From a Tweet to a Launch Window
Epic Web didn't start with a business plan. It started with a tweet. Back in January 2020, when someone publicly floated the idea of a "Kent C. Dodds engineering bootcamp," the reply was immediate: "I'm planning on doing this, no joke." That intention followed me through my time at Remix, and I left the company in 2022 to pursue it.
By early 2023, the deadline was set. My wife and I were expecting another child, and I was committed to launching Epic Web before the baby arrived. The plan called for live-streaming the construction of the flagship application used in the workshops — Rocket Rental — and then running real, live workshops based on it to validate the material before recording self-paced versions.
Broad Ambition, Sharper Focus
Building the platform publicly worked. The Workshop App, which powers the learning experience, was solid, and the playground, diffs, and file-opening features made even the fairly large Rocket Rental codebase digestible. But two problems surfaced.
First, Rocket Rental was still too big for learners, even with the tooling we built to help. Second, the intended audience was far too wide. Marketing for such a general scope fell flat, and a couple of workshops were cancelled because seats didn't sell.
The turning point came just before Remix Conf 2023. I was asked to run the conference again, and as I was preparing a talk, I shared some honest confusion online: the name "Ship Modern Full-Stack Web Applications" felt too broad and vague. Matt Pocock provided the diagnosis and the prescription. His observation — that courses are solutions to specific team problems — was followed by the key insight: brand it as your own method. Instead of trying to teach everything about full stack development, the goal became showing people how to build apps my way.
That reframing unlocked everything. Epic Web is not an encyclopedia; it's a proven path to building excellent full stack applications.
The Epic Stack Arrives
A week before Remix Conf, I stripped Rocket Rental down to a much simpler note-taking application. That became the Epic Stack, unveiled in my keynote at the conference. It was a hit. People adopted it, referenced it, and started getting paid to build with it, which was deeply gratifying.
More importantly, it sharpened the workshop curriculum. Since the end state was now clearly the Epic Stack, every workshop could be restructured around building its core pieces together. If you work through the series, you end up assembling the most important parts of the stack yourself — material you can then use for your own projects.
The Workshop Crunch
Broader strategy aside, the logistics of an October content launch meant the workshop series had to be pulled together quickly. The plan: deliver all workshops live by mid-August, record them in the second half of August and first half of September, and publish by October. This was set in mid-May, which felt like plenty of time.
It was not.
I had two foundational workshops already built around Rocket Rental (Full Stack Foundations and Testing Web Apps). I needed to update those and create new ones for Web Forms, Data Modeling, and Web Authentication. Since the end state was just the Epic Stack, there weren't many unknowns — but the sheer volume was brutal.
By mid-July, the first foundations workshop wasn't even finished. With the calendar demanding progress, I opened tickets anyway for "The Full Stack Workshop Series (Vol 1)" — eight days of workshops, two per week, for four weeks straight. The first 30 seats sold out instantly, so I opened another 30. Those disappeared before the early bird period ended.
With that encouragement came the weight of expectation. The first two days of foundations and the brand-new forms workshop were ready just the week before the series began. Data Modeling was still on the drawing board and scheduled to be taught in a week and two days — with three of those days spent presenting other workshops.
The result was five of the most stressful weeks of my life. I pulled 16- to 18-hour days, six days a week. My wife, in her second trimester, ran the household.
The work was spread across every repo:
- Full Stack Foundations: 84 commits over 19 days
- Web Forms: 38 commits over 12 days
- Data Modeling: 37 commits over 8 days
- Web Auth: 66 commits over 9 days
- Full Stack Testing: 71 commits over 8 days
And throughout that period, the workshop app itself was being worked on too — 105 commits over 30 days.
It's only easy to talk about now because the attendees were happy with the result. Several filed testimonials, and some suspected how thin the margin was between the material being delivered and me still building it. But the experience validates that a clear path forward — the Epic Stack — was more than enough to overcome the ambiguity of the messy middle.
Fitting 16 Days of Material Into One Month of Recording
By the time the live workshops wrapped up on August 11th, the scope had grown. Splitting several workshops to fit delivery schedules meant there was now roughly 16 days' worth of material, some of it still incomplete. That left about a month — until September 14th — to finish the content, record everything, and hand it off to the team for editing, transcription, and publication in time for the October 18th launch date.
