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Show HN: Workouts – Learn by doing real developer projects
- auslegung 7y agoI like this, but it's primary draw for me might not be the expected stuff. Learning by building is a great method, but my problem is that I don't know what to build. This website can help me by providing me with a lot of options, simple -> complex. Great job!
- shivawu 7y agoThanks for that! That's exactly the idea, and the thing we build needs to be useful in the real world, not some artificial thing that never exists :)
- janpot 7y agoI like the idea. But I feel like it would be a good workout to make this website mobile friendly and accessible.
- auslegung 7y agolol
- cheez 7y agoDamnit janpot, they're devs not designers!
- shivawu 7y agoThank you! :D
- shivawu 7y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll try to make it happen... We were originally thinking since you need a computer to actually do the project, so didn't bother making the mobile version at the beginning.
- claudeomusic 7y ago+1
- snissn 7y agoI think you could make it more clear that "Unlock for 9.99" unlocks all the tasks under that project.
- Stwerner 7y agoI really like this idea, and the stock market example looks really interesting. Will definitely try this out!
- shivawu 7y agoThanks! Let me know if things work for you. You can reach me with the Intercom chat window too.
- applechen777 7y agoI like this idea a lot. I struggled learning new things all the time. This will give me a list of interesting projects to work on.
- shivawu 7y agoGlad you like it! Mind sharing a bit about your learning experience, so that I can learn from it? :)
- blowski 7y agoI'm interested, but I'd want to see an example of the spec I'm going to build and the format of the instructions before giving my card number.
- shivawu 7y agoCould you be more specific about what is the "spec" you're looking for? As for examples, we do have some examples of separate tasks (non projects) in the tasks page, that should explain how things work really well.
- blowski 7y agoIf I'm going to build a project like I'm building something for a client, then I want to see the "brief" from the client. A 2 paragraph description with a 10-15 bullet points would be absolutely fine. Otherwise, these kind of courses can feel like a series of tasks with an unfeasible thread trying to link them together. For example: The client wants to run a calculator on their intranet, to avoid staff searching for dodgy calculators on Google. A lot of the ones they find are on dangerous, script-laden websites. Some of the calculators even give wrong results. * The client really likes Apple design, so wants the calculator to look identical to the macOS one. * They want all the results to load client side, with no calculation done on the server. * Staff do a wide range of calculations, but they're all using basic arithmetic. * The largest numbers the calculator has to deal with are in the low millions. * Staff machines are all fairly up to date, with the latest browsers (typically Safari or Edge), but they're not very powerful. They don't use phones or tablets to access the intranet. * One of the users is partially-sighted, another is colourblind, and another suffers from restricted movement in his hand. As such, accessibility is really important for this calculator. And so on...
- jakequade 7y agoYour splash page does nothing for showing me what I'll actually learn, or what context/'scenario' I'll learn it in.
- mendeza 7y agoWould be great if there could be niche workouts of Machine Learning projects. I can see a list of machine learning projects that aspiring ML practitioners can do to build strong skills and a portfolio companies would be interested in.
- shivawu 7y agoI don't personally know a lot about ML, but what you said matches what I heard from friends who does ML. What's your thoughts on Kaggle? Is it similar?
- philsnow 7y agofrom https://real.dev/docs https://real.dev/docs > Can I share my code? > We strongly recommend against sharing your code publicly. It will ruin the fun for everyone. s/the fun for everyone/our business model/ ? Once people catch on that solving these problems can lead to landing actual jobs, there's a certain kind of person who will share complete solutions, either widely or with some in-group they're in. Once that happens, the companies you're partnering with will (okay, "might") start noticing quality issues with the candidates you're sourcing. I don't have an answer to this problem. I don't understand the mind of the kind of person who shares interview problem solutions.
- shivawu 7y agoThanks for the comment. Yes and no. On the job seeking perspective, what you said is right. Typically what people do is signing an NDA, but even with that, the question/solution still sometimes leak on the Internet. On the learning scenario, it's sorta true, but mostly sharing the solution would ruin the motivation, at least for me personally. If I know there's a solution sitting there, I wouldn't be interested in repeating it again. I know it's sorta silly... But my mind works best when I only focus on the problem, and how to solve it. As long as I know there's a solution, I couldn't stop myself looking at it whenever I was stuck at any tiny bit.
- the_duke 7y agoThe home page really needs a better, terse description of what this actually is. Right below "What is Real Dev?" or below the video, which would probably explains things, but which I'm not interested in watching. The three paragraphs below only give a rough idea that has to be pieced together.
- shivawu 7y agoThanks for the feedback! The homepage is actually sorta old. I'll update it.
- 7y ago
- arcturus17 7y agoI like the idea a lot... Sometimes I don't have a personal project in mind and I'd like something more guided with which I could practice. However, as others have said I'd need to see what I'm getting for the price. Particularly I'm interested in how the spec is laid out, and how the solution is laid out... From university I learned there's an art to building a pset where you give enough pointers but do not hold the student's hand's too much and that's what I'd be looking for - the right level of challenge, in a nutshell. Maybe you should give out a project for free, or create a sample or similar...
- shivawu 7y agoThanks for the feedback! Sounds like a good idea to provide a free trial. But I also want to make sure that people are actually interested in paying. What specifically do you mean, by "how the spec is laid out, and how the solution is laid out"? I guess I understand the spec part, but what about the solution? The from-university statement, so true, it's an art. We're trying to explore to find the perfect balance :)
- arcturus17 7y agoIs there no solution to ultimately compare against? How would I know how I’ve done at the end? On the other hand, I wouldn’t want the solution immediately revealed - you barely learn anything with that.
