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

codecrafters.io

121–130 of 207 posts

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

#121

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…

I'll go further and say that a high price is a great way to screen out the worst customers.

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

#122

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…

Ooh, super interesting. Thank you! We weren't aware of Unidays / StudentBeans, indeed sounds like something we should explore. We have organically seen students sign up — so I'm sure a more favorable pricing to them could go a long way.

FWIW the GitHub student developer pack allows age 13+ (unlike Unidays and StudentBeans) and supports high school students (unlike Unidays)

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

#123

You've appealed to me. I'm continuously learning to become better. My next self goal is to add sharding and replication into SQLite. Question - Can you share an example with me - how would you teach someone to use OOPS (inheritance/composition), design patterns, and SOLID principles - to better structure code for maintainability, enhancements? One of my personal philosophies is to write less code, but still achieve a…

Our general approach to this is "Show, don't tell".

We feel the ideal way to learn design patterns and SOLID principles isn't to read about them or be told that they're good. It's to make the mistakes yourself and then see how things could be cleaner had you used one of those techniques. Much like code review. You first do things your way, then a reviewer points out how this could be better if you did XYZ instead.

In our product we cover this by offering "Expert Solutions" for each stage. You'll see a code diff (compared to the previous solution), an explanation for that code diff (_why_ were things done this way, what were other alternate approaches), and where possible we even offer a source walkthroughs of the official codebase you're re-creating (the Redis source code, for example).

We have previews of all these features in the demo video: https://codecrafters.io/videos/demo. You can see the solutions in-app without starting a trial, just navigate to the Redis course, click on a stage and then click on "View Solution". And here's an example of a source walkthrough: https://app.codecrafters.io/walkthroughs/redis-event-loop.

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

#125
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A little micro-suggestion on videos: record the narration separately from actually doing the computer work. I.e., do NOT record the keyboard clacking. It's super annoying to some people. Like me. Thanks.

Lots to improve on the videos front - thanks for the suggestion!

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

#126
post #37

This is neat. Although I’m not a huge fan of subscription payments where you lose access once you stop paying. I’d happily pay a few hundred dollars and have access to it years later. Like the way we bought books and software CDs a while back. You buy, you own it. Not everything needs to be a subscription unless it is a truly recurring service where every month there is value add.

Agreed. Who likes "talk to sales" :) We have a pricing page — https://codecrafters.io/pricing , and do have it linked on our menu and footer. Would that help?

Quick note here: the original comment mentioned that our pricing page was hard to find, that's what Sarup's reply was addressing. Looks like it was later amended to talk about subscription payments.

Re: subscription payments, only our Monthly plan is a recurring subscription, the 3 Months / 1 Year plans are one-time payments. A "lifetime access" plan isn't sustainable for us at the moment since we need to keep servers (including test runners) up and running.

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

#128
How is it compared to JetBrains' https://hyperskill.org ? They seems to be competitive products.

PS. HyperSkill's pricing is also more competitive. They offer tons of tracks containing hundreds of coding projects at the price of 240$ per year, while CodeCrafers' charge is 790$ per year.

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

#129

The “trusted by engineers at” massive list of Top companies seems very suspect and fishy for a “Launch HN”. It feels dishonest. Where is the proof of that?

Sarup touched upon this a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32344751.

Summary: All the logos listed are genuine (i.e. engineers from those companies have signed up and used CodeCrafters). In most cases we've also spoken to these users either over Zoom or in-person.

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

#130
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A little micro-suggestion on videos: record the narration separately from actually doing the computer work. I.e., do NOT record the keyboard clacking. It's super annoying to some people. Like me. Thanks.

Thanks so much for flagging! Sorry the keyboard sounds were annoying — I almost thought that was the highlight of the video :)
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