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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

#71

Post by lamontcg »

altruios wrote: post #23

Price point I feel is too high for specifically what it is offering. A general point I would make. In education: cost is a barrier of entry - a smaller ask might yield far more results from people in disadvantaged situations able to scrabble up ladder. A rising tide raises all ships. You are doing work creating the material and course work - I'm not saying release stuff for free. but $80/mo is something to bat an eye…

I think the prices are more or less in line with what they're offering. Based on the descriptions I expected low-to-high triple digits, which is in-line with Arden Labs golang training.

The subscription model is a bit annoying, though, I'd prefer to spend a bit more to get lifetime access to sets of tutorials so that you can come back to it at any time in the future. The future upsell would be new tutorials sold to existing users. And it'd be nice to be able to buy it sliced either by language or by target. Most likely someone is learning Python so then they want to buy the Python set of courses, then they come back later and they're learning Go so they buy the Go set of courses, etc.

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

#72

Post by cercatrova »

qsort wrote: post #65
dnissley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this type of resource would be all that helpful for people trying to scrabble up the ladder. They would almost certainly be much better served by countless other resources.

If you are already a professional developer though, it's also questionable what is the added value. I'm willing to trust them that the quality is top notch, but it's basically a glorified tutorial; I have to agree with GP that the price point is way too high. I think they're targeting professional developers with self-training/learning budgets. I'd be totally down for this if my company were willing to pay the time a…

The value is many devs know how to do their work but many might not know enough of the intricacies to build their own Redis for example. I do full stack and while I can make a website with a corresponding API, I don't know enough to rewrite Redis which includes more low-level backend knowledge than a typical fullstack engineer might have, so this would be useful for me.

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

#73

Post by Archit3ch »

dangom wrote: post #68
altruios wrote: post #23

Price point I feel is too high for specifically what it is offering. A general point I would make. In education: cost is a barrier of entry - a smaller ask might yield far more results from people in disadvantaged situations able to scrabble up ladder. A rising tide raises all ships. You are doing work creating the material and course work - I'm not saying release stuff for free. but $80/mo is something to bat an eye…

Makes sense, but if there is a slack channel where people are supposed to be responsive and answer technical questions, then that's value beyond just material and course work. And given there is a community, if you set the price too low you start to get spammers and people that are not truly interested in the content, bringing down the value of the community in the first place. I think the price is fair.

Counter-intuitively, a free community adds more value by attracting people of all levels. Paid communities attract beginners (who are incentivised to pay for education), but not experts ("Why am I paying for a Slack channel?"). Spammers are easily handled by enforcing community rules.

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

#74

Post by sarupbanskota »

qsort wrote: post #65
dnissley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this type of resource would be all that helpful for people trying to scrabble up the ladder. They would almost certainly be much better served by countless other resources.

If you are already a professional developer though, it's also questionable what is the added value. I'm willing to trust them that the quality is top notch, but it's basically a glorified tutorial; I have to agree with GP that the price point is way too high. I think they're targeting professional developers with self-training/learning budgets. I'd be totally down for this if my company were willing to pay the time a…

Indeed, you're spot on!

Our current target is professional developers and teams with learning budgets.

Here are some reasons why experienced engineers have found value (the first expensed it, the second didn't):

1. One customer manages the Redis team at an infra company, and they used CodeCrafters as a starting point to get up-to-speed on Redis internals — to be able to do their job better. We ended up getting feedback from them on areas we could dive deeper on, to be useful to platform engineers in general.

2. A Distinguished Engineer at a Fortune 500 had built a database product before, and wanted to pick up a new language (Java, if I remember right). So they did our course because they preferred the "learning by doing" approach, and existing resources felt a bit too "hello world / todo-app"-ish.

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

#75

Post by winphone1974 »

debarshri wrote: post #5

I think a bigger value I see with your product is replacing leetcode challenges with something like this. We often give take home assignments to our potential candidates and this would be a great fit, if the platform had features around code evaluation, ephemeral environment with seeded data that would be great. I think that is quite a big market too.

Experienced devs won't bother with your LC exercises but you now want them to implement SQLite or redis? Good luck with your recruiting!

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

#76

Post by cercatrova »

sarupbanskota wrote: post #50
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 initial…

Have you heard of Rustlings? It's a series of exercises for Rust that teach you the language as you do them. I just finished that recently and this reminds me of that, except more complex. Now that I've done Rustlings which is for beginners, I have a high interest in doing something like CodeCrafters.

Perhaps for other languages which don't have a Rustlings equivalent, maybe you could add something like that for beginners as well as your more complex challenges. If I were to rewrite Redis to learn Rust, that probably would have been too complicated a project, but having a guided beginner course before the complex projects makes more sense to me.

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

#77

Post by sarupbanskota »

isaacaderogba wrote: post #25
sarupbanskota wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're targeting engineers with access to company-provided learning / professional-development budgets. From speaking with customers, we're seeing companies offer employees between $500-$5000 in annual allowances. Which course intrigues you most? :)

Are there pricing options for developers that aren't in this position? The platform looks great, but $80/month on a personal subscription feels really steep.

Thanks for your appreciation! I've touched on the pricing topic a bit here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32345899

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

#79

Post by sarupbanskota »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #55
sarupbanskota wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sma…

Fwiw I like the idea and will look at subscribing myself later. These are projects I see as magic and would love to know more about, especially Docker and SQLite.

That gives me an idea for a tagline! "We explain the magic"
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