Week 8 - Friday
Week 8 is in the books! For those of you who missed the presentation and meeting on Authentication, we’ve got it recorded:
While we are recording these sessions, we’re covering a lot of information in the breakout sessions too - and those are not recorded. For example, in the Friday section, we answered the question “Why is it that when I go to twitter.com, I see my logged in version?”. The answer has to do with how cookies work, and we saw how if we deleted a certain cookie, Twitter would effectively log us out.
Moving forward, I’m going to try to get us to interactive exercises faster. I think this generates a lot more value. While the presentations are nice, it’s the interaction that’s irreplaceable.
Teams
If you just joined us, check out the following resources:
Project Tracker - where you can find groups who are looking for collaborators. Feel free to add an entry if you have an idea and are looking for collaborators!
Mentor List - where you can find a mentor for your project
There are other projects in the #💡-idea-pitch Discord channel, so give that a look too!
Solo Projects
I know a lot of people are working on solo projects, but I haven’t checked in on our solo shippers in a little while. If you’re working solo, I’d love to hear from you! Just respond to this email with a couple questions:
How’re your summer project(s) going?
Are you looking for a mentor?
Stuck on anything?
Morale
A summer project isn’t quite a startup, but they share a lot in common:
Self driven. You decide what to work on
Access to peers and mentors. Stuck? Ask your peers or reach out to mentors
Constant temptation to quit. You will be constantly tempted to quit. Why work when you could just watch YouTube or play Minecraft?
And just like a startup, the number one killer is morale. When your morale goes, your project often goes with it.
In my experience, there are two hacks for this:
Shipping small things
Sharing progress
Doing this won’t make you ship any faster, but it allows you to celebrate small wins (a huge psychological victory that boosts morale) and to get feedback faster (let other people accelerate your progress).
We’ve been using #30DaysOfShipping as an excuse to practice these hacks. Sharing your unfinished work is unnatural, because it feels like over-sharing. But the truth is that most people won’t care anyways, but the small fraction who do might take notice and celebrate with you, or better yet, give you some valuable feedback.
Some of you have already been beneficiaries of this!
So whether you’ve been hardcore sticking with the #30DaysOfShipping challenge, or have been falling off every few days (such as yours truly 😂), it’s a perfect day to do something tiny, and share it!
☀️🚢
Phil