What is shipping?

Hi there! This page is my best attempt at explaining the age old question of, what on earth is shipping??

In short, shipping is 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 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)

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:

• Seigaiha Keyboard
  
• Ducky Pad

3D printers:

• Voron 0
  
• Annex K3

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!

Hopefully you got through this document. If there’s any questions let me know.