What you will build
Every team works on one real project for the whole cohort. We pick projects that solve a real problem for real people, not exercises that nobody will ever open.
Three rules decide what we take
Useful to someone outside the program.
A local organisation, a community, a public service, a group that cannot pay for software.
Nobody makes money from it.
Not us, not the mentors, not the team. There is no client paying a bill and no product we plan to sell later. If an idea looks like a business, it is not for this program.
It needs a full team.
Backend, frontend, QA, product management and design all need real work for three to four months. A project one person could finish in a weekend teaches nothing about working in a team.
What stays with you
Every project is open. The code, the pull requests, the reviews and the discussions stay public on GitHub. Anyone can open the repository and see what the team built, who did which part, and how the decisions were made.
So you always have a real link to show. Not a screenshot and not a line in your CV, but the product itself and your own commits in it.
We will keep supporting and developing every project for at least a year after the cohort ends. The project will change, and new people will work on it. Your work does not get lost when that happens. At the end of the cohort we mark the exact version your team built, so you can always link to what you shipped, not to what it became later.
The code and its full history stay public after that year too.
Ground rules
- What we do not build
- Gambling, casino, betting, dating, and anything built to hold attention rather than to be used. This is not about taste. These products are built around numbers we do not want people to learn to optimise as their first professional habit.
- Technology
- We use tools that the market hires for today. The stack changes from project to project, and the team picks it together with its mentor. You will not spend three months on something nobody uses outside one company.
- Real data
- Every project is public, so no real personal or financial data ever goes into it. Where a project touches money, health or personal records, we build against realistic test data. That is a rule, not a limitation of the first cohort.
Where projects come from
Some we propose, some come from a mentor, and a team can bring its own. The team makes the final choice in the first week and then lives with it. Changing the project in month two is how cohorts fail.
Build something real
Apply to build one of these, or bring a project of your own as a mentor.