Welcome Session — Week 0
Weeks
Production Tools
Capstone Project
Aki Wijesundara, PhD
Instructor
30 minutes to get you oriented and ready to build
Quick introductions — who I am, and who you are
Setting expectations for the bootcamp
What you'll build each week
The power of sharing your journey
Meet your cohort
I've built, broken, and shipped AI systems in production — across startups, enterprises, and research labs. This course is the distilled version of everything I've learned doing it for real.
AI Founder & Educator
This course is everything I wish existed when I started building AI systems.
Let's go around the room. Keep it short and sharp.
Where you're based
Role, company, background
You want to build or learn
In 4 weeks. RAG pipelines, agents, MCP tools, and full-stack AI apps with observability baked in.
This is not a lecture series. This is a build-first sprint. You'll ship real systems, push real code, and leave with a portfolio that proves you can do the work.
Ship working code, not just read about it
Used by modern AI engineering teams
Working demos and GitHub repos
Setting the right expectations from day one
You graduate as an applied AI engineer with the systems, the portfolio, and the confidence to prove it.
Each week builds on the last. By Week 4, you have a production-ready AI system.
Build and deploy your first LLM-powered API. Prompts, chains, structured outputs, and working code pushed to GitHub.
Implement embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval logic with LangChain. Design, evaluate, and debug RAG architectures.
Evaluate your agent before your users do. Build multi-agent systems, LLM-as-a-Judge, and ship with confidence.
Add LangFuse for tracing & evaluation. Deploy with Docker. Ship your capstone — a polished, end-to-end AI system.
Every week includes Cursor as your AI pair-programmer, live debugging sessions, and real engineering workflows.
Post on LinkedIn as you go. Share what you're building, what broke, and how you fixed it.
Position yourself as someone who ships AI systems
Public commitment drives follow-through
Recruiters and hiring managers notice builders
Your classmates learn from your posts too
The engineers who post consistently get the most out of this course. Every single cohort.
Before our next session, make sure you've done the following
Python 3.10+ — installed
Git + GitHub — configured
Cursor / AntiGravity / Claude Code — your AI editor
OpenAI API key — or preferred LLM provider
We'll walk through the full stack in detail during Friday's main session. Getting these set up now saves valuable build time.
Set up your dev environment, explore Maven, sync your calendar
Dive into Foundations — FastAPI, LLM integration, and your first deployed API
Tuesday & Sunday — bring questions, get unstuck, keep momentum
Welcome to the cohort. Let's build.
— Aki