the day
One Saturday on the ship. A morning of being taught how to ship, an afternoon of doing it on your own idea, and a demo in front of the whole room at the end.
Doors and breakfast
Opening
We run the setup check on the whole room at once. If yours is broken, a mentor takes you to a breakout to fix it.
Block 01 — How to have an idea
You leave with a list of problems you actually have.
Break
Block 02 — Build something real, together
The whole room builds the same app and everyone deploys a live URL before lunch. Then you text it to someone.
Lunch and a talk
Someone who does this for a living, talking about their own work.
Block 03 — Scope it or lose
Cut your idea down until it fits in four hours. Write it on one page.
Block 04 — How to demo
What the judges are scoring, told to you before you build, not after.
Kickoff — pitches and teams
Nobody has a team, an idea, or a repo before this moment.
Scope Gate
You start building the moment a mentor signs your page.
Grind Time
Build. Mentors are on the floor the whole time.
Checkpoint 1
Checkpoint 2
Hard deploy deadline
It has to be live. Not on your laptop — live.
Dinner and demo prep
Demo Hour
Everyone demos at a table first.
Closing and awards
Doors close
the four blocks
*Three hours fifty of teaching, all of it before 2:10pm.
How to have an idea
Your own week, your own friction, the thing you already built a manual workaround for. You leave with a list, not a winner.
Build something real, together
The whole room builds the same small app at the same pace, and everyone deploys a live URL before lunch. This is where we install Playwright MCP and make the agent go and check its own work instead of announcing that it's fixed.
Scope it or lose
This block is entirely about cutting: one sentence, a demo path of three to five steps, what you are deliberately not building, and the part most likely to break. A mentor signs that page before you write a line.
How to demo
Fifteen minutes on the ninety seconds. You get the rubric before you build, not after.