8 ms·

We've Open-Sourced Everything

305 points by nwinter 13y ago

foxly 13y ago
Holy crap. They opened-up their entire stack! You can literally spin up a clone of the site.
- gsaines 13y ago
  That's the idea! We would love for you to give it a try and let us know how it goes.
- quadrangle 13y ago
  It's wonderful, but the absurd thing is the whole protective start-up culture that thinks this is crazy. The truth is that people ought to not trust businesses whose main function is to lock you in with trade secrets and other anti-competitive measures. Obviously the only real risk to their business would be if someone else completely outdoes them, like does everything they do and better with their codebase. Simple clones are competition. Yes, competition makes things harder. But isn't competition what all these capitalists say is the answer to things anyway?? These guys are among the few non-hypocrites.
  - Zecc 13y ago
    > Simple clones are competition. Will they be able to combat them with better code?
jffry 13y ago
You talk about the levels contributed by your community - will there be / is there a way for those to be shared under open licenses too?
- nwinter 13y ago
  If someone makes a level on another CodeCombat server in their own database, they can share that with other CodeCombat servers all they please. We are just being cautious about the levels that end up in the main codecombat.com database, because at some point we might want to either make premium-only campaigns or allow others to sell access to their campaigns, and we can't do that if the levels are all MIT. Hopefully we can keep all levels free for everyone anyway, since recruiting is looking pretty good as a monetization strategy so far.
  - serickson 13y ago
    Also, just want to point out the CLA specifies contributed content is still owned by the creator, but we're also granted the right to distribute and license it on our end. So creators can always do what they want with their content.
  - pyromine 13y ago
    I'm honestly amazed at the idea of recruiting as a monetization strategy for a project like this. It seems to be a way to make money while keep literally everyone happy. I think the only thing that could be worrisome is if perhaps there will end up being a disconnect in how hard a challenge needs to be to make it worth it as a screen, and how good of a programmer the primary user base will be.
    - scast 13y ago
      What does recruting as a monetization strategy means? That is, what is recruting? Truly curious.
      - lazerwalker 13y ago
        If their plan is anything like similar startups (like the also-YC-funded Hacker School), the idea is that they can connect employers looking to hire with engineers looking for jobs. Maybe this means something like letting people flag on their profile that they're looking for a job, and giving companies tools to search, filter, and contact the users who've said they're looking (and vice versa). After someone takes a job through CodeCombat, the employer would pay them some sort of referral fee. This sort of arrangement is common; a typical fee structure is around 20% of the new hire's annual salary. Employers get a concrete way to assess the skill of potential employees, job-seekers get free visibility they wouldn't otherwise get (this sort of thing tends to benefit newer programmers whose limited experience doesn't accurately represent their raw skill and potential), and CodeCombat gets paid. Everybody wins.
        girvo 13y ago
rickdale 13y ago
Good stuff going on over there at CodeCombat. My favorite part about this headline is that during office hours PG questioned them about their decision to go open source, so I wasn't sure if they would do it. This shows me that CodeCombat has a vision they are following and I believe a big bright future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s
- nwinter 13y ago
  I had a personal blog post about that story that someone posted to HN, and the top comment thread there was very helpful to us in the decision to open source anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601712 sillysaurus2 and highCs made some excellent points about ignoring what the gaming industry as a whole was doing, and this went a long way toward allaying our concerns. Then we talked to everyone we could think of who might have reasons why this wouldn't be a great idea, including some good lawyers, and no one could think of anything. For a startup like CodeCombat where the audience may be interested in the code, open source should be the default choice, and hopefully we can succeed in this and start to make that happen by example.
seivan 13y ago
Nicely done!
sinak 13y ago
I'm just going to hazard a guess that that Nick, George and Scott made a very clever decision to set up a script to alert them when HN went up (and perhaps even to submit this post as soon as it happened). This was the first post after the site went up. They might just be lucky, but somehow I doubt it. Way to hack HN. You win my upvote. Edit: Also, more specifically to the news of them open sourcing: It'll be particularly awesome if people eventually graduate from learning to code on Codecombat to working on its codebase. Since the backend is all node, it's not inconceivable. A virtuous loop for sure.
- gkoberger 13y ago
  @hnstatus on Twitter was posting percentages: https://twitter.com/HNStatus https://twitter.com/HNStatus
- nwinter 13y ago
  I just had a Chrome extension refreshing the page every couple minutes is all. I think it was actually a bad decision, because we were #40 on the new page in under 10 minutes with everyone doing the same thing. I just posted it because it's news today, and fortunately some people like it.
