From Dev to Deployment at Breakneck Speed

I’ll always remember my first time trying to deploy a website to production. Partly because it was maddeningly frustrating, and partly because of the guy from HostGator tech support who patiently helped me stumble through it.

My very first production deploy was about as simple as it gets: an HTML file with some interactive JavaScript and CSS. I was using shared hosting from HostGator, which I assumed would be easy. It quickly turned into my first major Google-or-bust moment.

I was in my second year of college, coding in the lab late at night — brimming with excitement about learning to build real things. But the moment I opened cPanel (for the first time ever), I was greeted by a wall of unfamiliar icons and a file manager that looked like nothing more than a jumble of letters and colors. I thought I’d just drag and drop some files into a folder and boom — deployed.

I was very wrong.

Fast-forward a few years (I’m getting old, I can feel it in my bones, Gandalf 🧙🏼‍♂️) I’ve now used just about every deployment method out there:

• Pushing files to shared hosting from my local machine

• FTP transfers to mapped drives

• Repo-to-server deploy hooks

• Full CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI

• Even container registry-based deploys

It’s amazing how many ways exist to move your app from local dev to production. And that’s exactly the problem.

For new devs, deployment is one of the most overwhelming parts of learning to ship software. Not just because it’s technically complex — but because it’s rarely taught in a clear, streamlined way. You end up wondering:

Does this go in the public_html folder? Or www?
Why isn’t my build running on the server the same way it does locally?
Where do I even start?

I’ve spent years refining my own deployment workflow, and I finally landed on a setup that’s simple, fast, and feels modern:
GitHub + Docker + DigitalOcean App Platform.

So I’m turning it into a short, focused course — built for developers who just want to ship:

✅ Build a .NET Web API
✅ Containerize it with Docker
✅ Auto-deploy to production with GitHub + DigitalOcean

No fluff. No DevOps jargon. Just the real-world steps I wish someone had shown me back in that college computer lab.

👉 The waitlist is now live — use the signup form below to get early access and updates when the course drops.

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