- ar_lan 7y agoWhy is this called Workouts?
- reroute1 7y agoGuessing because it's like a programming workout (exercise)
- TurkishPoptart 7y agoI'm very interested, but could you perhaps provide a free open beta (perhaps invite-only) so I could see if this will help me learn before I give away money I don't have?
- kreetx 7y agoThis is where you pay to get work. :p But an interesting idea!
- shivawu 7y agoPay to get work! That's one way to phrase it, I'll remember that, LOL
- ta999999171 7y agoMay want to value-prop it - Spend Money to Make Money. Or, Spend Money to become someone who Makes Money. No charge, hang onto the 10-99
- siscia 7y agoDon't do it! Just have fun and understand how stuff work and why they work as they do! There is so much boring time in "doing real developer work"! If you get time to invest, this is not how you want to invest it!
- rjplatte 7y agoDisagree strongly. Functional understanding is how I learn best, and this is perfect for me.
- siscia 7y agoA react component? Seriously? Now, let me be completely straight and honest, if you need exercises in react, react won't be your career. Do you know how reactive stuff are implemented in js? Do you know how those are implemented in C? Can you implement them yourself in both js and C? If you can do it, a component like a calculator is trivial and you just need to adjust the syntax and jargon. If you can't, this exercises will just be exercises in memorization and shallow understanding. What I am saying is to learn how to implement the underneath engine in low level languages, it is much more fun and productive. Anyhow, your life, your time! After all I am just a stranger on the internet.
- shivawu 7y agoWhat you said makes sense, but only to limited set of people. Not all people are interested/capable of learning how it works underneath. There're like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of React developers in the world, very few of them understand how React really works underneath. This is actually one of the goals that React was invented and popularized inside Facebook. It's just sooo easy to pick up and start building. That being said, for our product, it's not only about React and its basics. We can totally create a workout project for React internals. That depends on what you guys need :) We started with these two projects because it seems a common useful and popular thing, and we're able to do them ourselves.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
- travbrack 7y agoWhy would I do this instead of contributing to open source?
- ARandomerDude 7y agoPlease take this comment as intended to be helpful, not rude: I wouldn't pay money to learn web or mobile technologies from a site that didn't display well on mobile.
- uponcoffee 7y agoSecond this; doesn't render well for me on Firefox Preview for Android.
- qwerty456127 7y agoToo expensive. I'd pay $10 for a month of unlimited access to a site full of stuff but it doesn't seem like I'm getting much for the bucks here. Perhaps I'm wrong and the content is so good it's worth it, I didn't check so far. BTW why is there )} at the end of every project description? Looks more like a bug than like a design feature.
- hcheung 7y agoI understand this is still under development and I can't full judge the content unless I paid to unlock it. But this looks like a pay version of what is available on the freeCodeCamp[1]. freeCodeCamp is not only free, you can see the entire user story[2] before you take on the challenge, but for Workouts, you have to pay first to see the steps/user stories... [1] https://www.freecodecamp.org https://www.freecodecamp.org [2] https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/front-end-libraries/front-end-libraries-projects/build-a-javascript-calculator https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/front-end-libraries/front...
- chabad360 7y agowould there be a way for users to submit projects (obviously there would need to be some sort of quality control)? I would think that this would be a quick way to expand the community.
- woat 7y agoVery neat idea. I did notice that there is not many platforms that support fullstack projects. A lot of it is simple bitesized function/method exercises (LeetCode, HackerRank, CodeSignal, etc.) and don't encompass building applications from spec. There is definitely some resistance here on HN about pricing, but I wouldn't worry about it. There are plenty of people who pay $$$ for courses (Udemy, CodeCademy, PluralSight) so the market is there. If each workout provides at least about 1-2 hours of content, then the price is in-line, if not a bargain, compared some Udemy courses around the same length. For what it's worth, while I understand that your business model is based around finder fees, there is an extreme amount of value from building a solid platform that can handle interactive fullstack courses like what you have so far. There is serious acquisition or licensing/support potential (enterprise onboarding) if this platform grows the correct feature set.
- wefarrell 7y agoWould love to see something like this with an infrastructure component, teaching automated deploys on AWS/GCP/Aure and a CI pipeline. Also it would be nice to see how to accomplish the same task across different stacks and languages.
- sincerely 7y agoI would love something like this for a non-web-dev skillset. Does anyone know of anything like that?
- mpmpmpmp 7y agoDownloading one of the Task Templates and attempting to expand the zip file on OSX gives: Unable to expand "hello-real-world.zip" into Downloads. (Error 79-Inappropriate file type or format.)
- bgdkbtv 7y agoThis is genius. Why haven't i thought of that :(
- james_s_tayler 7y agoClicked on Business and got "an unexpected error has occurred". Also, mobile experience is very much treated as a second class citizen on this site. First thing I'm greeted by is "Unlock for $9.99". Instantly off-putting. Curious though how real world does it go? I've got a course I've paid for lined up to do as my next project after I'm done with my current one which is making a clone of the internet banking experience of the bank I use. That course is a full AWS Serverless project that assumes you've already got AWS Developer Cert level of knowledge and the course is about how to a make production grade application. Pretty excited to go through it. The real-worldness of being taken through something that is realistically complete to a production quality level is something I find pretty compelling because it's something ordinary tutorials never give you. That's worth money.