Are We Done Yet? A Guided Project, Claim to Certificate

Across the top of every guided-project workspace runs a row of circles, one per task. Follow the Money has seventeen. Assign a block of your work to task one and circle one turns into a tick. Do it seventeen times and the whole row is ticked.

Seventeen ticks. Are you done?

Not nearly. To see why, here’s the whole route of a Community guided project and its track, from the claim button to a certificate, and the one moment on it where “done” stops being a matter of opinion.

Who gets to play

First, the guest list. Anyone can read a brief, its tasks and the published takes on it. A free account adds downloading datasets, clapping, commenting and bookmarking. Claiming a project, the workspace and publishing are for Community members. Membership works by invitation: any member can send you a link, which works once and expires ten minutes after it’s made, so don’t leave it in a tab overnight. If you don’t know a member, you can apply directly. Either way a person reviews it, which can take up to four weeks, and an account waiting in that queue keeps everything an account can do.

Claim

It starts on the brief’s page, which lays out the job before you commit: the story, the level, a time estimate (about twenty to twenty-six hours for the five field-book projects), all seventeen tasks, and the datasets in scope with the alias you’ll query each one by. Then there’s one button, Claim this project. It earns 25 XP, creates your private workspace and a draft repository for the write-up, and drops you straight in. Double-clicking won’t get you two; the database refuses a second claim on the same brief, which is the kind of strictness we like in a database.

Work

Once you’re in, the workspace is a notebook that runs in your browser: note blocks for writing, SQL blocks (DuckDB) and Python blocks (pandas), with the brief’s tables already loaded under their aliases. A Data Explorer lets you page, search and sort a table without writing a query, and a Profile & Quality panel profiles every table for you.

Those four controls are worth knowing early. The task dropdown on each block assigns it to a task, which is what turns that task’s circle into a tick. The eye decides whether the block goes into your public write-up, so your false starts stay off the public page. The clipboard snaps the cell, its code, a small table or a chart, into a five-slot clipboard; snaps are what you can attach to a Community post, so you can show work in progress while you’re still in the middle of it. And Run all replays every included block from top to bottom, stopping at the first error. A clean pass is stamped on your repository as reproducible. It also matters for a duller reason: the views and tables you create vanish when you reload the page, until Run all rebuilds them.

Then there’s the Tasks drawer, where every task carries a Check button. It runs that task’s test against what you’ve built, in your browser, and answers either “passed”, or, rather kindly, “not yet”, with the number it got and the range it wanted.

Submit, and be read

When you’re ready, Submit for review asks for one line describing your analysis, between 10 and 500 characters, and insists on at least one block in the write-up. Your work joins a queue and the page shows your place in it.

Then a person reads it. They see your check results too, marked on their screen as computed in your browser and advisory only, with a reminder that their review is the decision. They have two buttons: publish, or ask for changes. Asking for changes needs a real note, and the form refuses anything under ten characters, so “no.” is not a review. The note appears as a banner at the top of your workspace, the button now says Resubmit, and round you go.

Now, back to those seventeen ticks. Line them up against what each kind of tick actually proves, and against the progress ring on the track page:

Seventeen ticks, and the ring hasn’t moved.

A stepper tick means a block is assigned to the task, not that it’s right. A passed check means one number landed in range on your machine. Reproducible means the whole notebook runs. All three are useful, and none of them moves the ring, because the track counts one thing. It says so in small print under the ring: “Done” means published, reviewed and public, not just attempted.

Publish

When the answer is yes, publishing turns your draft into a public repository page: your notes as prose, your code with its saved results, a Code tab, a discussion, claps, and the reproducible badge if your last Run all was clean. You get 160 XP and some coins, the claim is marked complete, and anyone following you or the brief hears about it. On their own, the claim and the publish make 185 XP, past the 160 that the Silver rank asks for.

Portfolio and certificate

From there, every published repository lands on your public portfolio, next to your rank, streak, XP, claps and certificates, under a note that everything there is public, human-reviewed work. It also appears in Explore, where every repository has passed human review, and it can turn up on the pages of the datasets it used, in their list of published repos.

And the track? Each of the five holds one guided project, named after its field book, so publishing that project completes the track. The next time you open the track page it issues your certificate, with a code in the form LPC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX that anyone can check on the verification page, no account needed. The page confirms the holder, the track and the completed projects, “all human-reviewed and published”, and then tells the employer that the strongest signal is the work itself, and to go and read it. We couldn’t have put it better, so we didn’t try.

After the last tick

All of which is scaffolding: the brief, the stepper, the checks and the reviewer. Good scaffolding, too. At work there’s usually no stepper, no range to land in and nobody obliged to read your notebook before it goes out.

So when the scaffolding comes down, what will you put up in its place?