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50 Builders, 90 Minutes, and 5 Lessons from Our Claude Code Workshop in Barcelona

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50 Builders, 90 Minutes, and 5 Lessons from Our Claude Code Workshop in Barcelona

Last Friday, we packed 50 people into Swiss Business School's Barcelona campus for a hands-on Claude Code workshop. Here's what we learned about teaching AI development tools to a mixed audience.

The Setup

The Happy Operators community has been growing steadily in Barcelona, and we wanted to do something different: instead of another talk about AI, we'd get people actually building with it.

The format was simple: 90 minutes, laptops required, and by the end everyone would have built something real with Claude Code.

Workshop audience at SBS Barcelona
Workshop audience at SBS Barcelona

What Worked

1. Getting to the "Aha" Moment Fast

The biggest insight? Skip the fundamentals. When you're introducing people to a new tool, they don't need to understand every feature — they need to feel what's possible.

We started with a live demo of building a simple app from scratch, narrating the thought process. Within 15 minutes, people were nodding along. Within 30, they were trying it themselves.

2. Use Cases Over Features

Instead of walking through Claude Code's capabilities one by one, we framed everything around real problems:

  • "You have a CSV of customer data and need to analyze it"
  • "You want to build a quick landing page for an idea"
  • "You need to automate a repetitive task"

This made the abstract concrete. People could immediately see where this fit in their work.

Presenting Claude Code to the audience
Presenting Claude Code to the audience

3. The Energy of In-Person

There's something about being in a room with 50 people all figuring something out together. Questions sparked more questions. Someone's breakthrough became everyone's breakthrough.

Barcelona's tech scene is heating up, and events like this are part of it.

What We'd Change

4. Installation is a Time Sink

We lost 20+ minutes to setup issues. Node versions, PATH variables, authentication flows — the usual suspects.

Next time: either handle setup beforehand (pre-event checklist with support) or start with browser-based tools like Claude Desktop before graduating to Claude Code.

5. 90 Minutes Isn't Enough

We've spent months building with Claude Code. Compressing that into 90 minutes meant hard choices about what to cut.

The solution isn't necessarily longer sessions — it's more focused ones. One use case, done well, beats three rushed ones.

Full house at the workshop
Full house at the workshop

What's Next

We're planning more hands-on workshops in Barcelona. Smaller groups, more focused topics, more building time.

If you're a local builder doing interesting things with AI, we'd love to feature you. And if you missed this one, join the Happy Operators community — we'll announce the next session there.

Thanks to Swiss Business School Barcelona for hosting, and to everyone who showed up on a Friday morning ready to learn.