Two hours, hands-on. Walk in with an idea. Walk out with a real website running on the open internet under your own subdomain.
This isn’t a slide deck. By the end of the session, every attendee will have shipped a real website to a real server with HTTPS and a real subdomain — built largely by talking to Claude.
Domains, DNS, A records, propagation. The phonebook of the web, demystified.
Your own login on a Linux box. Keys vs. passwords. The single most important developer skill.
Nginx, the web server that runs a huge slice of the internet. Static files, configs, reloading.
Let’s Encrypt and certbot. The little green lock, in two commands.
How to actually use an AI assistant to write code, debug errors, and iterate on a real product.
The five-layer stack that powers nearly every website you visit. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
To kick things off, we’ll look at a real production system built on this same stack: the Madison Barracks DJ Preferences page. It’s a wedding tool where couples submit their DJ requests, record audio pronunciations of their guests’ names, and the system generates a printable PDF and an MP3 of all the names spoken aloud, then emails everything to the venue.
One person, one weekend, mostly written by Claude. Static form on the front. A small Node service on the back. Talks to OpenAI for text-to-speech. Generates PDFs with a headless browser. Stitches audio with ffmpeg. Emails the lot.
By the end of class you won’t have built something this elaborate — but you’ll understand exactly how every piece of it works, and you’ll have shipped the foundational layer it’s built on.
→ See it liveNone of this is hard, but doing it ahead of time means we can skip straight to the fun part when class starts.
Yes. The whole point. You’ll be writing instructions in English and reviewing what Claude produces. The few real terminal commands you run will be in this guide and on the screen.
Then this will be 30% review and 70% “huh, I hadn’t thought to use Claude that way.” You’ll leave faster than you came in.
It stays up. You’ll have your own subdomain on sackets.work and your own login on the server. Keep iterating, point your own domain at it later, or let it fade gracefully. Your call.
No. Everything used in class is on infrastructure already paid for. Free Claude tier, free domain (the subdomain is shared with the class), free SSL via Let’s Encrypt, free hosting (within reason — don’t put a Bitcoin miner up there). If you want your own domain afterward, those cost $10–15/year.
Not yet. This one’s a community event in Sackets Harbor. If there’s interest, an extended version covering forms, backends, and deploying real apps could happen later.
Email back to whatever address sent your confirmation, or just no-show — we won’t take it personally. But seats are limited, so a heads up helps.
Reserve your spot. We’ll send a confirmation and any last-minute logistics to the email you provide.