[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) - Interactive video for ...
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Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) - Interactive video for learning to
code
Hi all, I'm Per, co-founder of Scrimba. We are building an
interactive video format for teaching and learning how to code. The
main benefit is that students can pause the video and edit the code
whenever they want. We think this is needed is because over 70% of
people who are trying to learn to code today use videos. But since
videos aren't interactive, students end up mirroring the
instructors' code line-by-line in their local code editors. This is
time consuming, and it often causes problems with local dev
environment setup. Scrimba solves these problems as it enables
students to pause the screencast and modify the instructors' code
directly inside the player. So when a Scrimba student feels
confused, she jumps into the screencast and plays around with the
code (editing, running, debugging) until she's made sense of it. As
a consequence, she learns faster. Technically, this is possible
because we have merged the IDE and the video player into one tool.
To understand the technology in-depth, please watch this cast:
https://scrimba.com/scrim/cww679T9 The Scrimba format also opens
the way for other features that can further enhance the learning
experience, like searching inside videos, in-video hyperlinks,
audiovisual code feedback from teachers, remote pair programming
between students, and more. The more we work with the format, the
more of these opportunities we see. So we have decided to use the
format as the backbone for an online coding school as we continue
to improve it. After launching a bunch of shorter courses the last
couple of years, we launched our first full-degree program this
summer. It's called "The Frontend Developer Career Path" and it
contains 75 hours of content and 100s of interactive coding
challenges. It costs $19 per month and the teachers are well-known
instructors like Gary Simon, Cassidy Williams, and Kevin Powell.
Students are also paired up in Study Groups, in order to make the
online learning experience feel less lonely. So far, over 3000
people from 110 different countries have enrolled. Here's a link
to the course: https://scrimba.com/learn/frontend Fun fact:
Scrimba is built entirely in Imba, a programming language that our
CTO has created. It's a Ruby-inspired language that compiles to
JavaScript, and it excels at creating high-performant web apps. The
first version of Scrimba was created because Sindre wanted a better
way to teach Imba. You can learn more about Imba here:
https://www.imba.io/
Author : mrborgen
Score : 134 points
Date : 2020-09-24 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
| gavinray wrote:
| I have nothing but good things to say about this group of people.
|
| My personal interactions were mostly with Sindre Aarsaether,
| several years ago. Absolutely brilliant and genuinely caring
| human being.
|
| I have recommended Scrimba to everyone who's asked me how to
| learn to code since the first time I tried it.
|
| It will blow your mind the first time you see it, there's no
| possible better medium for learning and explaining software IMO.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: Side note, check out Sindre's work on DOM reconciliation,
| schedulers, and general performance. The way that Imba was
| written is incredibly unique for a DOM framework and the render
| capabilities + performance are absurd. An order of magnitude
| faster than React/Vue etc.
|
| Also, I seem to recall something about the Scrimba team helping
| Ives from Codesandbox out with some JSX-parsing black magick for
| performance.
| colmvp wrote:
| This is a cool startup. I was learning frontend code throughout
| 2020 using another online learning platform who I won't name
| because I don't want to dilute the purpose of this post.
|
| My biggest issue with these companies is they don't provide a
| pathway to go from education to IMO what is truly the hardest
| part of the process: landing your first entry level position.
|
| I ended up hiring an ex-tech lead / senior dev to mentor my
| personal development. He helped guide me through the job
| application process and suggested technical areas for me to
| strengthen. He gave me tips to increase my visibility to
| companies, the same ones he did as a junior. I would imagine
| there's thousands of people who finished some bootcamp/online
| curriculum and are lost trying to find their first technical job.
|
| I would've loved for a company with a learning platform to help
| fast-track new graduates to applying to entry level positions
| especially given the platform acting as a first filter.
| mrborgen wrote:
| I totally agree that getting your first job is one of the
| hardest things about the process. Which is why we've dedicated
| an entire module in the Frontend Developer Career Path to
| "Getting Hired". At our current price point though ($19/month),
| we're not able to do any hand-holding to help people get their
| first job (which tends to require that). But we are going to
| launch price tiers which will allow us to give more career
| help, as the perfect school IMO definitely ensures that you get
| a job at the end :)
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Extremely cool! As someone who makes their living by teaching
| people how to code, this looks like something I'd love to use.
