What is shipping?
Understanding what it means to actually ship a project.
Original by @alexren at hwdocs.hackclub.com
In short, shipping is the process of actually making your project sharable. It's the most important part of your project, almost as important as the entire project itself.
When you first make something, usually it just lives as a file on your computer. This is bad because only YOU can access it! Nobody else can see it. Not only that, but when you look back at the project a few years from now it'll be very, very difficult to remember anything about it! It's not real.
Shipping (at least in this context) involves publishing your design out there for the world to see. Making it very real. This involves a couple steps:
- Documenting what your project actually is:
- A quick story/motivation on how the project came to be
- A description of what the project does
- A quick brief on how it all fits together
- Some pictures of the design
- Making all files & resources easily accessible & organized
- Putting it on a platform that's easily shareable (i.e GitHub, Printables, etc)
So what counts as shipped here?
We've laid out exactly what a shipped project looks like over on the requirements page, so give it a read!
Here are some great examples of shipped projects. Notice how the files are organized using folders, and, more importantly, it's well documented what the project is about and what you can do with it!
Keyboards & Macropads
3D Printers
Misc Projects
- PiGRRL — Game console
- Nevermore filters (I'll admit — this one is a little excessive)
When you make your repository nothing but a dump of files and 2 sentences for a README, what happens is that it's hard for other people to recognize your work, nor does it make it easy to learn from. It's not real. It only lives on in your tiny corner of this earth.
Unfortunately we also can't accept non shipped projects since it'd be impossible to tell what you even made. Make sure to ship your projects!