Effective Claude Code Workshop

Exciting news! I am running a new workshop, Effective Claude Code, in collaboration with Dylan Beattie. We’re doing an online version that is open to anyone, starting on the 1st and 2nd of September; it’s split over two days, from 2pm to 6pm UK time, so it’s accessible to people in all kinds of timezones and it doesn’t use up a whole work-day. We’ll probably try putting one on at a weekend so if you can’t get or afford the time off work (hello fellow freelancers) you can just sacrifice watching some sportsball or playing Elden Ring or whatever you do to unwind.

Even more exciting news! For the first workshop, you can get 50% off by using the code EMMZ50 when signing up on Eventbrite.

Why a live workshop?

I see a lot of people selling pre-recorded courses, or pre-written or whatever, and I’m sure they’re great, but I don’t want to spend hours and hours and hours writing and recording and polishing a course just to release it and then there’s yet another tectonic shift in the state of the art and the whole thing’s out of date. Seriously: I did my How I Tamed Claude talk¹ at NDC London in January and (a) it was nothing like the abstract I originally submitted the previous August, and (b) literally the day before it OpenSpec released version 1.0 and it was completely different from the version I’d written about in the talk. As a wise man once didn’t say:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and update your workshop every other week you’ll be teaching people the wrong things.

With a live workshop, if “they” change something on Day 1, we can tell you about it on Day 2. And with 30 days of follow-up support by email, even if they change something within that timespan, we can help you deal with it.

Why Claude?

Currently, in my experience, Claude Code provides the most cohesive experience out of the box, and it tends to be the most popular target for new techniques, extensions, skills and so on. It also works pretty well even with a $20/month subscription, although if you hit the limits a lot and you can afford Max it’s (currently) totally worth it.

It’s my go-to daily driver, but I regularly try others like OpenCode, Pi, Codex, Copilot and so on. If I switch to a different primary tool or agent or model for any reason, whether it’s something better coming along or some kind of rug-pull moment, then I’ll write a new workshop and teach that instead.

If you want to use something else after the workshop, everything we teach is transferrable to other agents, models, IDEs and harnesses.

What does the workshop cover?

On the first half-day we start by one-shot prompting (vibe-coding) something, so we can see what the baseline looks like. Then we get more rigorous with spec-driven development, using OpenSpec, and build something more complex using that workflow. Again, if I find something I like more than OpenSpec, future workshops will be updated.

On the second half-day we look at customizing Claude with CLAUDE.md, skills, plugins, MCP servers, and role-specific agents, which is how I work on my customers’ and my own projects. The last couple of hours are spent building a client for an existing server, and you can get as creative as you like with it.

What stack will we use?

We’ll be using Node.js with vanilla TypeScript and Vite, because that’s what most people are familiar with and it’s easy to build frontend stuff with it, but if you want to use .NET or Java or whatever, that’s totally cool. One of the things I love about building with AI agents is the spec is what you create; how that gets turned into code and built into an application is almost incidental. I’m working with .NET, Python, Swift, Kotlin, Rust and Zig across my various projects, and I don’t really know how to write some of those languages. The important thing is that I can read all of them, because at the end of the day programming is variables, loops, conditions and functions, and the syntax really doesn’t change that much.

What do I need?

You’ll need a computer with Claude Code and Node.js installed, and a decent terminal app; Terminal for Windows users, and whatever you prefer for Mac and Linux. I’m currently using cmux because it’s really good for running half a dozen Claude sessions simultaneously. You should also have access to a Claude subscription, at least the $20/month personal subscription, although if you can afford Max, or you have a corporate account, that’s even better.

Have you run this workshop before?

Yes. We delivered it in person, over a single day, to a room full of not just developers, but also designers, testers and entirely engineering-adjacent people, and by the end of the day we had 40 people connecting to our server with 40 different clients, and in some cases making those clients do some things that surprised us. In fact, the first person to connect was not a programmer; that’s just how good we are at this stuff.

Do you do private workshops?

Yes. If you want a workshop for your company or organization, either online or at a location of your choosing, we can do that. For in-person workshops we can do a single eight-hour day; for online, we can do a single day or the two half-day format. We can also deliver it for your specific tech stack and make the project work directly relevant to your business, domain or other preferences. To find out more, get in touch using the contact form on the website.