> shipley-farms --greet

Hello, world.

We are a family cattle farm in Vilas, North Carolina. We raise Black Angus, we run a store, and we built our own storefront rather than renting someone else's.

This page is an open door. If you write software, or you are learning to, or you have never written a line but you noticed something on our site that is wrong, there is something here for you to do.

Your first contribution, in about ten minutes

There is exactly one spelling mistake on this page. One. We put it there on purpose.

Find it, fix it, and send us the correction. That is a real contribution to a real business's real website, and when we merge it, this page changes for everyone who visits. You will have shipped something.

Here is the whole process:

  1. Go to site/helloworld.html in our repository. This file is this page.
  2. Click the pencil icon to edit it. GitHub makes you a copy automatically. You cannot break anything.
  3. Fix the mistake.
  4. Scroll down, write a sentence about what you changed, and click Propose changes.
  5. Click Create pull request.

That is it. No install, no setup, no account beyond a free GitHub one. We will recieve it, read it, and reply. If it is right, we merge it and your fix goes live on this page.

Find the mistake

Never used GitHub before? That is genuinely fine, and this is a good first thing to try. If you get stuck, tell us where you got stuck and we will help. Getting stuck is useful information about our instructions, not about you.

Things you could build

Our whole product catalog is public: every product with its name, cut, category, image and price, as a single file at /files/catalog.json. No key, no signup, no rate limit. Everything below starts from that one file.

If you are just starting out

  • A printable price list. Read the catalog, print a clean one-page PDF. Our staff would genuinely use this.
  • A "what does a quarter cow get you" calculator. People ask us this constantly and we answer it by hand every time.
  • A price-per-pound comparison table so a shopper can see which cuts are the best value this week.
  • A cut chart that maps our SKUs onto a diagram of a steer.

If you are comfortable with an API

  • A Discord or Slack bot that posts when a new product appears.
  • A kitchen menu board that pulls live cuts and prices onto a screen.
  • A recipe matcher: give it a recipe, get back the exact cuts to order.
  • A freezer inventory tracker for someone who bought a bulk share.
  • An accessibility audit of our storefront. We care about this and we know we have gaps.

If you build for restaurants or shops

  • A Square or Toast catalog sync, so a kitchen can order without retyping anything.
  • A Shopify or WooCommerce bridge, so another store can resell our beef.
  • A standing order tool for a restaurant that buys the same thing weekly.
  • A cost-per-plate calculator for a chef pricing a menu.

If you do not write code at all

  • Photograph a cut. Good food photography is hard to come by and we will always take more of it.
  • Write a better description for a cut you have actually cooked.
  • Tell us what confused you on the website. Where you gave up is the most valuable thing you can give us.
  • Test it with a screen reader and tell us what it does badly.

Want to do one of these? Say so in an issue first so two people do not build the same thing. We will tell you what we know and then get out of your way.

Students, classes and interns

If you are learning, this is a good place to do it. A merged pull request here is public, permanent, and something you can put in front of an employer, and we will confirm you contributed if anyone asks. There are twenty project briefs at three difficulty levels, including analysis and design work suited to security and IT courses, and nothing in any of them involves touching our live systems.

Instructors: you are welcome to use this as a free class project, and we will seed tasks at the right level if you tell us ahead of the semester. We are just outside Boone, so if you are local we are happy to talk in person.

Project briefs  |  For instructors

What you get out of it

  • Your name on it. You keep your copyright. We use a sign-off line, not a contributor agreement that signs your work over to us.
  • A real reply from a real person, whether we take it or not. We are a farm, so we are slower than a software company, and we will not pretend otherwise by quoting you a turnaround. What we will not do is leave your pull request open for a month without a word.
  • Something you can point at. A live commercial site using your code is worth more in a portfolio than another to-do app.
  • Credit in the fix if you want it, and a genuine thank you either way.

Two things we have to ask

Please use the catalog file rather than crawling the site. /files/catalog.json has everything the product pages have, in one request, already structured. It is faster for you and it is the polite way to do this. Automated scanning and load testing are not welcome. If your project needs something the catalog file does not cover, ask us and we will work it out with you.

If you find a security problem, email gray@shipleyfarmsbeef.com instead of posting it. We will not come after anyone who tells us about a problem in good faith. We do not run a paid bounty and we are not going to pretend we do.

Start here

The repository   Technical details and the data we share

We are a cattle farm, not a software company. We will be slower than you expect and more direct than you are used to. But we read everything, and we would rather build this with other people than alone.