What "shipped" actually means

Your cockpit works. That is not the same as shipped, and the gap between those two words is this entire course.

The definition, and it is not about deployment

A tool is shipped when someone who is not you can run it, read it, and tell when it is broken.

Three clauses, and each one is work you have not done:

• Run it — clone, configure, start, without asking you anything. That is units 1 and 3.
• Read it — understand what it does and why, including the decisions you would otherwise have to explain in person. That is the README and the code you already reviewed.
• Tell when it is broken — because you will not be watching. That is unit 3.

A public URL with no README is published, not shipped. A perfect README on something nobody can configure is documentation of a thing that does not exist.

The someone else is you, in four months

If "someone else" feels abstract for a personal tool, use the honest version: you, four months from now, having forgotten everything.

That person cannot ask you questions either. They have exactly what is in the repository, and every decision you left in your head is a decision they will have to make again, worse, without the context that made it right.

This reframing is why production discipline is worth doing on a tool with one user. It is not ceremony for an audience; it is the only way the tool survives your own attention moving elsewhere.

The four artefacts

You finish this course with four:

1. A public repository — readable, licensed, with CI that checks things you will stop remembering to check.
2. A live URL — deployed, configured from environment, rollback-able.
3. Documentation — a README that answers the questions people actually have, and a limitations section that is honest.
4. A certificate — the academy's, for passing the exam, which is the part you can put on a profile.

What does not change

Everything from the previous four courses stays exactly as it is. The proxy still holds the key. The tests still run. The review lenses still apply. Shipping adds obligations, it does not relax any.

In particular, going public sharpens one thing you have been told four times: the data licence is personal use. Publishing the code is fine and is the point. Publishing a hosted instance that serves other people from your key is a different conversation, and the licence page in this lesson's sources is where it starts.

The one thing to decide now

Before writing a line: who is this for? A portfolio piece for hiring managers, a tool for three friends, and a thing only you will ever open are three different products with three different READMEs and three different amounts of work.

Pick one and write it down. Every decision in this course gets easier once that sentence exists, and every one of them gets argued about forever if it does not.

Try it now

Write the audience sentence and put it at the top of PLAN.md. Then read your repository as if you were that person and list every question you would have to ask its author. That list is the backlog for this whole unit, and it is usually longer and more basic than you expect.