@angrezi_ Thank you!

@albert_tri thank you! I agree - once you've experienced the "build your own x" style of learning, there's no going back. The courses are currently made in-house, but we have external experts contribute solutions for the challenges. Solutions need to cover a variety of languages, and we don't have all the talent needed for that in-house. In the long-term we do want to have external authors build courses. We aren't quite there yet though. There's a lot of work to be done on the course-authoring side of platform to make it user-friendly enough for an external author to build a course. In a sense we're dog-fooding the course creating platform - with each challenge we build the platform gets better and better, moving us closer towards the goal. We released the first couple of challenges based on what we thought would be interesting, all the others were driven by user demand. Our users vote on what challenges they want to see next: https://app.codecrafters.io/vote..., and we prioritize votes from users who've already completed other challenges.

@vera_mur Thanks Vera!

@irfan_s Thanks Irfan! The Redis one is probably quickest :)

@deeptivchopra Haha so true. 6 years ago, the alternative was to follow tutorials. https://github.com/codecrafters-... has hundreds of them. (it's the 10th most popular repo on GitHub with 200k+ stars) But tutorials have these problems: ◆ They're only available in one language, the one the author knows ◆ Due to lack of tests and automated feedback, it's easy to go astray and lose motivation ◆ They're created at one point in time, and then go stale as the language gets new versions Those are some of the problems we hope to solve. Thank you for your kind support!

@sarupbanskota @gshewakr thanks Gautam! Handling the "I'm stuck" problem is super important for us. That's where most of the learning happens, and if we don't offer help people are likely to get frustrated with our product and drop off. There are a combination of features that we offer to help people when they're stuck: ◆ The instructions for each stage are carefully refined based on user feedback so that all the common questions are answered. It's common for us to make 10s of edits to each stage after launch. ◆ The instructions for each stage are also tailored to the language you're using. So if a stage is difficult in Rust for of a specific reason, we highlight that. We offer a concise explanation in-app and link to external articles for further reading. Here's an example from a stage in our Docker challenge, where if one uses Go they might run into a cryptic error: https://rohitpaulk.com/articles/.... ◆ We have a "Hints" feature, where users can submit hints based on their experience. Other users can upvote/downvote these hints and reply to them. ◆ If you're stuck and hints don't help, you can browse through solutions from other users. These solutions come with "Automatic Explanations", which are AI-generated comments that explain the solutions in detail. This was a recent launch that uses GPT-4 under the hood, you can read more about it here: https://codecrafters.io/blog/exp.... I also tweeted about how we made this: https://twitter.com/RohitPaulK/s.... ◆ For popular languages, we also offer a "Recommended Solution". These are authored by experts in the field (Maintainers of Next.js, for example). More on recommended solutions here: https://codecrafters.io/blog/sol.... ◆ Lastly - we offer personalized 1:1 debugging help over email. It's rare for people to do this, but when they do we respond with a thoughtful answer within a few business days. Summary: Meticulously crafted instructions, hints, user solutions with AI-powered explanations, expert solutions, and if all else fails - a live human to help. There are a lot of other interesting things we want to do here. One of the ideas I'm very excited about is automated bug fixes. What if we could analyze the thousands of mistakes users have made before you, and use that to suggest a fix to your code? Automated program repair is typically considered unreliable since it's hard to verify a fix, but in our case we've got a rock solid test suite so it's easy to say whether a fix is valid or not.

@cindywu The Recurse center community is the best. Thank you for your continued support, and please keep the feedback coming. We want to make a product every Recurse batch will enjoy.

@vishaag good question! The process we use for breaking down challenges into stages is similar to "feature slicing": https://handbook.infinityworks.c.... As an example, in our Git challenge, the first stage is to initialize a repository since that's usually the first step in using Git + it's relatively easy (just creating a few files and folders). Subsequent stages involve more complex features like making commits, cloning repositories and so on. We try to order stages based on difficulty. This isn't always possible though, since there might be features that are simple to implement but only once another complex feature is already in place. We highlight such cases in the app so users know what level of difficulty to expect from a stage.

@puspesh this wasn't too difficult to build, took us a couple of days experimenting with prompts to get good results. I tweeted the whole journey here: https://twitter.com/RohitPaulK/s... (includes the full prompt and how it evolved). We had to write two separate prompts - one to break a diff down into relevant chunks, and another to explain each chunk. We didn't need to do few-shot prompting or fine-tuning. The results are far better than I thought they'd be - GPT-4 is able to catch a lot of subtleties in code. One example that blew my mind is where it recognized that a variable was unused, and explained what purpose it might serve in _future_ changes to the code.

@alanafanderson thanks Alana! 

 There’s definitely a lot of demand for full-stack product-y challenges like you mentioned. We’re going to experiment with some ideas in this space :) For context, we chose the current set of challenges (Redis / Docker / Git / SQLite / Grep) because:

 (a) they’re “evergreen” tools — widely used, some have been around for decades
 (b) they’re the kind of tools where learning the internals helps you become more efficient at _using_ the tool. For example: I rarely have to reach for regex cheat sheets anymore now that I’ve built my own Grep from scratch. (c) they’re easy to build tests for. All of these have structured interfaces (either they’re CLI tools, or they speak a well known protocol), and that makes it easy to test and convey error messages to the user.

@niranjan94! This comment touched me. You've been one of our greatest supporters. Community oriented features we've rolled out recently: ◆ You can now look at how others have approached the same stage you tried, and get our AI to explain what's going on in their code https://codecrafters.io/blog/exp... ◆ If you're part of a team, you can enjoy being part of a private leaderboard and Slack, where you can see how your team is making progress and be inspired by their submissions ◆ We're exploring the idea of letting larger teams create custom courses that fit their talent engagement and up-skilling goals, whether for internal or external talent cc @rohitpaulk

@rohitpaulk @sarupbanskota I'm thrilled to hear that my comment resonated with you. It's great to have been able to support and witness your journey so far 😄 And those are some interesting features that you have mentioned there ! Will check them out :)

@rohitpaulk @niranjan94 ❤️🙏

@faisal_ilaiwi can't wait

@ahmedash95 we appreciate your goodwill! thank you!

@rohitpaulk @rnjai_lamba Thanks, completely agreed!

@rohitpaulk @arsh99 we're glad! can't wait for you to try the other challenges.

@tomasruta I attempted to answer this here https://www.producthunt.com/post... and here https://www.producthunt.com/post... TL;DR not a great fit as an "intro to programming" resource, but if you can program in any language, you'll find CodeCrafters relevant, at any skill level.

@wecandoit Absolutely Shane 🚀

@gabriel_nori Thank you so much! When we started out, we thought we were teaching people the internals of popular software. Before CodeCrafters, you were a user of Git. After CodeCrafters, you knew how Git works. But we realised we were teaching something beyond software internals. ◆ Among the experienced engineer community (including staff/principal level engineers), they seem to enjoy CodeCrafters the most as a form of language mastery. Leetcode doesn't feel real-world enough. Other real-world sites don't feel complex and ambiguous enough. And books don't feel engaging enough. ◆ Among the early career community, they like the ability to explore areas of programming that they might not usually get a chance to explore at work. Reimplementing Redis is a journey into network programming. Docker is an adventure in OS and systems programming. grep is a deep dive into statecharts. etc ◆ Among Engineering Managers, they find CodeCrafters both a meaningful way to engage their team — but also to keep themselves up-to-date and hands on, especially when their dayjob causes their programming skills to go rusty. We're also exploring the idea of tailor-made programs for larger companies to engage talent, both internal and external. I hope this helps!