Show HN: Gophercises – Coding Exercises for Budding Gophers

> Your site wants me to open an account before it is willing to show me something that would commit me.

I agree that an example video or two would be useful long term and I have been planning to add those eventually, but they aren't there yet.

> Also, to be perfectly homest, I would never open an account to see some videos.

Once the course is 100% complete I intend to post most of the videos to YouTube, but that will be gradual and I'll probably always have some sort of "bonus" for signing up. I'm not certain viewing videos on YouTube would result in you being tracked less, but at least it would give you options.

> Why, if I may ask, are you even asking me to open an account? Is this about you teaching me Go or is it about you trying to monetize me?

Being completely upfront here - both.

First, the course is in beta and I use email addresses to tell users about new exercises, request feedback, and try to improve the course.

Second, I want to teach to as many people as possible, but I also need to make a living. So far the best way I have found to do this is to occasionally collect email addresses and tell them about paid work that I think they might enjoy. I don't spam, I don't email often, and if you unsubscribe you will never hear from me again.

If that bothers you, you can just skip this particular course. I won't be offended and I get that not everyone is willing to provide an email address. I also provide free content that doesn't require an email address to access - both my blog and youtube channel are like this.

> What are you logging about me?

I don't track course progress right now - though oddly this is a requested feature by many others. I don't even have Google Analytics on the page.

That doesn't mean I won't ever add some tracking, especially if users are asking for a progress tracker, but for now I don't.

The videos are hosted through Vimeo though, and they appear to have a tracking pixel in their embed.

> Why not make account creation optional?

There are many reasons for this, most outlined above.

This looks interesting - but is it usable without the videos?

I much prefer text - to the point that simple transcripts might be preferable to videos for me. So if the essential information is available as text and source code, I might want to give this a shot - but not if I can't really get started without having to listen to//watch videos.

You can try to code each exercises on your own just by reading the GitHub repos. Eg https://github.com/gophercises/quiz

If you want to see my solution and how I coded it then you have to watch the video and there aren't any transcripts yet :(

There are branches with solutions for each exercise tho, so you could just look at the diff to see if that is enough.

Can you please explain why do you think that it's unique?

I'm not stuck on 1hr segments, and I am willing to split exercises up, but only when it makes sense. For an example of this, see exercises 4 & 5 - the fifth one uses the code from the fourth.

What I am weary of is a single exercise that isn't easy to break up. Or one that even if you break it up, each exercise isn't entertaining or educational enough to stand on its own.

I also prefer having exercises (at least for this course) that can be completed in someones spare time - say in an afternoon or evening - and if an exercise takes me 1hr to code in a screencast, chances are it will take someone newer to the language longer and that doesn't account for time learning about new std libraries, googling questions, etc. In short, a 1hr exercise for me might be a 3+ hour exercise for some students.