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About the instructor

Who built Claude Code in Action, the work behind it, and why the course exists.

Hi, I'm Edwin Ashdown

I've spent 15+ years in enterprise technology. These days I run three concurrent roles: a consulting practice, a fractional CTO seat, and a cloud and data platform role inside government. All three put me in daily contact with Claude Code on real codebases and real delivery pressure.

AIFirstPartner

I founded AIFirstPartner, a consulting practice working with clients in government, legal, and enterprise. To date I've shipped 12 production AI systems through it.

Individual courses (including this one) are independent and are not Anthropic products. They have not been reviewed or endorsed by Anthropic.

Speculo

I'm fractional CTO at Speculo, a cyber risk software company. That role keeps me close to the pointy end of shipping a real product: engineering decisions, security posture, team leverage, and the trade-offs that come with all three.

Platform engineering

My day role is managing cloud and data platform engineering for a large Australian government department supporting 20+ agencies across the portfolio. That work is where my bias for reliability, reviewable change, and hooks that catch mistakes before merge comes from. A lot of the course reflects it.

Public portfolio

I publish my ongoing build process at 150days.aifirstpartner.com. If you want to see how I actually work with Claude Code before paying for a course about it, that's the honest answer.

Why this course exists

Most developers pick up Claude Code, run it once, and either fall in love or never touch it again. The difference between those two outcomes is rarely about Claude itself. It's about whether the developer learned how to feed it the right context, control the conversation, and wire it into their existing tools.

Claude Code in Action is the playbook I use when onboarding a team onto Claude Code: CLAUDE.md that holds, custom slash commands, MCP servers, GitHub Actions review, hooks that enforce your standards, and SDK integration for the pipeline work you want to automate end to end. Every concept is paired with a working example you can apply to your own project the same day.

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