🌟 The Showcase — Finishers’ Gallery

This page is a guestbook for everyone who finished a capstone track. Adding your name is the course’s final Git exercise: you’ll do it with a pull request — the same propose-review-merge move professional teams use thousands of times a day (Module 08, one last time, for real stakes).

🏅 The gallery

Name	Track	Project	One-line story
Alex Example	🌐 A	alex-example.github.io	Former chef — my kitchen now has a website, and so do I
Sam Placeholder	🤖 C	expense-splitter	Our hiking group hasn’t argued about money since
← your row goes here

(The first two rows are placeholders showing the format — replace nothing, add yourself below them.)

✍️ How to add your name (your final Git exercise)

You don’t have permission to edit this repository directly — and that’s the point. Neither do most professionals on most projects. Here’s the professional move instead:

Fork this repository. On this repository’s GitHub page, click Fork (top right), then Create fork. You now have your own complete copy under your username — yours to edit freely. (Module 08: a fork is your own photocopy of the whole project.)
Create a branch. In your fork, click the branch button (it says main) and type a new branch name: add-my-name. Press Create branch. You’re now working on a safe parallel copy — main stays untouched.
Edit this file. Still in your fork, on your new branch, open capstone/showcase.md, click the pencil icon, and add one row to the table below the placeholders:
```
| Your Name | 🌐 A | [link text](https://your-real-link) | One honest line |
```
Match the pattern of the rows above — the | bars are what keep the table a table.
Commit the change to your branch, with a message like Add [name] to showcase.
Open the pull request. GitHub will show a banner suggesting it (“Compare & pull request”) — click it. Check the direction: from your fork’s add-my-name branch into this repository’s main. Write one friendly line about your project in the description, and click Create pull request.
You did it. A maintainer will review and merge it — and then your name is part of this course, shipped to every future learner. Watch for comments on your PR; answering a review comment is one more real professional experience, free of charge.

⚠️ Watch out: the most common stumble is editing the original repository’s file instead of your fork’s copy — check the top-left of the page shows your username before you edit. And if the table renders scrambled in the preview tab, count your | bars against the row above.

🎓 If you’re reading this as a finisher: congratulations

Stop and take inventory of what’s true about you now. You know what a computer actually does, what software is made of, and what happens in the two seconds after you type a web address. You can read and write Python. You’ve used Git and GitHub the way professionals do — including, as of today, a real pull request. You know how software is planned, built, tested, shipped, and kept alive; how teams organize; and what every job title at a tech company means. And you have proof: a finished project with your name on it, in the gallery above.

Nineteen modules ago, this course promised you’d hold your own in any technical conversation. Check that box.

🧭 What now?

Module 19 already gave you the answer, and it fits in one line:

Build something slightly too hard → get stuck → search or ask → finish anyway → repeat.

Your capstone was one pass through the loop. The next pass starts whenever you like — your Lab 19 six-month plan has the schedule, your community has the company, and “slightly too hard” just moved up a notch because you moved up a notch.

🤝 One last invitation: your first open-source contribution

Somewhere in these nineteen modules, at least one sentence confused you. We mean this sincerely: that’s a bug in our course, not in your brain — and now you know exactly how to file it, or fix it.

Report it: open an issue on this repository describing the confusing sentence and what you wished it had said. (You practiced writing good reports in Module 09.)
Or fix it yourself: fork → branch → edit → pull request. The same six steps you used to add your name above, pointed at any lesson file.

Either way, you’ll have made the road smoother for the learner behind you — and contributing an improvement to a public project is, by every definition that matters, open-source contribution. Put it in the portfolio. It counts.

Welcome to tech. You built your proof. 🛠️✨