About the Instructor
My Background + Course Origin Story
Hello, my name is Karena Cai, and I wanted to personally welcome you to this course! Here’s a little bit about my background and how I made the course:
- ⛰️ Bay Area native: Was born in Texas, but raised in the Silicon Valley!
- 🎓 Academic deep dive: BSE at Princeton + PhD in Computational & Mathematical Sciences at Caltech
- ⚙️ Industry hustle: Senior Applied Scientist II at Cruise, working on how self-driving cars make decisions…until my love for teaching took over.
- 🏗️ DIY dev journey: Built an educational platform with zero formal full-stack credentials.
- 🚀 AI product sprint: Learned cutting-edge AI coding tools & shipped 3 AI-powered apps.
- 💡 Course creation breakthrough: Packed every “aha!” moment into a lean, high-ROI course.
- 🌟 My passion: Empower you to wield AI superpowers and build real-world apps—fast!
My Teaching Philosophy
I also want to share a little bit about my passion for teaching and how I view it:
- I care deeply about how people learn. To me, teaching isn’t just a way to share information—it’s an art, a craft, and a lifelong obsession.
- I spend hours refining every lesson to really distill the content to the most essential, high-impact concepts and exercises—the kind that truly stick and change how you think and build.
- This course isn’t a collection of surface-level tutorials. It’s a toolkit of enduring skills—the kind you’ll draw on again and again, long after the videos end.
- I believe great teaching should light you up, not wear you down. That moment when something finally clicks—when your eyes light up and you feel empowered to build something real—that’s what I live for.
This course was built with care and intention—for both the craft of teaching and the students who take the leap to learn.
Some MVP Apps I have Built:
Plot Pulse
CurioCity Course Platform
Personal Website
Trivia Application
