How to ship your first project

Start to finish, the first time. Budget an evening for the build; the shipping part itself takes about five minutes.

1. Set up Hackatime

Hackatime is a plugin for your editor that records which project you are working on and for how long. It has to be running while you work, or the time does not exist as far as Crescent is concerned. There is no way to add hours by hand afterwards, on purpose.

Install it for your editor, follow its setup, then write code for a few minutes and check that time is showing up on your Hackatime dashboard. Do this before you start building, not after.

2. Create a project

From the dashboard, Create a project. You give it a name and pick a card.

A card is an optional weekly challenge with a multiplier on it: build a bot, ship a library, make something that lives in a terminal. Meeting its requirement multiplies every approved hour on that project. If none of them fit what you want to build, take the wildcard: no requirement, full base rate, no penalty. Picking a card is a bonus, never a condition for being paid.

Each card shows its multiplier and links to its own guide, where one exists.

You can change the card any time up until your first ship. After that it locks, and the project keeps that multiplier for the rest of its life.

Once the project exists, its page is where everything else happens: the card you picked on the left, and the “What next?” list on the right.

3. Link your Hackatime projects

On the project page, open the edit sheet and tick the Hackatime projects this one uses. This is the step people forget, and nothing works without it: until a Hackatime project is ticked, your tracked time has nowhere to land.

One Hackatime project belongs to one Crescent project only, so the same hour can never be paid twice. The total on the project page catches up within a minute.

4. Build it

The actual part. Work on it with Hackatime running.

You need thirty tracked minutes before you can ship, which is a floor and not a target. Ship when the thing works, not when the timer says you may.

5. Fill in the “What next?” list

The project page keeps a checklist, and the Ship button stays dark until it is clear:

• Pick Hackatime projects. Step 3.
• Track 30 minutes. Counted since your last approved ship, so it applies to your second ship too.
• Add a repo. Public, on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg or sr.ht. It needs a README saying what the thing is, how to set it up and how to run it. Several commits that show it being built beat one enormous commit.
• Add a demo. A link where somebody who is not a programmer can experience it: a live site, a downloadable build, an app store page. A repository full of source is not a demo. For hardware, a video of the hardware working is the demo.
• Write a description. Forty characters minimum, though a real paragraph serves you better. Say what it is, what it does, and if you used an assistant or followed a tutorial, say that here.
• Add a screenshot. A still of the thing running. Not a logo, not a banner, not a mockup, not a GIF.

The “?” beside any field opens the raccoon, who will answer questions about that particular field.

6. Ship

Press it. The project page then shows your place in the queue and the median wait for ships sent this week.

A reviewer will do one of three things:

• Approve. The hours they can verify are paid, multiplied by your card, and turn into stars.
• Ask for changes. You get a specific list. Work through it and ship again.
• Close the project. Rare, and reserved for things like claimed work that is not yours.

7. Then keep going

When a ship is approved the project’s watermark moves up to the time Hackatime had recorded at that moment. Your next ship pays only the hours above it.

So the useful habit is: keep building the thing you already started, and ship it again whenever you have done another meaningful chunk. That works in any week, however old the project is. See Start here for how re-shipping is paid.

The two mistakes that cost people hours

1. Building first and installing Hackatime afterwards. Untracked time is gone. Nobody can give it back to you.
2. Never ticking the Hackatime projects. The hours are tracked but attached to nothing, and the ship shows zero.

Both are cheap to avoid and impossible to fix later, which is why they are worth the warning.