  - sinak 13y ago
    That makes sense, though given the result I don't think it was a bad decision. Congrats on open sourcing today in any case!
- jaredsohn 13y ago
  Another way to quickly discover that Hacker News was back would be to a part of a Facebook group that automatically posts Hacker News stories. https://www.facebook.com/hnbot https://www.facebook.com/hnbot
ivan_ah 13y ago
This is awesome! There are lot's of things to learn from this code base... In particular, I had not heard about http://brunch.io/ http://brunch.io/ before and it looks like an interesting frontend build tool. The config file looks totally readable, even for a complex app like this: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/blob/master/brunch.coffee https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/blob/master/brunch.... I can't seem to find ''app/assets/images/sprites'' in the git repo which I was interested in for an RPG project of mine. Were these not included to simply to keep the repo light, or are these not to be released?
- serickson 13y ago
  They're in the DB to keep the repository lean and mean. But they're also licensed under CC. You can find 'em here: http://codecombat.com/editor/thang http://codecombat.com/editor/thang They're in a custom JSON-vector format, and the app turns them into sprite sheets in the code. Brunch is pretty awesome, by the way. We chose it because it only compiles the files that have changed, which is good because it takes at least 15 seconds to compile the whole app on a fast machine.
- nwinter 13y ago
  Brunch is amazing. I was using Grunt in another project, but Brunch is so, so much faster to recompile changes, since it's very clever about caching. Oh yeah, those sprites were in the repo as raster files, but we managed to move them all over to our awesome vector-graphics-in-the-database system just before launch. Check the DB dump to get a copy: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Developer-environment#setup https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Developer-envi... (We did a ton of cleanup work before open sourcing, which managed to get our gzipped GitHub clone download from 203MB to 3.5MB.) It might be hard to use these art assets in another game unless you take a lot of CodeCombat code on top of EaselJS to render the sprites directly from the vector graphics data, though, because of how they are stored: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Surface#vector-art https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Surface#vector... I could send you the old raster versions if you did want to use EaselJS for their animations but not go whole-hog with the CocoSprite solution.
Trufa 13y ago
Wow that is commitment! Good job guys, keep it on!
ranman 13y ago
This is so fantastic. The tools you've made really remind me of some of Bret Victor's ideas around the future of programming. I look forward to the day where I can play an MMO where my character progresses inline with my programming ability. You could program your own spells and weapons... Non destructive exploits and hacking would be encouraged rather than discouraged... that's the world I want to live in right now.
- glabsounet 13y ago
  Bret Victor's talk in question: http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII
z3phyr 13y ago
I could upvote this a hundred times... Its so damn good. I want to be the kid who learns to code, again.
dimillian 13y ago
This look awesome. I'm an experienced developer who wants to learn game development, will it works for me?
epaga 13y ago
This is just absolutely insane in a good way, and will at the very least prove to be incredibly valuable as a case study of whether or not being this generous to the open source community can actually be a good, profitable thing for a company to do. Obviously we all hope it can be, and if this catches on, the Internet would become a much better, freer, more "open" place. Huge thanks to CodeCombat (gsaines and co)!
Keats 13y ago
That's awesome, I will have some busy time looking through it ! Thanks
thejteam 13y ago
Would it be rude of me to ask what the business model is? This doesn't seem like the type of venture that lends itself well to the standard ways of making a profit off of open source, ie consulting or support.
- thomaslangston 13y ago
  Schools are very much into Service Level Agreements, implementation consulting, and support contracts. Open source can be seen as an additional warranty (Did we go out of business? Are we not delivering the service you desired, but you love the product? Hire anyone to take over hosting, support or development you'd like with no restrictions).
- nwinter 13y ago
  Sure! This is what we are trying first: http://blog.codecombat.com/beat-this-level-get-a-programming-job http://blog.codecombat.com/beat-this-level-get-a-programming... Now we know we can definitely have enough skilled candidates, and though it's only been a week, it is looking really good on the employer end as well.
  - bertil 13y ago
    I hate to be that guy but… If you do HR, could you clarify the need for a visa early on?
    - nwinter 13y ago
      We are so new to this that I'm not sure how big a deal it is going to be. We'll definitely find out soon, as a lot of great candidates are not US citizens.
      - bertil 13y ago
        I'll let you see how it stacks up at Kaggle: http://www.kaggle.com/users http://www.kaggle.com/users Jobs threads on HN seem to have the same callous approach, but… I have never met an American, even expatriated for a decade, that didn't grossly underestimated how US-centrism was hurting them.

