Project Week
From today, August 4th, until the 12th, we’re going heads-down on your websites. Eight straight days of coding, tweaking, rethinking, and hopefully (at least a little) enjoying the process. It’s enough time if you use it well, and not quite enough if you try to do everything last-minute. Treat these days as if you were on contract to yourself: your client is you, your audience is also you and maybe a few other friends that you’d like to send to your websites on our exhibition day on the 13th.
If it helps, think of this week less as “finishing” and more as “shipping your draft.” Getting something that works, that someone else can visit and click around, is already a big achievement. Everything after that is iteration and polish.
Day Plan
I will be following this day plan everyday during Project Week:
| Time | Activity | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| 9:30 AM– 9:45 AM | Morning standup | 15 minutes |
| 9:45 AM–12:00 PM | Development Sprint 1 | 2 hours 15 min |
| 12:00 PM–12:15 PM | Break / Progress Check | 15 minutes |
| 12:15 PM– 1:00 PM | Development Sprint 2 | 45 minutes |
| 1:00 PM– 2:00 PM | Lunch | 1 hour |
| 2:00 PM– 3:45 PM | Development Sprint 3 | 1 hour 45 min |
| 3:45 PM– 4:00 PM | Mid-Afternoon Check | 15 minutes |
| 4:00 PM– 4:45 PM | Development Sprint 4 | 45 minutes |
| 4:45 PM– 5:00 PM | Dev Notes | 15 minutes |
You’ll start each morning with a gut-check: What’s one thing you want to solve or finish today? Don’t make it a huge mountain. It is easier to think in terms of smaller pieces. “Get my homepage markup written,” or “write the CSS for the top hero section of the second page,” not “finish absolutely everything completely in entirety oh no it is not working what do I do oh god help me.”
We’ll check in mid-morning and again after lunch to see what’s going well and where folks are wading through the mud.
Afternoons are for focused sprints (you are of course free to take breaks as you see fit during sprints) with occasional “debugging huddles.” If you’re blocked, call over a friend or me, explain what you’ve tried. Sometimes just saying your problem out loud is enough to see what’s missing. If not, we’ll brainstorm and push past it together. Everyone gets stuck. Smart design people get good at getting unstuck.
Your goals by the 12th:
Have at least two actual web pages that feel like you, not just “assignments” you did for this class. Is it good enough to make you feel like shelling over a few hundred rupees for a domain name? Let us aim for that. We want every one to feel like having their own
.comor.inA real website with content, not bare-bones filler, but something you could see a friend or random person going through
Pushed to a live URL on Netlify
Broadly my suggestions for this week would be:
- Till Tuesday, focus on writing all the basic markup, and basic global styles.
- On Wednesday and Thursday, hone in the more intricate layouts and stylings. Your grids, your images, your other small details.
- On Friday, go over your entire page and clear pending issues that you had put off for later.
- I realize this weekend is Raksha Bandhan so I will not mandate working on that day. However, I do advise working on Sunday on more layouts and the sections of the site you wanted to but have not been able to cover yet.
- Next Monday and Tuesday (Aug 11, Aug 12) can be for more refinements and visual polish.
If you’re ever in doubt about what to do next, just ask: “Would I show this to someone next week and feel at least a little bit proud?” and “Is this a priority for me now, if I stop working on my website after this class is it enough that I made this at least?” If yes, ship it. If not, defer for later. Small, steady wins build up.
Whenever possible, document everything!! Problems, discoveries, any other revelations (“here’s the thing about Astro layouts I wish I’d known on Monday…”). These notes are for you, but they also help me help you and will be gold the next time you build something.
Forum and help
I have created a new Discord server which we can use to do Q/As. Join in and post your questions in the
#helpchannel.Reminder that the layout library has a bunch of layouts in both Astro and vanilla HTML formats that you can use to start off with.
Bonus meme
Everyone’s in this together!