Ship It

Part A — Your first launch (15 min)

For pages made of plain files (like your About Me and bakery pages — pros call these static sites: just paper, no machinery), GitHub hosts them free.

1. On your repo's GitHub page: Settings → Pages.
2. Under "Build and deployment", set Source to Deploy from a branch, pick your main branch and / (root), and Save.
3. Wait for the green check (1–3 minutes). Refresh until you see: "Your site is live at https://YOUR-USERNAME.github.io/vibe-coding-course/"
4. Open it. On your phone. This is the moment. Send it to one person who will be nice about it.

🤖 If any button doesn't look like this (GitHub rearranges its furniture sometimes): ask your AI, "Walk me through enabling GitHub Pages for my repo, step by step, for the current GitHub layout."

Part B — The ship loop (15 min)

Here's the professional rhythm you'll use forever:

change (small bite)  →  review the diff  →  commit  →  push  →  live in ~1 minute

Run the loop twice right now:

1. Ask for a small change that's worth the world seeing — e.g.:

   Add a line to my footer: "Last updated [today's date]".
   Change nothing else, show me the diff first.
   

2. Review it (Challenge 5, three questions). Commit. Push.

3. Watch your live site update about a minute later. No servers, no settings.

4. Do it once more with a change of your choice.

Notice what you've assembled across this course: prompt (C3) → diff review (C5) → commit (C1) → secrets check (C2) → push → live. That pipeline is professional software development. You're doing the real loop, just calmer.

Part C — When your app needs a brain (15 min, reading challenge)

Static sites are paper: text, images, buttons that work in the browser. But some ideas need machinery — saving a guestbook entry so it exists tomorrow, sending an email, storing passwords. That machinery is a server (a computer running your logic, in the cloud), and you'll know you need one when your idea involves remembering or doing things after the page closes.

You don't need to build a server today, but you need the map:

• Static (paper): portfolio, event invite, bakery menu, About Me → GitHub Pages, free, perfect.
• Dynamic (paper + machinery): anything that saves data, has user accounts, or sends messages → you'll eventually deploy to a hosting service (free tiers exist for all of them) and — this is the important part —

⚠️ The shipping security rule (Challenge 2 grows up): the moment you deploy anything dynamic, your secrets move from your .env drawer to the hosting service's settings panel (usually called "Environment Variables" or "Secrets"). Never paste a real API key into code because "it needs to be on the server anyway." It gets there through the settings panel, still never written in your files. When you get there, ask your AI: "How do I add my .env values as environment variables on this host?"

And the flip side to check today, on your fresh static site: view your live site's source (right-click → View Page Source) and search for anything that looks like a key (sk-, key=, token). Nothing there? Ship clean.

Part D — Name it (optional, 10 min)

your-username.github.io/vibe-coding-course is honest but not lovely. A domain is your site's own name — flourandfog.com — rented yearly (~$10–15) from a registrar (e.g. Namecheap, Cloudflare). Buying one and connecting it is a nice 30-minute quest for another day; ask your AI "walk me through connecting a custom domain to GitHub Pages" when the moment comes. For now: free subdomain, fully respectable.