Hey SoS,
If we trace the origins of SoS - we’ll see it really started with a Reddit post that provided advice on how to plan and build a successful summer project. The post:
SoS became that “weekly Zoom meeting to offer mentorship”.
Over the course of the summer, we’ve seen a lot of projects get started. Of the 30+ projects in our project tracker, not all have made it to week 12. In part, this is to be expected. Baby project groups are fraught with risk and lots of things need to go right in order for a project to ship. It’s why we used the baby sea turtle analogy in May:
But perhaps the biggest lesson of all, is that a summer project is HARD. There are countless times you will want to give up. Teammates ghost you. A technology is proving more difficult than you imagined. Things that feel basic are not basic. Mentors have high expectations. The stress can be overwhelming. Your morale plummets. You’d rather play video games and do something else.
Don’t worry if that happened to your project. This is normal. In fact, this is what happened to me on pretty much all of my projects before I got my first job.
But summer is not over yet! Most of you have at least a month before school starts. Let’s finish strong! Here are two ways to do it:
1) Salvage what you have and ship! Cut scope. Cut all the features that are in progress and just polish the existing ones. Does the app have a minimum quantum of utility? Great, then ship it! Get something to the Google Chrome Extension store. Deploy your web app to a domain (HTTPS guys! Many services like Render and Netlify will do this for you! Or use Let’s Encrypt and do it yourself). Ship to the Apple App Store (requires a license). Just make it such that something you created can be used by someone else without any action on your part.
2) Start fresh and scope something tiny. Leverage what you’ve learned this summer, leverage access to mentors and give yourself that clean feeling of starting anew. Now you know what you’re capable of. Now you can set a target that you know you can hit.
And if your project is still going strong, well done! You’ve survived a monu“mental” challenge. These Tweets from the Pearish team have made me extremely proud:
And I know other teams have been able to band together and keep each other motivated as well. Well done to you also 👏
Regardless of where you are at - if there’s one takeaway I want you all to have, it’s that focusing on small things, is the key to shipping and managing morale. It’s the philosophy behind #30DaysOfShipping, cutting scope, and no zero days. Aim for something small, see tiny progress, and inch forward with baby steps. Big things have humble beginnings.
With school back on the horizon - let’s finish strong!
☀️🚢
Cheers,
Phil