305 points by nwinter 13y ago

foxly 13y ago

Holy crap. They opened-up their entire stack! You can literally spin up a clone of the site.

gsaines 13y ago
That's the idea! We would love for you to give it a try and let us know how it goes.
quadrangle 13y ago
It's wonderful, but the absurd thing is the whole protective start-up culture that thinks this is crazy. The truth is that people ought to not trust businesses whose main function is to lock you in with trade secrets and other anti-competitive measures. Obviously the only real risk to their business would be if someone else completely outdoes them, like does everything they do and better with their codebase. Simple clones are competition. Yes, competition makes things harder. But isn't competition what all these capitalists say is the answer to things anyway?? These guys are among the few non-hypocrites.
- Zecc 13y ago
  > Simple clones are competition. Will they be able to combat them with better code?

jffry 13y ago

You talk about the levels contributed by your community - will there be / is there a way for those to be shared under open licenses too?

nwinter 13y ago
If someone makes a level on another CodeCombat server in their own database, they can share that with other CodeCombat servers all they please. We are just being cautious about the levels that end up in the main codecombat.com database, because at some point we might want to either make premium-only campaigns or allow others to sell access to their campaigns, and we can't do that if the levels are all MIT. Hopefully we can keep all levels free for everyone anyway, since recruiting is looking pretty good as a monetization strategy so far.
- serickson 13y ago
  Also, just want to point out the CLA specifies contributed content is still owned by the creator, but we're also granted the right to distribute and license it on our end. So creators can always do what they want with their content.
- pyromine 13y ago
  I'm honestly amazed at the idea of recruiting as a monetization strategy for a project like this. It seems to be a way to make money while keep literally everyone happy. I think the only thing that could be worrisome is if perhaps there will end up being a disconnect in how hard a challenge needs to be to make it worth it as a screen, and how good of a programmer the primary user base will be.
  - scast 13y ago
    What does recruting as a monetization strategy means? That is, what is recruting? Truly curious.
    - lazerwalker 13y ago
      If their plan is anything like similar startups (like the also-YC-funded Hacker School), the idea is that they can connect employers looking to hire with engineers looking for jobs. Maybe this means something like letting people flag on their profile that they're looking for a job, and giving companies tools to search, filter, and contact the users who've said they're looking (and vice versa). After someone takes a job through CodeCombat, the employer would pay them some sort of referral fee. This sort of arrangement is common; a typical fee structure is around 20% of the new hire's annual salary. Employers get a concrete way to assess the skill of potential employees, job-seekers get free visibility they wouldn't otherwise get (this sort of thing tends to benefit newer programmers whose limited experience doesn't accurately represent their raw skill and potential), and CodeCombat gets paid. Everybody wins.
      - girvo 13y ago

rickdale 13y ago

Good stuff going on over there at CodeCombat. My favorite part about this headline is that during office hours PG questioned them about their decision to go open source, so I wasn't sure if they would do it. This shows me that CodeCombat has a vision they are following and I believe a big bright future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuvRv4Vv3s

nwinter 13y ago
I had a personal blog post about that story that someone posted to HN, and the top comment thread there was very helpful to us in the decision to open source anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601712 sillysaurus2 and highCs made some excellent points about ignoring what the gaming industry as a whole was doing, and this went a long way toward allaying our concerns. Then we talked to everyone we could think of who might have reasons why this wouldn't be a great idea, including some good lawyers, and no one could think of anything. For a startup like CodeCombat where the audience may be interested in the code, open source should be the default choice, and hopefully we can succeed in this and start to make that happen by example.

seivan 13y ago

Nicely done!

sinak 13y ago

I'm just going to hazard a guess that that Nick, George and Scott made a very clever decision to set up a script to alert them when HN went up (and perhaps even to submit this post as soon as it happened). This was the first post after the site went up. They might just be lucky, but somehow I doubt it. Way to hack HN. You win my upvote. Edit: Also, more specifically to the news of them open sourcing: It'll be particularly awesome if people eventually graduate from learning to code on Codecombat to working on its codebase. Since the backend is all node, it's not inconceivable. A virtuous loop for sure.

