Artificial Intelligence Trailblazers: AI Dev Bootcamp (Session 1)

A hands-on, 4-week workshop series for software developers ready to build with AI coding tools. Led by Nick Yeager, a senior software engineer who has been deep in the trenches with Claude Code, Copilot, and agentic development workflows, this series takes you from setup to shipping real projects with AI as your co-developer. WHAT YOU’LL BUILD You will work on a real open source project for AI Trailblazers, building a hackathon execution system complete with a website, idea voting, and marketing agents. Every session builds on the last, and your code gets committed back to the repo. SESSION SCHEDULE (Saturdays, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM) Session 1: April 25 - Foundations and Setup Claude Code features. Skills, markdown configs, and the Plan-Revise-Test-Execute loop that makes AI coding actually productive. Session 2: May 2 - Building and Iterating with Skills Write your first skills. Learn how to make AI tools that improve over time. Start building the project. Session 3: May 9 - Sub-Agents and Parallel Work Run multiple agents simultaneously with agent teams and worktrees. Break complex tasks into sub-agent workflows. Session 4: May 16 - Evals, Hooks, and Production Patterns Test your skills empirically. Set up evaluation loops. Hooks, automation, and patterns for real-world use. This series leads directly into AI Trailblazers Hackathon 3 on May 23-24. Everything you learn here prepares you to hit the ground running at the hackathon. WHO THIS IS FOR Software developers with coding experience who want to level up with AI tools. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you should be comfortable writing code. WHAT’S INCLUDED Each participant gets a Claude Code Max subscription for the duration of the series. Scholarships available for those who need financial assistance. ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR Nick Yeager is a software engineer at ScriptSave who has been building AI development tools and evangelizing agentic workflows across his organization. He has given company-wide talks on AI coding practices and built evaluation frameworks for testing AI-generated code. Presented by AI Trailblazers in partnership with Startup Zones, Tech Catalyst, and Vantage West.