What's a ship

A project is something you build. A shipped project is something you build, and present to the world! It’s a milestone where it becomes real to somebody else; they need to be ready for the world to see.

At the very least, we need…

• Hackatime projects linked, with at least thirty new minutes tracked since your last approval.
• A repository on GitHub/GitLab/etc that’s public, with a README that says what the project is. More on that later!
• A demo anyone can open: a live site, a release, a video for hardware.
• A description of at least forty characters.
• A still screenshot. No logos, please!

Your README

We need all repos to have good, detailed READMEs, written by hand. They’re like a developer note, and making it pretty will make your project more likely to be approved!

For hardware, your README needs to include (or point to) a BOM - a Bill of Materials. Basically, a list of stuff someone needs to build the hardware!

Here’s some ideas of how to make your README pretty:

• add some images! On GitHub, you can just paste them in when editing the Markdown.
• make it a devlog of all the problems you’ve encountered while building your project and how you fixed them
• experiment with GitHub formatting (Markdown supports a small subset of HTML!)

Your demo

A demo is what everyone uses (including the review team!) to check out your project. For websites, this is almost always a link to a live, deployed version of a website.

Please don’t make your demo link a video! Generally, you can usually showcase your project with a live demo rather than a pre-recorded video.

• for websites, use a free hosting service like Vercel or GitHub Pages
• for desktop apps, link a GitHub (or equivalent) release page with a built binary (e.g. an .exe or a Linux executable)
• for hardware projects, you can leave your demo link the same as the repo link. Just make sure your README is nice and has a video showing your project in action!
• for CAD, make your demo link a publicly accessible OnShape URL
• for extensions, we prefer a Chrome/Firefox Web Store link, but if you don’t have a license, a GitHub release with a ZIP and instructions on how to install it is fine.

There’s many different projects you can ship, so feel free to ask in #crescent-help!

AI and tutorials

You can use both, with moderation! Make sure to list all the tutorials you’ve followed. If we see that your project is practically the same as a tutorial, we will probably reject it, sorry!

With AI, try to limit your usage. We recognize that it’s a great tool and tutor, but if we see that your project was made almost entirely with AI and has that “LLM vibe” (e.g. gradient-y buttons, “AI slop”, low effort), we will unfortunately have to reject it.