A field manual · 0 → 140
Build software
without becoming an engineer.
Shipyard teaches the process, vocabulary, and culture of full-stack web development with AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable, Bolt — so a non-technical reader can scope, prompt, review, ship and run real software, and hold their own with engineers while doing it. Two paths: apprentice (0 → 100) for shipping; yardmaster (100 → 140) for keeping it running.
Apprentice path · 0 → 100
Six levels for shipping a real web app.
Each level builds on the one before it. Skip ahead and the next level won't make sense; go in order and the whole thing locks together. Throughout, we build a single real app — Tasklane — so you watch the pieces connect.
What a web app actually is, before any tooling. Client and server. Request and response. The browser as a runtime. The internet as a network of asks and answers.
Repo. Branch. Commit. PR. SaaS. MVP. SPA. SSR. The nouns engineers say a hundred times a day, taught inside the workflow they belong to — never as a glossary dump.
Frontend frameworks. Backend runtimes. APIs. Databases. Auth. Environment variables and secrets. What each piece is for, when it shows up, and how the parts fit.
Local → staging → production. Git and GitHub. Pull requests. Code review. CI/CD. Deployment platforms. DNS, domains, SSL, CDN. The path from your laptop to a live URL.
The agent landscape. Context, scope, specs. Reviewing diffs. Debugging iteratively. Managing long sessions. The PRD → tickets → prompts pipeline. Bad prompt vs. good prompt at every stage.
Security at concept-level. Error handling. Logging. Monitoring. Performance. Scaling. Tech debt. Code review culture. Incident response. Postmortems. How real teams keep things running.
Yardmaster path · 100 → 140
Two levels for keeping it running.
DevOps and SysOps. Containers, Kubernetes, deeper CI/CD with Jenkins, GitOps, configuration management, then Linux, networking, load balancing, on-call discipline. The layer that lets you run what you ship at scale — or read along when your engineers do.
The practice of shipping reliably. Infrastructure as Code. Containers and orchestration. Deeper CI/CD with Jenkins. Deploy strategies. GitOps. Secrets at scale. Configuration management. SRE basics.
What's happening on the metal. Linux. Networking. DNS deeper. Load balancing. Storage. Backups. Capacity. FinOps. Compliance. On-call. Vulnerability management.
Tech
28 dedicated tech tabs, each with its own focused mindmap
Every technology mentioned in the path gets its own page — what it is, why it exists, what it competes with, where in Shipyard it shows up, key vocabulary, a bad-vs-good prompt for it, and the pitfalls that bite real teams. The Overall tab explains how the whole stack flows together end-to-end.
Open the Tech section →Cross-cutting
Reference everywhere from any level
Searchable jargon — every term defined in plain English with an example of how it gets used in real conversation.
Side-by-side bad prompt vs. good prompt for every stage of the build, with annotated reasoning.
Tasklane — a real task tracker with auth, a database, and a deployed URL — narrated end to end.
One page per technology in the stack, each led by its own mindmap. The Overall tab shows how the whole stack fits together.
The whole 0 → 140 path as an interactive blueprint mindmap.
Every external claim in this site, sourced. Official docs only — MDN, framework docs, platform docs, RFCs.
What you get
By the end you can do these things
House rules
What this is — and isn't
A workflow & vocabulary manual. Process-first. The grammar of how engineers think about software, in the order it shows up. Real tools, real patterns, sourced.
A coding tutorial. We don't teach syntax. There is no "learn JavaScript in 30 days" here. If you want to write the loops yourself, this isn't the book.
Static. No backend. No AI calls at runtime. Everything you read is pre-written, hand-checked, and inspectable. Open the HTML, read the source, drop it on a thumbdrive.
A magic shortcut. You'll still have to read every page. Skipping levels will leave gaps — and you'll feel them the moment a build fails or an agent goes off the rails.