I was able to set up my development environment for the course thanks to the help from others in the discord and the guides they developed. I understand that this helps us set up the plutus playground in our local environment for the course.
My question is: How does this setup differ from what we'd end up using for a contract in a production environment? Is there additional infrastructure required to run smart contracts in mainnet production?
Later in the course, I think we'll get into using PAB and submitting smart contracts on-chain. At the first stage here, the focus is on simulated contracts. There's some additional steps to get the hashes that need to go into the tx and other things.
I did the Plutus Pinoer Cohort 3 and can confirm there is an End-2-End example in the course that comes out near the end.
As the previous cohorts are online there's no reason you cant watch those videos in advance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfWKxdli4eI&list=PLNEK_Ejlx3x2sBWXHdFBRgkzPF6N-1LVi
