# 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)**

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**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](https://github.com/yiancar/Seigaiha)  
- [Ducky Pad](https://github.com/dekuNukem/duckyPad)

**3D printers:**

- [Voron 0](https://github.com/VoronDesign/Voron-0)  
- [Annex K3](https://github.com/Annex-Engineering/Gasherbrum-K3)

**Misc projects:**

- [PiGRRL](https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-PiGRRL-PCB) Game console  
- [Nevermore filters](https://github.com/nevermore3d/Nevermore_Micro) (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.


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*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.
