Assignment 01 — Get Yourself Online

By next week you can take a change from idea to live on the internet without looking anything up.

Below is the list. Nothing here explains how — finding out is the assignment. Use AI, videos, docs, each other. There’s no cheating on the how. You’re judged on whether it works, whether you can explain it, and how you got yourself unstuck.

Each row has two halves. The left is the thing to make work. The right is the thing to understand — if you can’t answer it, you haven’t finished the row, no matter what’s on your screen.

The list

Accounts

The Git loop

Run that loop start to finish, twice, without notes. That’s the bar.

Live on the internet

Secrets

Everything you commit is permanent, and on a public repo it’s instantly public. Bots scrape new commits within seconds of a push. API keys, tokens, passwords, .env files: never.

Hand in

done when All four handed in, and you can walk through the Git loop out loud with the screen off.

What you’re actually graded on

Three things, and only three:

Everything above is how you get ready for those. Nothing on the list is worth marks on its own — it’s worth marks because you can’t do 2 or 3 without it.

Limits worth knowing before you assume you’re stuck

• GitHub Pages needs a public repo on the free plan. Other hosts don’t.
• Your profile needs to look like a real person for the Student Pack. Nothing beyond that belongs in a repo — not your address, not your schedule, not your phone number.

When you’re stuck

That’s not the assignment going wrong. That’s the assignment.

Before you ask a person: search the exact error text, read the real documentation, ask an AI to explain it three different ways until one lands, find a video. Note where the answer came from — hand-in 4 is that note.

I need to learn X. Don’t explain it yet.
Find me the three best resources — the official docs page, one video, one worked example.
Tell me what order to use them in and what I should be able to do after each. Then quiz me
on it and tell me what I still don’t have.

The portfolio — due Friday 21 August

The list comes first — there’s no point styling a page you can’t deploy yet. But the portfolio is due at the end of this week. What it has to do and how it’s marked →

That live page becomes your portfolio, and you’ll add your work to it every unit. Nobody’s handing you a template — working out what makes a portfolio good, and what makes yours worth looking at, is the assignment.

Which makes this the place to plan before you build. Every project this year starts the same way — Goal, Scaffold, Evaluate — and you write all three down before you make anything. Write it in a file in the repo, so it’s committed and you can hold yourself to it later.

This isn’t paperwork. It’s the handoff. An AI will build whatever you ask, instantly, and has no idea what you actually want or when it’s finished — so these three, once you’ve got them aligned, are exactly what you hand it so it can go and work without you standing over it. Goal says what to build. Scaffold says in what order. Evaluate is the test it has to pass before either of you calls it done.

Get all three right and you’re driving. Leave one vague and you’re just accepting whatever came out.

Do this before you write a line of it, or you’ll end up with whatever the AI defaulted to. That’s the point of the prompt below — same trick as the one further up, make it find you the map instead of walking it for you.

I’m building a portfolio site that I’ll add school and personal projects to all year.
Don’t build it, and don’t give me code or a template yet.
First: find me four or five real portfolios worth stealing ideas from — a mix of students,
designers, and developers — and for each one tell me what it does well and what it does badly.
Then ask me the questions you’d need answered to plan mine: who’s meant to read it, what it’s
for, what I actually want out of it. One at a time, and don’t move on until my answer is
specific.
Then help me write three things down, and push back where I’m being vague:
GOAL — who it’s for and what they should think after ten seconds
SCAFFOLD — the pieces in build order, what depends on what, what I’m not building yet
EVALUATE — how we’ll tell whether the finished thing is any good
Tell me which parts you’re least sure about and why.

Then, and only then, hand it over and let it work:

Here is my plan. Goal, Scaffold, Evaluate:
[paste your three]
Before you build anything: tell me where this plan is ambiguous, and where two people could
read it differently. Ask me about anything you’d otherwise have to guess. I’d rather answer
five questions now than get the wrong thing.
Once it’s clear, work through the scaffold in order and build it. Then — separately, and
strictly against my Evaluate section, not against your own taste — go back over what you
built and tell me where it falls short of the standard I wrote. Be hard on it.

If it built the wrong thing, that’s information: your plan let it. Fix the plan, not just the page.

done when It’s live, something of yours is on it, and you can say why it looks the way it does — and “because the AI made it that way” isn’t a reason.

Extra — get an agent in your terminal

Only if you already have a paid Claude or ChatGPT plan — both agents need one, and neither free tier includes them.

Get it running inside your Codespace, not on your laptop. Things to look up, in order:

• The official install command for Claude Code, or for the Codex CLI
• How to authenticate it from inside a container. This is the awkward part. The first link you’re offered won’t work, and working out why is the exercise
• How to get it to read your whole project before you ask it for anything
• How to stop your login vanishing every time you create a new Codespace

done when It has explained your own repo back to you in plain English, and you’ve had it change something that you then reviewed line by line.