This post is almost a month old now, but I was really moved when I first saw it. It’s a 15-week Web Programming course that didn’t take a single half day off, and it wrapped up last December. Huge thanks to Professor Chung-Yang (Ric) Huang for sharing his teaching.
The core idea of the course is clear and very much in line with where things are going: In the AI era, writing programs in natural language will be as ordinary as writing an essay. So “can you code” should no longer be a barrier. It should be a basic literacy.
The course isn’t trying to turn everyone into a software engineer. It’s about giving people who want to build things the real ability to turn their ideas into something that works.
What impressed me even more is that Professor Huang’s course notes and lecture videos are all open source and free. No polished editing, no packaging, just the real teaching process, kept in full. In an environment where everything has to be monetized and everything gets packaged into a paid course, that’s genuinely rare.
And looking at the syllabus, this is nowhere near a toy intro course: From HTML / DOM / JS all the way to React and TypeScript SPA, full-stack, databases, OAuth, serverless Next.js, realtime, chatbots, Agentic AI Flow And at the end, straight into From Projects to Startups
This learning path is one that normally takes years and a lot of falling into pits to figure out. Now you have someone experienced walking you through AI coding + web + product + projects + the startup perspective all at once, from a single vantage point, so you can understand the whole picture and connect a lot of things together.
What resonated with me most was Professor Huang saying that, once it’s open source, letting the course content evolve together with the community might fit the AI era better than restarting the course every year. That’s also something I’ve been working hard on myself.
It’s actually a big question: should knowledge be confined to a course? Or should it become a public resource that keeps getting updated? Looking at all the MOOCs abroad, and even free courses on YouTube, I personally lean toward the latter.
If you’re interested in AI coding but don’t want to stop at prompts, and you want to build side projects or have even thought about a startup,
then this open-source material is really worth saving and coming back to again and again. I’m also looking forward to the day we actually get to see the WP-2 Professor Huang mentioned.