Study Tools Season: two weeks, a team, and a finished project

What a season is

A season is two weeks, one narrow theme, and a deadline shared by everyone. Everybody starts on September 7 and finishes on the 21st. No "I'll finish it later" — later never comes, and everyone knows it.

The first season's theme is study tools. It's September: some are back at university, some started courses, some study on their own in the evenings. Everyone has a study pain that a small tool could fix:

• a schedule that reminds you about classes by itself;
• flashcards generated from your own notes;
• a course progress tracker;
• a bot that sends deadlines;
• a pomodoro timer with per-subject stats.

Not a platform, not a "Notion killer". One task, closed completely.

Why a shared deadline works

The main disease of side projects is that they never end. Starting is easy, quitting is easier: nobody expects a result, there is no date, and the scope grows as you go.

A season removes all three causes at once. The theme is narrow, so scope can't creep. The deadline is shared, so falling behind is visible immediately. Other teams race the same date, so quitting feels awkward. It's the same mechanism that makes hackathon projects get finished — minus the sleepless night.

How to join

You have an idea. Create a project on CohortX, open roles (who you need: developer, designer, QA) and enter it into the season on the season page. People will come through applications — answer fast.

You don't. Open the season page, browse the entered projects and apply for a role that fits. An application is two or three sentences: what you can do and how much time you can give.

You're a complete beginner. That's fine. Season-sized tasks are exactly the size junior hands can carry. An honest "haven't done this before, but I'll figure it out" is a working application.

What counts as a result

A working link. The tool can be used and does what it claims. Beauty is optional, doneness is not. Plus a repository and a short write-up in the project's updates: what you built and who did what.

What you keep afterwards

After the finish, the project owner confirms each member's contribution: what the person actually did and with what stack. That lands in your public CohortX portfolio — a page you can attach to a job application. Not "studied React", but "in two weeks, in a team of three, built X — here's the link and the confirmation".

For interviews, such a project is a ready answer to "tell us about your teamwork experience" — the question everyone gets and beginners rarely can answer.

Dates

• Until September 7 — team formation: create projects, open roles, apply.
• September 7–21 — the work.
• After the 21st — results, contribution confirmations, and a retrospective on the blog.

Start on the season page.