gkoberger 13y ago
@hnstatus on Twitter was posting percentages: https://twitter.com/HNStatus https://twitter.com/HNStatus
nwinter 13y ago
I just had a Chrome extension refreshing the page every couple minutes is all. I think it was actually a bad decision, because we were #40 on the new page in under 10 minutes with everyone doing the same thing. I just posted it because it's news today, and fortunately some people like it.
- sinak 13y ago
  That makes sense, though given the result I don't think it was a bad decision. Congrats on open sourcing today in any case!
jaredsohn 13y ago
Another way to quickly discover that Hacker News was back would be to a part of a Facebook group that automatically posts Hacker News stories. https://www.facebook.com/hnbot https://www.facebook.com/hnbot

ivan_ah 13y ago

This is awesome! There are lot's of things to learn from this code base... In particular, I had not heard about http://brunch.io/ http://brunch.io/ before and it looks like an interesting frontend build tool. The config file looks totally readable, even for a complex app like this: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/blob/master/brunch.coffee https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/blob/master/brunch.... I can't seem to find ''app/assets/images/sprites'' in the git repo which I was interested in for an RPG project of mine. Were these not included to simply to keep the repo light, or are these not to be released?

serickson 13y ago
They're in the DB to keep the repository lean and mean. But they're also licensed under CC. You can find 'em here: http://codecombat.com/editor/thang http://codecombat.com/editor/thang They're in a custom JSON-vector format, and the app turns them into sprite sheets in the code. Brunch is pretty awesome, by the way. We chose it because it only compiles the files that have changed, which is good because it takes at least 15 seconds to compile the whole app on a fast machine.
nwinter 13y ago
Brunch is amazing. I was using Grunt in another project, but Brunch is so, so much faster to recompile changes, since it's very clever about caching. Oh yeah, those sprites were in the repo as raster files, but we managed to move them all over to our awesome vector-graphics-in-the-database system just before launch. Check the DB dump to get a copy: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Developer-environment#setup https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Developer-envi... (We did a ton of cleanup work before open sourcing, which managed to get our gzipped GitHub clone download from 203MB to 3.5MB.) It might be hard to use these art assets in another game unless you take a lot of CodeCombat code on top of EaselJS to render the sprites directly from the vector graphics data, though, because of how they are stored: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Surface#vector-art https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Surface#vector... I could send you the old raster versions if you did want to use EaselJS for their animations but not go whole-hog with the CocoSprite solution.

Trufa 13y ago

Wow that is commitment! Good job guys, keep it on!

ranman 13y ago

This is so fantastic. The tools you've made really remind me of some of Bret Victor's ideas around the future of programming. I look forward to the day where I can play an MMO where my character progresses inline with my programming ability. You could program your own spells and weapons... Non destructive exploits and hacking would be encouraged rather than discouraged... that's the world I want to live in right now.

glabsounet 13y ago
Bret Victor's talk in question: http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII

z3phyr 13y ago

I could upvote this a hundred times... Its so damn good. I want to be the kid who learns to code, again.

dimillian 13y ago

This look awesome. I'm an experienced developer who wants to learn game development, will it works for me?

epaga 13y ago

This is just absolutely insane in a good way, and will at the very least prove to be incredibly valuable as a case study of whether or not being this generous to the open source community can actually be a good, profitable thing for a company to do. Obviously we all hope it can be, and if this catches on, the Internet would become a much better, freer, more "open" place. Huge thanks to CodeCombat (gsaines and co)!

Keats 13y ago

That's awesome, I will have some busy time looking through it ! Thanks

thejteam 13y ago

Would it be rude of me to ask what the business model is? This doesn't seem like the type of venture that lends itself well to the standard ways of making a profit off of open source, ie consulting or support.

thomaslangston 13y ago
Schools are very much into Service Level Agreements, implementation consulting, and support contracts. Open source can be seen as an additional warranty (Did we go out of business? Are we not delivering the service you desired, but you love the product? Hire anyone to take over hosting, support or development you'd like with no restrictions).
nwinter 13y ago
Sure! This is what we are trying first: http://blog.codecombat.com/beat-this-level-get-a-programming-job http://blog.codecombat.com/beat-this-level-get-a-programming... Now we know we can definitely have enough skilled candidates, and though it's only been a week, it is looking really good on the employer end as well.
- bertil 13y ago
  I hate to be that guy but… If you do HR, could you clarify the need for a visa early on?
  - nwinter 13y ago
    We are so new to this that I'm not sure how big a deal it is going to be. We'll definitely find out soon, as a lot of great candidates are not US citizens.
    - bertil 13y ago
      I'll let you see how it stacks up at Kaggle: http://www.kaggle.com/users http://www.kaggle.com/users Jobs threads on HN seem to have the same callous approach, but… I have never met an American, even expatriated for a decade, that didn't grossly underestimated how US-centrism was hurting them.