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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

#101

Post by celdon25 »

Archit3ch wrote: post #73
dangom wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard disagree. There is incentive to pay for education (particularly the type offered by CodeCrafters) regardless of experience level, but the more engaged, more motivated, more mindful personality types will be more likely to make the connection that it's well worth the investment.

A free community is going to have more lurkers that aren't engaged, aren't committed, and may post one thing if they even post at all, before slithering away. Drive-by-comments would be more common. It would not add value, it would be like most of the rest of the public Internet.

Additionally, you might have missed this from the OP:

> First, we cater to people with programming experience. There are tons of introductory “learn to code” resources out there, but surprisingly little once you get past the basics. Good programmers want to get better and to develop in areas where they’re not strong yet, and that’s what we help with.

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

#102

Post by sarupbanskota »

cercatrova wrote: post #76
sarupbanskota wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 begi…

Rustlings for other languages seems like a really good idea, thanks! Were you doing Rustlings as part of onboarding at a new job / project, or as a hobby?

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

#103

Post by cercatrova »

sarupbanskota wrote: post #102
cercatrova wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 begi…

Rustlings for other languages seems like a really good idea, thanks! Were you doing Rustlings as part of onboarding at a new job / project, or as a hobby?

As a hobby, I do full stack in JS mainly for work. You could take a look at exercism.io as well, although some of their questions are more like Leetcode rather than teaching the language which is not the way to go I think.

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

#104

Post by nindalf »

sarupbanskota wrote: post #90
nindalf wrote: post #88

I signed up for the year subscription. But that's not actually what I want. I want a one-time payment because I know I'm terrible with these recurring subscriptions. I know in a year I'm going to be like "damn, I didn't cancel that??" Could you please implement non-recurring purchases? Or at least, enable it for users who ask. Speaking of which, could you make my purchase non-recurring? My username is the same as HN.

Thanks for signing up, excited to see what you build! Our quarterly and annual plans are both one-time, so you should be good! I also verified your details on Stripe and can confirm this.

I misinterpreted what Stripe was telling me. It said something like "you're agreeing to allow Codecrafters to charge you recurring fees". I realise now it was just the charge after the 3 day trial.

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

#105

Post by sarupbanskota »

andy_ppp wrote: post #87

This is a great idea, I’ve had a slightly different one that could be added to this that is a different type or programming more within your application. Examples of this off the top of my head you should know are caching, login, image uploading direct to s3 and resizing, event driven systems, scaling stuff with the dynamo db/Cassandra style of writing out denormalised views etc. So instead of concentrating on softwa…

All good ideas! Thank you for your appreciation!

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

#106

Post by AlchemistCamp »

It’s generally just the largest and highest prestige tech companies that pay for $80/month worth of training for their employees. I suspect the price is a barrier not only for the median dev, but even for the median American dev. It’s likely a bit of a barrier even for the 20th percentile dev living in the US.

In other words, if the quality of this offering is excellent, it will be a powerful example of the Matthew Effect. The best compensated 5-10% of mid-level devs will pull further ahead.

I can definitely see going for the corporate training budgets as an appealing business model, though.

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

#107

Post by sarupbanskota »

nindalf wrote: post #104
sarupbanskota wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for signing up, excited to see what you build! Our quarterly and annual plans are both one-time, so you should be good! I also verified your details on Stripe and can confirm this.

I misinterpreted what Stripe was telling me. It said something like "you're agreeing to allow Codecrafters to charge you recurring fees". I realise now it was just the charge after the 3 day trial.

All good! Glad it's sorted!

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

#108

Post by jamestimmins »

This looks really awesome, and as someone who loves reading source code (and works in OSS full time), this is my ideal way to learn.

The price seems sensible as long as the quality is high. The question I'd want answered before asking my employer to pay for it is how complex it can get. There's certainly value in a Redis that takes 3 hours to build, but there's a lot more value in the 30-50 hour version where you have to think through design tradeoffs and dealing with hard edge cases. It's the more complex version that I'd ask for my employer to pay $80/month for.

For context, I've been in industry for 8 years and work on the Airflow OSS project as my day job.

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

#109

Post by kodah »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #106

It’s generally just the largest and highest prestige tech companies that pay for $80/month worth of training for their employees. I suspect the price is a barrier not only for the median dev, but even for the median American dev. It’s likely a bit of a barrier even for the 20th percentile dev living in the US. In other words, if the quality of this offering is excellent, it will be a powerful example of the Matthew E…

Yeah, I'd love to use this service. Some of the challenges are really cool sounding. That said, I don't even pay $80/m for my IDE, and that's a critical tool I can't go without at this point.

One data point I learned being a programmer in the American South was that companies generally did not pay out for things like conferences, education (aside from college) etc... If you want to serve those folks (and I suspect there's a lot of them!) then the price point might need to be different.

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

#110

Post by rahimnathwani »

I love the idea of this, and I disagree with others about the price being too high. If you're in the US/Canada/UK and planning to spend even a couple of hours per month using this to further your skills and career, then the value of your time investment will exceed your cash outlay on the subscription.

That being said, I wonder whether you've considered offering a student discount for bona fide students? You could do this via sites like Unidays or StudentBeans. You can rely on their process for verifying students, instead of just accepting anyone with an edu email address (which are sometimes available to alumni).

I'm sure some of the folks doing online CS degrees at WGU and Georgia Tech would be interested in this.

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