Skip to content

cat work/bootcamp-capstone.md

Bootcamp capstone: a full-stack AI SaaS built live with students

role:
Instructor and lead engineer
timeline:
2025, 10 week bootcamp
stack:
Go · Ollama · HTMX · SQLite

View the source ↗

Capstone project interface showing an AI chat backed by a local model

Problem and constraints

TODO: teaching 10 AI projects live, why the capstone had to run on local models (Ollama) instead of paid APIs, and the constraint of code every student could run on a laptop.

Key decisions

TODO: 3 to 5 decisions in Decision, Why, Tradeoff format. Candidates: Ollama over hosted APIs, HTMX over a JS framework for teachability, Go standard library over frameworks.

The hard part

TODO: one war story in depth. Candidate: streaming model output to the browser while keeping the code simple enough to teach.

Results and lessons

TODO: student completion numbers, what shipped, 2 to 3 lessons about teaching engineering live.