OS and deeply concerned with power management and data consistency. To program for it, you had to shell out for Codewarrior for a start, which wasn't cheap, and you had to use the Palm OS C dialect which was pretty distinct from your regular ANSI C.
You had like 2KBs of stack space for your entire program (stack overflow wasn't just a website in those days) and while dynamic memory allocation was possible, it had its own Palm OS specific API rather than malloc/free, and you really had to be careful because the OS wouldn't clean up after you if didn't free every byte. Permanent data storage was through things Palm were pleased to call "databases" and were strictly limited per-app.
I know from bitter personal experience that the vast majority of amateur, and even quite a lot of so-called professional programmers, when faced with anything outside the things they've been taught to do by rote will fold up and cry. You just can't give them an environment like Palm OS and expect them to produce anything meaningful. Nothing I've seen about Wu suggests she would be capable of learning Palm OS C and producing an app. There were no WYSIWYG form layout designers or anything that would make app creation easy, and Wu didn't even write her own HTML.
Fun fact, the book I have claimed there were only 7000 Palm OS developers in the entire world. Doesn't seem likely Wu was one of them.