Your App Deserves an Audience

Beyond the Workshop

Right now, your Avalanche Field Guide works. It shows real danger ratings, real weather, real snowpack data. You've connected it to live data sources, added features your team is proud of, and your AI coding assistant knows the project inside and out thanks to the context file you set up in Lift 3.

But there's a problem: it only works inside your workspace. If your teammate opens a browser on their phone and tries to visit your Field Guide, they can't. If a friend heading into the backcountry tomorrow wanted to check conditions, they'd have no way to find it. Your app is locked inside the workshop — like a painting that never leaves the artist's studio.

Workspace vs. Production

Your workspace in Coder is a workshop — a place to build, experiment, and iterate. It's designed for you and your team. It's not designed for the public.

Production is the gallery — a permanent place where anyone can see your work. When you deploy your application, you're moving it from your private workshop to a public gallery. Instead of only being accessible on your screen inside Coder, your Field Guide gets a live URL — a web address anyone can visit from any device, anywhere.

Think of it like the difference between cooking a meal in your kitchen (your workspace) and opening a restaurant (production). The meal is the same — but the restaurant lets other people enjoy it too.

Your Work Is Already Protected

Here's some good news: you've been protecting your work all along.

Every time you told your AI coding assistant to "save my progress and sync it," two things happened:

1. Save created a snapshot of your work — a record of exactly what your project looked like at that moment
2. Sync backed up that snapshot to GitLab — a safe place outside of your workspace

That's source control — a system that tracks every change, who made it, and when. It's the same version history concept from Lift 2, working automatically every time you save and sync.

This means: - If your workspace restarts, your work is safe - If you want to go back to an earlier version, you can - Your whole history of changes — from the first README edit to the latest feature — is recorded

Deployment builds on this. The same saved-and-synced work that's backed up in GitLab is what gets deployed to a live URL. You don't need to do anything extra to prepare — you've been doing the right thing all along.

Team Activity: Who Would Use This?

Format: Team Discussion Time: ~3 minutes

Think about your Avalanche Field Guide as if it were live right now — accessible to anyone with a link.

Discuss: - Who would benefit from using your Field Guide? (Friends, family, a local ski patrol, a backcountry guide service?) - What behavior change are you hoping for? If someone used your Field Guide before heading into the backcountry, what would they do differently — and how might that lead to better avalanche safety and fewer deaths? - What assumptions did your team make while building this? What unknowns would you want to test by putting it in front of real users?

Hold onto those answers — they'll shape your final sprint in Run 4.

Key Insight

Your workspace is a workshop. Production is the gallery. Deployment is the act of moving your work from one to the other — and your save-and-sync habit has already been preparing you for it. The work you've done, the changes you've tracked, and the context you've built are all ready to go live.