Build · A complete product architecture course

Websites, Apps & APIs from First Principles.

Understand how a polished interface, application logic, data, authentication, APIs, integrations, analytics, and infrastructure fit together.

AccessFree · public

Structure7 modules · 5.5 hours

LevelBuilder

Fieldwork7 operating artifacts

Who this is for

Founders and builders planning customer portals, marketplaces, internal tools, SaaS products, conversion websites, or API-backed workflows.

Course outcome

Leave with the architecture, API contract, data model, release plan, and quality gates for a focused production web application.

Choose the smallest valuable product

Define one user, one costly problem, one measurable action, and the minimum system needed to support it.

Lessons

↳Marketing sites, web apps, mobile apps, portals, and internal tools
↳User journeys, jobs to be done, and vertical slices
↳Scope boundaries, assumptions, and product risk

Field assignment

Write a vertical-slice scope that begins with a user trigger and ends with a measurable business event.

Design the interface system

Turn the journey into information architecture, reusable components, responsive states, and accessible interactions.

Lessons

↳Content hierarchy, navigation, and conversion paths
↳Design tokens, components, variants, and empty states
↳Mobile behavior, keyboard access, validation, and feedback

Field assignment

Produce a route map and low-fidelity interface specification for every normal, empty, loading, error, and success state.

Model the data and business rules

Define the records, relationships, constraints, calculations, and lifecycle events that make the interface truthful.

Lessons

↳Entities, relationships, status machines, and audit history
↳Validation at the browser, server, and database layers
↳Migrations, seed data, and safe change over time

Field assignment

Create the first data model and annotate every field with its source, validation rule, visibility, and retention requirement.

Design the API contract

Specify how clients and services exchange data before implementation hardens accidental behavior into a dependency.

Lessons

↳HTTP methods, resources, status codes, headers, and payloads
↳REST conventions, webhooks, idempotency, pagination, and versioning
↳OpenAPI descriptions, examples, errors, and consumer expectations

Field assignment

Write an API contract for one resource with create, read, update, list, validation, authorization, and failure responses.

Identity, permissions, and sensitive actions

Separate who someone is from what they may do, then enforce the answer everywhere that matters.

Lessons

↳Sessions, tokens, passwordless sign-in, and account recovery
↳Roles, ownership, organization boundaries, and least privilege
↳Uploads, payments, personal data, secrets, and audit logs

Field assignment

Build a permissions matrix covering every role, resource, action, denial case, and administrative override.

Connect outside systems reliably

Treat third-party integrations as unreliable boundaries with retries, duplicates, delays, and changing contracts.

Lessons

↳API keys, OAuth, webhooks, queues, and scheduled work
↳Timeouts, retries, idempotency, reconciliation, and dead letters
↳Provider isolation, observability, and graceful degradation

Field assignment

Design one integration sequence including authentication, normal flow, duplicate delivery, provider outage, reconciliation, and operator alerting.

Make it production software

Complete the system with tests, performance, SEO where relevant, analytics, security, deployment, and operating ownership.

Lessons

↳Quality gates, browser coverage, accessibility, and Core Web Vitals
↳Metadata, crawlability, analytics, logs, alerts, and privacy
↳Preview, migration, release, rollback, documentation, and support

Field assignment

Publish a production-readiness checklist and run it against the focused application before approving release.

Next course

Production AI Engineering

Build AI features around a real workflow with explicit knowledge, tools, evaluations, human controls, observability, and a safe release path.

Continue learning

— Turn the fieldwork into a system

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