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Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

codecrafters.io

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Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#41

Post by sarupbanskota »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #33
bytelane wrote: post #31

This concept seems great, and I work for a very large company shown in the "trusted by" section. I also noticed that you have a quote from an engineer at my company who does not exist in the company directory or on LinkedIn. I cannot find any information about a subscription on our intranet. Are the companies shown in the "trusted by" section actually subscribers, or are these placeholders for now?

> Trusted by engineers at top companies with learning budgets They probably have one guy at a company and add it, based on a survey/form where people could in theory lie about where they work or add previous positions if they're unemployed. Note the companies aren't subscribers, an 'engineer' from that company is a subscriber.

Indeed, you're right — it's companies where our engineer customers work. It's been a while since we looked at that list tho, so it probably could use a refresh!

For some companies on that list, we do have more than one engineer subscribing, and for in many cases we've spoken to them to learn about their motivations and feedback. We also have a Private Leaderboards feature for teams.

In the past few months, a nice small win for Paul and I is what we like to call the "Slack Share Effect".

It's when one of our users shares CodeCrafters within their company Slack, and then we notice multiple new users that work at the same company. When we get in touch with them, I always enjoy asking "how did the OP describe CodeCrafters on Slack?" and 100% of the time, I discover that customers do a better job describing CodeCrafters than we ourselves could. It's also how we uncover use-cases :)

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#42

Post by sarupbanskota »

alangou wrote: post #35

Pricing seems fine, that’s a drop in the bucket for developer education—my learning stipend at my first tech job (this was pre-IPO) was over $1000/year. Investing in quality education is a price willingly and even eagerly paid by those who want to grow. Bet a large swathe of immigrant parents would approve, too.

My Indian Mom thinks the pricing is outrageous

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#43

Post by turtlebits »

sarupbanskota wrote: post #36
bytelane wrote: post #31

This concept seems great, and I work for a very large company shown in the "trusted by" section. I also noticed that you have a quote from an engineer at my company who does not exist in the company directory or on LinkedIn. I cannot find any information about a subscription on our intranet. Are the companies shown in the "trusted by" section actually subscribers, or are these placeholders for now?

Thanks for the kind words! The logos highlight companies where our customers (the engineers) work. Since we're early stage, so far it's more common for engineers to discover CodeCrafters, sign up by themselves, and expense it to their company. That might explain why you can't find information about subscription on the intranet. We also do have cases where we work with companies to land team subscriptions, so if you'd…

It seems kind of disingenuous to show companies logos, when it could just be a random employee- let alone using the phrase "trusted by".

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#44

Post by theptip »

This looks very promising, I think it could be a great resource for companies that want to invest in training their developers, but don't have the resources to build a curriculum themselves.

> What new courses should we add?

The courses you have already are good, but are quite low-level. To broaden the applicability perhaps you could also try something like "build a REST API that matches this OpenAPI schema" (getting persistence working properly could be an interesting challenge). Going further, I wonder if it's possible to do a course like "build a web app that does X" (Realworld or TODOMVC are possible values of X), using browser automation to test. This is probably very hard without manual review. (Scoped broadly enough, this could be solved with a server-rendered framework or a client-side framework.) Common engineering/craftsmanship problems here are authentication, persistence, navigation, performance tuning, perhaps log-wiring, etc.

More generally, I'm wondering if there is a good open-source option as a competitor / baseline comparison? As others have noted, Leetcode is one common source of study exercises, but it's quite annoying to work with as you need to submit code in the browser rather than using your IDE. I'd love to see a repo with exhaustive test cases for the things you're building; for example low-level algorithmic exercises like "exhaustive tests for binary search tree" or higher-level "build a git client" like CodeCrafters offers. Being able to step-debug through failing test cases is always going to be more realistic training than the Leetcode workflow.

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#46

Post by m00dy »

turtlebits wrote: post #43
sarupbanskota wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words! The logos highlight companies where our customers (the engineers) work. Since we're early stage, so far it's more common for engineers to discover CodeCrafters, sign up by themselves, and expense it to their company. That might explain why you can't find information about subscription on the intranet. We also do have cases where we work with companies to land team subscriptions, so if you'd…

It seems kind of disingenuous to show companies logos, when it could just be a random employee- let alone using the phrase "trusted by".

oh come on guys. "Trust by" sections are pure marketing bullshit. I wonder who really takes a step back and thinks about whether they are real or not. Welcome to Internet.

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#47

Post by molyss »

turtlebits wrote: post #43
sarupbanskota wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words! The logos highlight companies where our customers (the engineers) work. Since we're early stage, so far it's more common for engineers to discover CodeCrafters, sign up by themselves, and expense it to their company. That might explain why you can't find information about subscription on the intranet. We also do have cases where we work with companies to land team subscriptions, so if you'd…

It seems kind of disingenuous to show companies logos, when it could just be a random employee- let alone using the phrase "trusted by".

Really nothing disingenuous here. “Trusted by top companies with learning budget” is pretty damn clear and accurate. All in the same font, so there’s no “fine print” argument to be had either.

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#48

Post by rsweeney21 »

This looks awesome! Since moving to a smaller company, I miss being able to learn new things from more experienced engineers.

This also satisfies the itch to learn a new language by building something really interesting, and not just another Todo app.

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#49

Post by theylovezmw »

sarupbanskota wrote: post #32
theylovezmw wrote: post #24

Congrats on the launch! I've been using CodeCrafters for a year now and am a huge fan of the product. One problem I had was finding proper documentation/guidance for when I got blocked. Beyond the Discord are there any plans to unblock users?

Thank you for your kind words! Until a few months back, we were focused solely on the "challenge" aspect of the product. Based on customer feedback, we've been making new features available that offer more guidance when you're stuck — a 2min preview is available on this demo video — https://codecrafters.io/videos/demo . 1. We show you expert-vetted code approaches for different languages in each stage, and also expla…

That look's perfect, great job!

Re: Launch HN: CodeCrafters (YC S22) – Practice writing complex software

#50

Post by sarupbanskota »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #48

This looks awesome! Since moving to a smaller company, I miss being able to learn new things from more experienced engineers. This also satisfies the itch to learn a new language by building something really interesting, and not just another Todo app.

Thanks for the kind words! We kind of stumbled into the language learning insight.

In the early days, we'd find folks sign up to do CodeCrafters because they had a "niche" job that involved knowing Redis or Docker internals (typically platform engineers at infra companies).

However, we saw that there were a set of engineers that would do all of our courses, then do redo some of them in different languages. We initially thought that to be strange (why re-learn the internals once you've already done it) — and they clarified they were in fact looking to pick up a new language.

Possibly my favorite customer call till date is a final year college student who didn't know what Redis was, had experience with C but none in Java — and within a few weeks times, he had learnt about what Redis was (and a bunch of backend concepts while he was at it), then it's internals, while learning Java at the same time

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