What we learned shipping 18 student projects in 8 weeks.

Cohort 02 of AWS Expedition finished last month. Eighteen students, eighteen production deploys, eight weeks. Here's what we learned about teaching this — most of it from things that didn't work the first time.

Week 1 deploy was non-negotiable

We used to wait until week 3 for the first production deploy. Cohort 02 we forced it to Friday of week 1. The students who'd never deployed anything got the scariest part out of the way first. The rest of the cohort accelerated from there.

Code review on Tuesday, not the instructor's office hours

Group code review with the full cohort, transcript on file. Students stopped writing for the instructor and started writing for the room — which is closer to the job.