That window also had to accommodate a speaking slot at React Rally and recording 25 bonus expert interviews. With school-age kids at home, recording was only practical while they were out or asleep.
The pace that followed was intense. A tweet from August 24th reported 30 videos recorded before the kids came home:
Today I got 30 more videos recorded before the kids got home from school 💪
Five days later came a new record:
New record! 44 Ship Modern Full-Stack Web Applications videos recorded before the kids got home from school 🔥 Today I was recording videos about database modeling. Feeling really great about how this is going! I'll definitely finish this workshop tomorrow and start on auth!
The Data Modeling workshop concluded the next day with 64 videos. From there, recording moved to Web Auth, which was wrapped up by mid-September:
I got 38 videos recorded today and that wraps up all the videos for the Web Auth workshop for Ship Modern Full-Stack Web Applications! 🔥 This is a huge accomplishment because it's massively comprehensive. This one workshop alone covers more topics than most web dev courses! It's 171 videos 🤯
After a late-night push of 10 more videos, the finish line was in sight. A tweet on September 14th estimated that completing the remaining content would require a new personal best of around 55 videos in a single day. That same day, the last workshop was done:
I FINISHED!!!!! 50 videos recorded today. The Testing Workshop is done! And that was the last one! Ship Modern Full-Stack Web Applications will have 452 instructional videos! 🤯 Stay tuned, the launch is on its way!
The Days That Weren't Records
Not every session hit those numbers. Scope creep was a recurring theme. A late-August tweet noted that only eight videos were recorded because creating three new exercises for the web forms workshop consumed the day. Other detours included re-recording four Web Auth videos after an issue was discovered, and reworking exercises to reflect last-minute improvements.
Even the final stretch wasn't free of surprises. Four days after recording wrapped, a tweet lamented that Chrome DevTools had shipped a long-overdue network tab UI update — instantly dating the visual references in all 452 videos.
Writing and Preparation
The final stretch before launch involved writing workshop instructions and polishing the workshop app itself. The workload was substantial: Kent C. Dodds had to write instructions for exercises across the series, with each one requiring content comparable to a full-length tutorial.
The finished instructions totaled 101,407 words across the exercise markdown files—more than the 76,944 words of the first Harry Potter book. That count excludes the inline guidance embedded within the exercise files themselves, which adds an estimated 30,000 more words. All of it was written in roughly three months.
With the expert interviews wrapped up and the workshop content complete, the team prepared the launch email sequence. Early access went out a week before the official date to customers who had purchased both Epic React and TestingJavaScript Pro, at a 40% discount. The following day, access opened to buyers of either product. Feedback was positive, setting the stage for the public launch.
Launch Day
The launch was scheduled for October 18th. To make the first 24 hours count, the team offered Epic Web Pro at a 40% discount, bundled with free Pro licenses to both Epic React and TestingJavaScript.com—a combined value of $2,131 for $720.
The promotion exceeded expectations. Kent spent launch day fielding questions on X, Discord, and email, helping prospective buyers understand what Epic Web offered. The discounted period lasted several weeks before the course returned to full price, with purchasing power parity still supported. In the weeks following, the team added à la carte purchases for individual workshops. Daily signups continue, though the launch spike remains the high-water mark.
What Comes Next
Unlike Epic React and Testing JavaScript—which were completed once published, aside from routine updates—Epic Web is an ongoing project with a substantial roadmap. Planned content includes:
- TestingJavaScript.com 2.0
- EpicReact.dev 2.0
- CSS/Tailwind workshop series
- Collaborative Web Apps
- Production Error Reporting
- Full Stack Caching
- Production Performance Monitoring
- Web Performance Optimization
- Internationalization
- Accessibility
The scale of that list led to a strategic shift. Rather than making learners wait for one instructor to produce everything, Kent recruited additional instructors willing to follow his teaching approach and technical recommendations. Simon Vrachliotis was the first announced contributor, and his free material is already available on his Epic Web instructor page. Other contributors are confirmed but not yet announced.
The goal is to preserve the consistency that a single instructor provides—a curated path without conflicting guidance on tooling or best practices. With more instructors aligned to the same methodology, Epic Web aims to release content faster without fragmenting its recommendations. Work on Epic React v2 is already underway, with the first videos recorded as of late November 2023.
