This is Hemanth , Founder at Codelearn. We had unprecedented spike in our traffic this morning. Thanks very much for trying us out.
frank confessions :
1. We did not expect that codelearn will get posted on hackernews, leave alone make it to the front page!.
2. We wanted a smaller audience to try it out first before releasing to a larger audience at hackernews .
3. We have been working on this only for 2 months now and there are lots of rough edges, some of them are really silly, like making the rails environment production and ideally we should fixed these small things.
4. We are working to fix these problems and will post a message here as soon as we are done.
5. Some of you have pointed that there were Grammatical errors in the copy. We understand that it is important, but we did'nt expect such a large audience.
I would like to reiterate my gratitude for the support .
I would like to know a bit more about the architecture behind it.
When 1000 users are coding together some RoR app, how do you guys execute that many behind on your server ? I can understand that file browser and all can be done with HTML5 APIs, but then on execution you have to take the entire app (controllers, models, views, asset pipeline, etc. etc.) on the server execute them, get the output.
Are you guys going to run a lot of web server instances then (maybe 1 per user)?
Would love to know if you got no problem with sharing. Just for knowledge :)
We would definitely write a big blog post on it. Right now I can say we had about 200 users on just a EC2 micro instance. We dint expect lot of traffic and users. and I have to run to do damage control.
I know I'm just nitpicking, but the grammar in the title of the video ("_Whats_ the best way to learn coding?") kills my confidence. Admittedly that isn't indicative of the quality of the product but it's something best avoided.
I spend my summer teaching high school students to code, but I doubt this resource would help at all. To be honest, I'm not sure what the target audience is for this. The tutorial assumes knowledge of Unix (otherwise you're copying commands such as mv, cd, touch, ...) without explanation, meaning it's not necessarily about coding anymore. Yes, knowledge of the Unix command line is important, but that complexity should either be approached explicitly or hidden away, especially with a tag line "the best way to learn coding". Coding is quite independent of the OS you're using.
I'd also question using RoR as "the best way to learn coding". This is nothing against the framework, simply the complexity and the amount that's magically set up for you defeats or complicates the learning process. If they really want to go with that tag line, I'd be more specific -- something like "the best way to learn RoR/webapp coding".
There's also a lack of information on the CodeLearn site. Is it a pay service after the beta ends?
Speaking from personal experience, a large MVC framework like Rails is horrible for learning coding. I tried to learn Django at the same time I learned Python and my head exploded with all the conventions you try to learn at the same time. Flask provided a much better start. There is a direct coupling between query and response, and the web-app is but a thin layer around the basic language.
In the Ruby world, this would mean starting with Sinatra instead of Rails. The added benefits of MVC only become apparent in larger projects.
Learning this kind of stuff in the browser is a great idea though.
I signed up for the site and got the error message below. I really like the idea of what they're doing, but if they're going to be teaching rails, shouldn't they know better than to show all that information to users?
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in Devise::RegistrationsController#create
SQLite3::BusyException: database is locked: commit transaction
Looks like the db lock error was transient (due to large traffic) and now people are able to sign up. So pls try again now, In case you still face the error, please mail us at founders@codelearn.org, and we would mail you once we have upped our capacity.
We had to take the site down. We have a few issues, we will fix them and inform you when we are up!. Meanwhile pls drop us a mail at founders@codelearn.org if you are interested to sign up and we will revert to you when we are up.
This is Hemanth , Founder at Codelearn. We had unprecedented spike in our traffic this morning. Thanks very much for trying us out.
frank confessions :
1. We did not expect that codelearn will get posted on hackernews, leave alone make it to the front page!.
2. We wanted a smaller audience to try it out first before releasing to a larger audience at hackernews .
3. We have been working on this only for 2 months now and there are lots of rough edges, some of them are really silly, like making the rails environment production and ideally we should fixed these small things.
4. We are working to fix these problems and will post a message here as soon as we are done.
5. Some of you have pointed that there were Grammatical errors in the copy. We understand that it is important, but we did'nt expect such a large audience.
I would like to reiterate my gratitude for the support .
warm regards hemanth