A public cohort is a short run of live sessions, homework on your own files, and a four-week clinic afterwards. The room holds twelve. Evenings last three hours. I stay on the floor while you work.
A weekday evening is 19:00–22:00, three hours on the clock. The first fifteen minutes are arrival, a recap of the homework, and a look at two problems that showed up in the comments. From 19:15 to 19:40 I demonstrate on a task close to the room’s work, slowly enough that you can see the dead ends. Ten minutes of questions follow while the example is still on the projector.
From about 19:50 to 21:20 you work on your own laptop. I walk the tables. We pause once in the middle to put two or three screens on the wall. The last twenty-five minutes are a short review and the homework brief. The Saturday course uses the same proportions across a longer day, with a proper lunch. I do not fill the hours with slides. If a demonstration is done, we stop talking and you start.
The enrolment form asks for one current task. That task is the spine of your homework. I will not accept a polished sample instead of it. If the file is confidential, we agree a redacted copy that keeps the same columns, the same length of paragraphs, or the same folder shape. Names become letters. Account numbers become nonsense. The structure stays, because structure is what the model trips on.
If you arrive without an example I will still teach you, and you will get less from the hours. I write this on the form and I repeat it in the first fifteen minutes. People who send the file on Wednesday get comments back before Thursday’s session. People who send it at 18:50 get a nod and a promise for the clinic.
The public chat tools most workplaces already allow. We practise prompts, checks, and when to throw a fluent draft away. You may use whichever login your employer has already given you. Paid seats are never required for the exercises.
The assistant built into a common spreadsheet, used on a copy of your sheet. We ask for filters, flags, and charts, then we tick every number back to the source. If your workplace blocks the copilot, the same drills run in a chat tool with a pasted table.
A free-tier automation tool for the Saturday course and for anyone whose week is repeating clicks. We stay inside the free limits on purpose. If a workplace firewall blocks one service, we rebuild the same loop on another, still without a paid plan.
Offered on the data course and the internal-assistant course for people who already have Python on the machine. Every assignment has a no-code path. I will not make a paid notebook host the gate to finishing the work.
I do not require licences on paid plans. If a tool asks you to start a trial, we switch. The point is the habit, and the habit has to survive on what you can open on Monday without a new budget line.
Homework is one task per session, about an hour, on your material. You send it to me. I comment in writing. We use the comments in the next room. I do not grade. I do mark where the model invented a figure or where a step will fail when a column is empty.
The clinic is an open online hour each week for four weeks after the last session. It is included in the fee. Attendance is optional. Bring a broken automation, a prompt that went bland, or the next process you want to try. Recordings of the taught hours stay up for those same four weeks.
I do not spend class time on marketing forecasts about the industry, on conversations about artificial general intelligence, or on selling particular tools. If a vendor’s name comes up it is because someone in the room already has a login, and we will still complete the exercise on a free tier. I also leave hiring talk at the door. I am here to get a working process onto your machine.
You receive the session notes, your commented homework, the prompt pack you built, and recordings of the taught segments. They remain available through the clinic. After that I take the recordings down. You may keep every document that was yours to begin with, and the notes I wrote for the cohort.
You may sit any missed session with the next public group of the same course, at no extra fee, if you write to me before that session starts. If you need to pause the whole course, the five-working-day transfer rule on the courses page applies. I would rather you repeat an evening than smile through material you did not do.