| Please consider open sourcing or making the pricing affordable
| even for smaller institutions/individuals.
| mrborgen wrote:
| Actually, anyone who wants can create Scrimba screencasts,
| group them in a playlist and share them with e.g. their class
| or community.
|
| If you need any help to get started, just ping me at
| per@scrimba.com :)
| mavsman wrote:
| Scrimba is awesome. I was really intrigued by it for a while.
|
| For me, I reached a point where I started to feel the limitations
| of the code editor provided. It became apparent that I was stuck
| in a learning tool, not a full text editor or IDE. There were
| just enough of these things that made it unappealing to me. I
| have been writing software for several years so I do have certain
| tools that I have become accustomed to using over time. Perhaps
| for people that don't have affinities for certain debugging tools
| or code editors this will be less of an issue but it would still
| be great to have some sort of seamless transition from tutorial
| to a real project, without just having to copy/paste code.
|
| One other thought I had about it is that to me the usage of Imba
| to build it was a turn off. I can't remember if there was a
| specific reason for this or not. It might have been because I was
| considering what it would be like to contribute to Scrimba and
| when I found out that JS knowledge wouldn't come in handy I was
| kind of let down. I can't remember for sure though to be honest.
|
| Last thought here, I found and started to contribute to a VS Code
| extension that I felt achieved a similar goal to this, called
| Codio (https://github.com/wix-incubator/codio). Ultimately there
| was some bug that prevented me from even recording any audio with
| it, basically making it useless, but I'd love to see something
| like these things take off.
| kkt262 wrote:
| Holy crap! This is insanely awesome. I just tried out one of the
| courses and it's way easier to use this.
| michaelmcmillan wrote:
| I'm a fanboy at this point
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Hey, I love Scrimba. A few on our team used it to quickly get up
| to speed with modern React. There is a lot good I have to say
| about the React course and the platform! I wrote a post about it
| recently: https://www.exploringreact.com/2020/09/19/need-a-
| comprehensi... where I recommend your course as THE React course
| to do for a verity of reasons and many of them are to do with the
| Platform itself, although Bob Ziroll is excellent too!
|
| No idea you were in YC. Good luck with it!
| mrborgen wrote:
| Wow, thank you so much for that awesome blog post! It's thanks
| to acts like that we've been able to keep the wheels going at
| Scrimba the last year, as we haven't had money to spend on paid
| advertising, so we've had to rely on organic growth.
| Off wrote:
| Scrimba is amazing! Learned a lot from it!
|
| Is this new video format that you developed opensource? Is there
| a link somewhere where we can learn more about it? Did some
| research and couldn't find anything.
|
| Thanks!
| mrborgen wrote:
| Thanks! Scrimba itself isn't open source, but we have
| considered is, so maybe we'll do it sometime in the future :)
|
| The language it's written in is fully open source (created by
| our CTO, Sindre). You can learn more about it here:
| https://imba.io
| pupdogg wrote:
| Both Scrimba and the language it's written in, Imba, blow my
| mind! Truly an amazing job on helping the web move a tiny
| step in the correct direction.
| subrat_rout wrote:
| Great and awesome resource. Just signed up as a paid member. My
| only minor gripe is that most of the courses are geared towards
| frontend development. It would be great if founders can invite
| authors to develop some courses on backend development, databases
| and some SRE etc.
|
| Any courses on frameworks such as ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails or
| Django would be great. I can see the complexity arising in
| creating in-browser tutorials involving any backend or framework
| etc. But I think it will add tremendous value to the platform.
| jslakro wrote:
| I learned React in two days with almost zero effort after trying
| the same with other resources before. I really recommend this
| platform and I don't have any affiliation with it
| mrtimo wrote:
| This is awesome! Plans to include data science topics? Seems
| awesome for web (and the python course).
