This article is the third of a series regarding the birth of the platform Tech.io. Check out the rest of the story:
- CodinGame Update: Focus on Learning in 2017
- Building a Free Knowledge-Sharing Technology Platform
- Building the Next Big Thing
- CodinGame and Tech.io: Past, Present and Future
End of January, I shared with you our plans for the year 2017. If you missed it, take a minute to read it: Focus on Learning in 2017. Two months have passed, and we have made good progress. It’s time to give you a small update on this exciting project which takes most of our time.
A Knowledge-Sharing Technology Platform
We’re building a free online collaborative knowledge database, created and edited by a community of volunteers around the world. In a rapidly evolving industry where True Programmers Never Stop Learning, the platform aims at resolving several troublesome points encountered by experienced developers.
On one hand, our ambition is to help every programmer keep up to date with new technologies and languages. Programmers rarely have the time to take on a full online academic class. They should be able to access practical content, freely and easily.
On the other hand, we want to allow tech pros, speakers, teachers and open source community contributors to create educational content on any technology they support. Whether they want to showcase their expertise, spread the word about a specific technology or gain flexibility and interactivity in their teaching experience, we want to help them.
Working Together
Since the beginning of March, a few people (less than 30) have had access to the closed beta. They are testing the new platform, creating content on different technologies and providing some valuable feedback. So far, they are quite happy and excited about the possibilities that the platform offers.
Discussion on the Slack we opened for the beta
If you want to help us in this beta, don’t worry; we’ll be letting more and more people in during the following weeks until we completely open it. If you haven’t done it yet, you can request an access on the contribute page.
As you might guess, we want to make sure the platform is fully operational before we open it to the world. We still have some work to do to polish the UI and make the contributor and learner experiences enjoyable. Also, we intend to have any technology working on our platform. Depending on the technology, it can be quite a challenge.
Discover Our Playgrounds
Remember that what you see in the different screenshots below will likely change in the following weeks. Still, we wanted to give you a small insight into what it looks like.
You’re used to having only 25 programming languages available on CodinGame, and you’ve been asking for more. The new platform opens new endless possibilities, thanks to a Docker-based architecture that allows integration of any existing image from the Docker store: HTML, SQL, Angular, Node, Kotlin…
A playground on SQL injection
A playground will consist of several lessons (not mandatory) with explanation text and, most likely, a small code test. It’s also possible to add multiple choice questions or videos.
Hands-on lesson in a playground on vue.js
To make things simpler and more interactive, we’ve added a viewer to the lessons.
A viewer which displays a plot in a R playground
Finally, if you really want to test, here’s a playground example where you can play with Angular and Typescript: to-do app playground.
We can’t wait to show you more. The whole project means a lot to us. We really believe that we can build an awesome tool for programmers. What do you think?
If you’ve got any remark or question, feel free to comment below. I’ll be glad to answer.