The 30-minute walkthrough above demonstrates in excrutiating detail one method for taking an existing project, making it yours, and getting it live on the internet using GitHub, Vercel, and Cursor.
If you ain’t got time for that, this post is for you.
Breaking It Down Step-by-Step
- You grab a project and pull it onto your computer. Now it’s yours to mess with safely. In the video I showed you how to download a ZIP and place it wherever you want to manage Repos from on your machine.
- You create your own project in GitHub and connect it to that code. That just means you’re in control of it going forward.
- You connect that project to Vercel. Vercel handles all the “make this available on the internet” stuff and gives you a real URL without making you learn how servers work.
- For finesse, I also showed you how to set up API keys as environment variables so you can get stuff like AI functionality up and running.
- You open the project in Cursor and start making changes. Copy, layout, features, whatever you want to adjust. When it looks good, you ship the update.
Every time you ship, Vercel automatically updates either a preview deployment (e.g. if you’re working from a GitHub Branch like you should) or to the live site (You shipped to main, didn’t you. goddammit, bobby). No extra steps. No ceremony.
So again in no fluff TL;DR format:
- Pull it down
- Make it yours
- Connect to Vercel
- Change things
- Ship
- Refresh the site and see it live
Once you’ve done this a few times, it stops feeling like “developer stuff” and starts feeling like a normal workflow.
The video shows the whole thing end-to-end, including the parts that usually trip people up. These are super fun to make, so let me know your ideas, questions, or requests. Building in public where anything can go wrong is a unique rush, and it’s easy to move the playhead scrubber on a YouTube video.