|
| Just tried it out for a couple hours, a little feedback on the
| UI: -After I changed code around, I clicked "play" on the video
| (mistakenly thinking it would run my code)- of course it resumed
| the video, and all my code changes/additions were gone.
| Frustrating for a few times, until I learned my lesson. -After a
| video finished, I started editing code, but the auto-advance
| kicked in, moving me to the next video, and ending my code edit.
| lquist wrote:
| Is Scrimba open source?
| [deleted]
| heapslip wrote:
| Scrimba is amazing, had a lot of fun playing with Imba as well.
| mrborgen wrote:
| Thanks a lot! A new version of Imba is about to be launched
| soon btw, which features a much better developer experience :)
| somebee wrote:
| The veeery wip docs can be found at https://v2.imba.io :)
| pier25 wrote:
| I see there's an hydration example!
|
| (which I think wasn't available in v1)
|
| Will Imba v2 support partial hydration?
| somebee wrote:
| Yep - the scrimba site is using partial hydration
| heavily. Hope to get imba 2.0 final out in a few months
| :)
| pier25 wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for your work!
| [deleted]
| rizpanjwani wrote:
| I'm not sure about beginners, but as a coder wanting to pick up
| other languages/frameworks quickly, I prefer text based courses
| with in-browser interactive code editors. This allows me to move
| at my pace with minimum distraction and fumbling around, and also
| when I want to refer back to something later, I can find it in
| text much more quickly than trying to find the right clip and
| time.
| habosa wrote:
| Scrimba is basically magic. It's a video of code but when you
| click on it ... suddenly you're in an editor. It's such a
| fantastic format. Imagine if every coding tutorial video on
| YouTube could let you do that!
|
| Oh and the team is full of kind and intelligent people, so that's
| nice too. Congrats on the launch!
| pier25 wrote:
| Been following Scrimba and Imba for a couple of years. Super
| impressive work.
|
| Imba is kinda of a mix between Svelte and Mithril with a Ruby
| kind of language. The way you model state without reactivity is
| brilliant. It makes everything so much simpler.
| turtlebits wrote:
| I wanted to like Imba, but could not find simple hash based
| routing for static sites (ie, no server side magic). Wonder if
| that is still the case.
| pier25 wrote:
| By "server side magic" you mean routing requests to
| index.html?
|
| AFAIK that's a very simple config in all static hosts.
| random_visitor wrote:
| I'm in my final year of college and for over last 3 years I
| learnt a good part of my coding skills from scrimba. I was sold
| from the moment I found we could pause the video and copy the
| code (no more rummaging through github and pastebin). Its really
| good to see you guys grow and reach even more learners.
| mrborgen wrote:
| That makes me very happy to hear! :D
| bookercodes wrote:
| I am such a big fan of Scrimba and everything you're doing, Per!
| As someone who learned to code by watching YouTube videos, I
| immediately saw the value. More than that, I saw the FreeCodeCamp
| community rush to sign up, engage, and learn from all your new
| courses. This was only a sign of what was to come. Watching the
| Scrimba platform, instructor base, and lesson database evolve
| this year has been awesome, and I see no reason why you'd slow
| down now. Acquisition offers from the likes of Pluralsight are
| coming!
| mushufasa wrote:
| I've not yet found an experience that matches the interactivity
| of DataCamp. They don't do simultaneous video and code, but they
| have helpful code feedback and the video slides are picture-in-
| picture, which I prefer to having to scroll through a video to
| lookup code screenshots.
|
| That said, DataCamp had a scandal a few years back and a lot of
| authors retracted content.
|
| I'll take a look at this.
| swyx wrote:
| i loved the email courses you did. congrats on the launch and
| good luck as you grow!!
| mrborgen wrote:
| Thanks! We're soon going to start a new newsletter which will
| give people one coding challenge per week. It's inspired by the
| one-week email course we did, as people seemed to like it a lot
| :)
| admiral33 wrote:
| Novel. Any plans to include flutter in the curriculum?
| mrborgen wrote:
| Not at the moment unfortunately.
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(page generated 2020-09-24 23:00 UTC)