Hey Reader,

I've been continuing my work with Claude Code, and the rabbit hole goes deep 😅. But rather than just tinkering with it on the side, I'm building real, actual stuff with it.

The Magento 2 Coding Jumpstart course was recently migrated to the new course platform (which I call Codex) and it was built with CC. You can watch some lessons on the new interface.

I still need to integrate Maggie Bolt (the AI tutor) as well as comment functionality, but the build has gone great so far.

And guess what? AI wrote 99% of the code for all of this, and the entire platform was built in about 3 months!

Here's what's already complete:

• The ability to start a course or playlist, watch a lesson, and track lesson progress.
• Full video upload + transcription processing (I use Mux)
• AI-assisted captions that are tech-friendly (they keep around dev speak) that are also translated to 7 additional languages (using Redis behind the scenes)
• WYSIWYG editor driven from markdown and output to HTML (very edited TipTap editor with heavy customizations, such as code block enhancements to include a reference to the filename)
• A full database migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL
• Light/dark-mode, because us devs like to work on dark screens
• Exam-taking capabilities, including some extremely custom logic around question and category pools, retake logic (so takes are different every time), and shareable exam results

And yes, it's production-quality (launched the cert-prep course on it a couple months back) and I trust the code it produces. But that's just because I spent some time to define a development process that is catered to working with the AI.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes as well, and I'll be making a demo of it all soon. But it has reignited my passion for development, so much so that I'm switching from "learning → documenting → teaching" to "building → documenting → sharing".

I just created a new video about this sharing my thoughts, and I've never been more excited to both build + teach using this new approach.

You can watch it at:

​What I Realized After A Decade of Content Creation​

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As mentioned in the video, nothing much is changing with M.academy, however I've polled many of my students and it's very clear: just about all of you want to know how to build apps with AI like I have.

So besides Magento courses, ...there may also be some new stuff on the way around Claude Code and AI-based dev! 😉

Claude Code generated the app logic beautifully, but I still needed rock-solid Docker skills to orchestrate the Redis queues and PostgreSQL migration. Below are some lessons with tips & tricks I picked up along the way 👇

Keep shipping code,

Mark Shust Teacher / M.academy Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn, YouTube & X​

List containers in Docker

There are some hidden flags available when listing out containers, and to get additional info about them:

Watch →

Stop a container in Docker

Besides just stopping a container, you can specify a timeout so to either give it more time to shutdown, or exit earlier:

Watch →

Learn about async development in Magento

Message queues are a way to write asynchronous (non-blocking) code in Magento, and you can't quite become that Magento master you want to be without knowing how they work:

Info →

Stop a container with a signal in Docker

Did you know that you can also pass a shutdown command to a container when stopping it? This can change the shutdown functionality:

Watch →

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