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
What if you could try out a new technology and learn its basics right in your browser? What if you could easily share your programming knowledge with anyone? We believe in a world where programming knowledge is free and accessible to everyone. For more than six months now, we’ve dedicated all our efforts towards this realization. Today, we’ve reached an important milestone: the creation of Tech.io.
A New Technology Platform: Tech.io
At CodinGame, our goal has always been to help you hone your skills and learn new concepts in a fun way. What we envision for Tech.io is, however, quite different from the experience that CodinGame offers today. We hope that this new platform becomes to technology education what Wikipedia is to general knowledge: a place where you can share your expertise to empower others to keep up and learn new skills for free.
To accomplish this, we’ve worked on crafting a robust container-based architecture that supports any technology or environment, thanks to the use of Docker images. Anyone, from passionate developers to tech speakers and teachers, will be able to create interactive learning content and share it easily.
Gamification, which is at the heart of CodinGame, will not be as prevalent on Tech.io. That is why we’ve decided to completely separate the project from CodinGame and migrate it to a new domain, with a new name. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and we believe that separation will be better for both platforms, although they still have much in common. The same account will actually grant access to both platforms.
Work in Progress
We’ve been busy!
First, we had to find a proper domain name. Quite a challenge… It had to be simple so people could remember it easily. It also needed to sound “nice.” We tried to link it to technology, even though there is nothing wrong in choosing a name that is unrelated or that doesn’t exist. Moreover, the final choice depended, of course, on the availability of the domains (thanks to those of you who took part in our naming survey!). At the end of the day, everyone feels differently about names. For sure, it was a difficult process, but we’re very happy now with the name Tech.io!
We had to design a new user interface and define a new graphical identity. There has been quite some progress, thanks to Vincent, who recently joined us as UI/UX designer. Work is still on-going on this.
New Look! (It could change in the following weeks)
A new platform also means a new logo (thanks to Mathieu Sancho for the great artwork!). We’re really happy to present to you our new mascot! It’s a wolf, because wolves are social animals who learn from each other. We thought it just fit well with the platform’s purpose.
What’s its name again? Oh right, he doesn’t have one yet. So feel free to share your ideas in comments!
Apart from that, we’ve spent some time focusing on security and scalability concerns. Not much to say about that, except that this “invisible” work is really necessary.
Collaboratively
As we’ve told you, Tech.io will be fully collaborative. We believe that the best people to teach about new technologies are the experts and communities who build them every day. Since the beginning of March, we’ve been closely working with early contributors. Some weeks ago, at the Devoxx conference in Paris and the DeveloperWeek in San Francisco, we met many programmers who were genuinely enthusiastic about Tech.io. Conventions and meetups represent the perfect opportunity to meet passionate developers and industry speakers and get feedback on our project. We intend to continue to meet them there (we’re currently in Budapest for the Craft conference!).
Around 50 programmers currently have access to the closed beta. They also have the ability to invite more people into it by sharing their three beta keys. Some of them have already created great hands-on content to use it during their incoming talks. Some of the contributors are working on playgrounds using languages that don’t exist yet on CodinGame: for example, Kotlin!
For now, I want to share with you a great course created by Marchete, who has helped us a lot. It will help you understand the possibilities that Tech.io offers. This will also be an opportunity to learn more about regular expressions:
by Marchete
We’ll keep you updated on the progress we make, until we completely open the beta. Meanwhile, you can still request an invite on Tech.io to be able to create a playground. As usual, please share your thoughts below!