This hands-on workshop takes multiple technologies and combines them into one complete full-stack application deployed to AWS – while using an AI coding agent to generate the code. Unlike my regular Hands-On Introduction courses, this workshop isn’t focused on teaching one technology from scratch. Instead, we’ll start with an empty folder and use an AI coding agent inside Cursor to build, containerize, and deploy an entire application consisting of a separate frontend, backend, database, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipeline. And we won’t hand-write the application or infrastructure code ourselves. The application we’ll build is a personal expense tracker. Users will be able to register an account, log in, add expenses with categories and dates, and view a summary of their spending.
We’ll build the application as two separate services:
- A React frontend
- An Express.js backend
- PostgreSQL for persistent data
- JWT-based authentication and user accounts
Once the application is working locally, we’ll containerize both services with Docker and move into the cloud infrastructure. Instead of configuring AWS resources manually, we’ll direct our AI coding agent to create the infrastructure using AWS CDK and TypeScript.
