Summer of Shipping is Live

Shipping is the whole job, so we made it a competition. Summer of Shipping is a public leaderboard where teams rank on how much they actually ship — running Monday, July 20 through September 13, with a halftime shakeup at the August 17 mark. The board is already live at /shipping: real-time rankings, individual team pages, badges, and share cards built for bragging on social. Right now it shows teams taking their seats before the gun; the moment scoring opens, every merge starts counting.

The scoring is deliberately boring, which is the point. Your weekly score is round(10 × √points), where points come from what you merged — features weigh most, then bugs, then refactors, then docs. Bots and dependency bumps score zero, so nobody games the board by letting a robot pad their stats. Each change counts exactly once, ever, on the week its release note first goes public — and we hardened the engine against the sneaky edges (deleting and republishing a note won't double-count, and amendments land in the week they actually happened). Scores finalize every Monday, streaks build for every consecutive week you ship, and there are badges for firsts, perfect attendance, and cracking the halftime top ten.

Here's the part that matters: for claimed teams, the whole release-note engine is free all summer. Join the board and your automatic release notes — the loop that feeds your score — cost nothing, with a quiet fair-use ceiling so nobody's surprised. Everything outside that loop keeps its normal plan. There's no paywall on your way in: campaign teams skip the plan wall entirely and get a permanent path to their dashboard, even after the competition ends and their history lives on.

Getting on the board takes one move. Install the read-only GitHub app, pick your tone (Drippy's the campaign favorite) and whether you want to be listed or compete from the shadows, and you're seated — we backfill your recent work and auto-draft your first note so the join → merge → publish → score loop runs on its own. Already a customer? One click, no new install. New teams now default to auto-publish, because notes land on your own Drippa-hosted page that nobody sees until you share it — so the real risk was a forgotten first draft silently blocking your whole summer, not an off-tone note on a quiet page. Prefer to review first? It's a single toggle in settings, any time.

One more thing for the shy: go stealth and you're hidden from the public board but still fully ranked in your own dashboard — you'll know a hidden team outranks you, but never who. Flip to public whenever you're ready to claim your badge. Under the hood we locked the launch dates, deferred a couple of nice-to-haves to keep the runway short, and wired up a weekly email digest so the standings come to you. The seats are filling. Claim yours before the gun.