shipley-integrations

For instructors

A real business, a real codebase, and real users, available to your class for free.

Shipley Farms is a family cattle operation in Vilas, North Carolina. We sell beef online and from a store on the farm. Our public tools are open, and we would rather students learn on them than on another to-do app.

If you teach computer science, information technology, cybersecurity, data analytics, or digital marketing, there is probably a project in here that fits your syllabus.

What makes this different from a textbook project

The data is real and it is messy. Beef is sold by the pound, so a price is an estimate until the meat is weighed. Products get renamed. Categories overlap. Students who assume clean data will produce something that is wrong in an interesting, teachable way.

The constraints are real. We are a small business, not a tech company. A student who proposes a solution needing a Kubernetes cluster has learned something useful when we say no.

The reward is real. A merged pull request is public, permanent, and citable. Students can point a future employer at a commit in a working business’s repository. See CONTRIBUTORS.md.

Nobody can break anything. Students never touch our production systems, never handle customer or payment data, and cannot deploy. See HOW-IT-STAYS-SEPARATE.md, which is worth reading before you commit a class to this.

What we provide

• A public product catalog as structured data, documented in API.md
• Offline fixtures so assignments work without internet access or rate limits
• A worked example client in examples/
• Project briefs at three difficulty levels in PROJECTS.md
• Code review from working practitioners, on the same terms as any other contributor
• A named contact who will answer a question from you or a student

What we ask

• No live testing of our systems. No scanning, load testing, traffic generation, or automated crawling. This is the one hard rule and it is not negotiable. Everything in PROJECTS.md is designed to be done against static data.
• Tell us before the semester starts, ideally a few weeks out, so we can seed issues at the right difficulty and be ready to review. A class of thirty arriving unannounced will get a slower response than we or your students would like.
• Set expectations honestly. We review carefully and we decline things. A student whose grade depends on their pull request being merged is in an unfair position, so please assess the work rather than our decision about it.

Suggested shapes

One class session. Students fix the deliberate typo on https://shipleyfarmsbeef.com/helloworld?utm_source=github&utm_medium=repo&utm_campaign=shipley-integrations&utm_content=educators and open their first pull request. Most students have never opened one. Teaching the mechanics on something that actually ships lands differently than teaching it on a sandbox repository.

A two-week assignment. One starter project from PROJECTS.md per student or pair. Deliverable is a working tool plus a README a stranger could follow.

A semester project. One capstone brief per team, with a midpoint check-in. We will review at the midpoint if you tell us when it is.

A cybersecurity exercise. Several briefs are analysis and design rather than code: threat modelling a public API, specifying an authentication model, auditing a supply chain. These produce documents, need no access to anything, and are genuinely useful to us.

Assessment, honestly

A merged pull request is a reasonable signal but a bad grade. We merge on whether something is useful to us, which depends on our priorities as much as on the student’s work. Better signals:

• Did they read the existing documentation before asking?
• Did they handle the catch weight rule correctly? It is the one domain trap, it is documented, and missing it is a reliable indicator of skimming.
• Does it work offline against the fixtures?
• Could a stranger run it from the README?
• When review feedback came back, did they engage with it?

Getting in touch

Open an issue with the education label, or email gray@shipleyfarmsbeef.com. Tell us the course, roughly how many students, and when it runs.

We are just outside Boone. If you are local, we are open to a farm visit for a class, and to a conversation about what would genuinely help your students rather than what we happen to want built.

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