C8 · Week 9: It's alive!
The final project starts here, and the bar is proof of life.
it’s alive! ship the first working slice of your final project, and come with one interaction decision made — how using it works, not what it’s about
The final project brief has been out since week 7; proof of life means your project deployed on Fly, doing its core thing for a stranger, with a trace that’s still there when they come back. The feature list, the real-time layer and the polish can all wait. The spec checks for signs of life and a decision made, so the crit mark reads this week’s exercise and passes no verdict on your in-flight A3.
The decision is the crit’s real material. Bring one call you’ve made about the interaction design — not the content, the interaction: what a user actually does. Is the core verb a click, a drag, a message? One shared space, or a room per group? Does the screen move while you watch, or on refresh? Next week you can reverse it completely, but the crit needs a decision to push against, and “still deciding” gives your pod nothing. Wrong beats undecided.
The week’s data material is the how: start from the smallest schema that can carry the core interaction, trace one request through it, and keep the decision reversible. From here to submission you’re working in the one repo, and it goes public at this week’s cutoff and stays public.
The spec
The brief on this page poses the problem and leaves room for your response. The spec is the fixed contract: what your tutor considers when judging whether that response meets the requirements. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for human judgement.
- the slice is deployed at its *.fly.dev URL by the cutoff
- it's alive: a stranger can visit, do the core thing, and find their trace still there when they come back
- one interaction decision is made and visible in the work — about how using it works, not what it's about — and you can say why
- the repo goes public at the cutoff and stays public
- the repo shows the process — commits that grew with the work, a process overview in PROCESS.md, and the week's reflection in reflections/crit-8.md
- you can account for how you directed, grounded and corrected the work