Series led by Chan Meng — Senior Full-Stack Engineer at She Sharp, Founding Engineer at Gavigo, Master of Applied Computing with Distinction (Lincoln University, NZ). Chan was featured at UN Women CSW69 for her work on AI and gender equality. The series was originally taught as a 12-week mentorship cohort and is shared here, polished and downloadable, for HER WAKA visitors.
What you will own at the end
A live portfolio site
Deployed to Vercel, with your name, projects, and accent colour — built by AI from your conversation.
An AI clone of yourself
A floating chat widget that answers questions in your voice — Gemini 2.5 Flash with a persona system prompt.
A real full-stack feature
A guestbook with Google sign-in, Postgres persistence, image uploads, and real-time Slack alerts.
A working blog with RSS
MDX posts, syntax-highlighted code, valid RSS feed. Your thinking-out-loud habit, version-controlled.
A contact form that pings you
Form persists to Neon and fires a Slack webhook within two seconds. Spam-defended.
One-click CV + cover letter
Your profile lives in Postgres. Click Download CV — get a PDF. Paste a job description — get a tailored cover letter.
How the series progresses
The whole series rests on one principle, the delegation rules: students describe what they want; AI writes, installs, configures, deploys, and commits. Students verify. You only touch tools or files with your own hands when no CLI, MCP server, or skill can do the job — which, in practice, means signing into third-party consent screens and copy-pasting secrets that only a human is allowed to see.Stack you will use
| Layer | Tool | First introduced |
|---|---|---|
| IDEs | Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI | Week 1 |
| Skills / MCP | Vercel MCP, Neon MCP, Typst skill | Week 1 |
| Voice input (optional) | Wispr Flow | Week 1 |
| Version control | GitHub, driven through Cursor | Week 1–2 |
| Web framework | Next.js 14 + Tailwind CSS | Week 2 |
| Hosting | Vercel (CLI + MCP) | Week 2 |
| LLM in product | Gemini 2.5 Flash | Week 3 |
| Database + Auth | Neon Postgres + Neon Auth + Drizzle ORM | Week 4 |
| File storage | Vercel Blob | Week 5 |
| Content | MDX blog | Week 6 |
| Notifications | Slack Incoming Webhook | Week 7 |
| Typesetting | Typst CLI + Typst skill | Week 8 |
The full reading list
Each week links to a one-page summary on this site, plus the full PDF lecture you can keep and re-read.Series outline
PDF · 587 KB — Track goal, delegation rules, 8-week plan, assessment strategy, capstone tracks. Start here for the big picture.
Week 1 — AI developer toolkit
Install Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI. Set up MCP servers and skills. Practise the delegation pattern.
Week 2 — Deploy your site
Fork the Magic Portfolio template; describe your bio in plain English; ship to Vercel via AI-invoked CLI.
Week 3 — AI clone of yourself
Floating chat widget powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash, answering as you, with streaming responses.
Week 4 — Full-stack: Neon + auth
Provision Postgres + Google sign-in by prompt. Add a guestbook. The hinge class of the series.
Week 5 — Image uploads
Vercel Blob, signed upload tokens, client-side compression. Memes alongside guestbook messages.
Week 6 — Blog + RSS
Graft a
/blog section onto your site. Publish your first MDX post. Validating RSS feed.Week 7 — Slack notifications
Contact form that writes to Neon and pings Slack in real time. Honeypot, rate limit, spam defences.
Week 8 — CV + cover letter
Typst skill in Claude Code generates a pixel-perfect CV from your Neon profile. Tailored cover letters from a job description.
Capstone (Weeks 9–12)
Team project: evolve the codebase into a deployed multi-user AI SaaS MVP. Three tracks to pick from.
Direct PDF downloads
Prefer to read offline? Each lecture is a self-contained PDF.Week 1 PDF
623 KB · Dev toolkit setup
Week 2 PDF
629 KB · Deploy your site
Week 3 PDF
647 KB · AI clone
Week 4 PDF
679 KB · Neon + auth
Week 5 PDF
649 KB · Vercel Blob uploads
Week 6 PDF
656 KB · Blog + RSS
Week 7 PDF
672 KB · Slack alerts
Week 8 PDF
676 KB · CV + cover letter
Capstone PDF
604 KB · Team project spec
Series outline PDF
587 KB · Big picture
Who this is for
Beginners welcome. The series was designed for students who began the cohort having only used ChatGPT on the web. By Week 8 those same students are shipping production features in a single conversation. If you can describe what you want in plain English, you can do this.
- You want to build, not just learn — every week ends with a live URL you can share.
- You’re comfortable with two-hour focused sessions; pacing is roughly concept → demo → lab → Q&A.
- You don’t mind paying for nothing — the entire stack uses free tiers (Vercel, Neon, Vercel Blob, Gemini, Slack webhooks). You’ll spend $0 to ship the whole series.
Going lighter first?
If you’re brand new and a multi-week commitment feels like a lot, start with one of the single-task tutorials — Summarise Gmail with AI or Voice-Control Your Notes are 5–30 minute introductions to the same toolchain (Gemini CLI + Wispr Flow). Come back to this series once you’ve felt one AI assistant do something useful for you.Ready to start? Head to Week 1: AI Developer Toolkit.