Show HN: Learn by rebuilding Redis, Git, a database from scratch

183

aacley 1 day ago 60 commentsRead Article on shipthatcode.com

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Discussion Sentiment

93% Positive

Analyzed from 1308 words in the discussion.

Discussion (60 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

conferza•11 minutes ago

So how much of this is AI-generated? I mean the content itself. Just curious.

xqb64•about 23 hours ago

How does this differ from codecrafters.io?

acley•about 22 hours ago

its free

f3408fh•about 22 hours ago

And entirely AI generated

Bnjoroge•about 15 hours ago

I’ll take that over something AI generated that’s not free

acley•about 20 hours ago

coauthored by compiler

gkbrk•about 20 hours ago

All the codecrafters content is available on Github too, for free.

DistractionRect•about 19 hours ago

This I didn't know, thank you for that! "Build a selfhosted codecrafters" might be a fun meta "build an X"

acley•about 20 hours ago

But can you run it on their platform? NO, you need to run it on your own machine which takes a bit of work. And we have over 80 courses waaay over whatever codecrafters has

batisteo•about 19 hours ago

Are we the product?

acley•about 18 hours ago

How can you be the PRODUCT when we have only 500 users? WE are NO GOOGLE my friend. BTW you can use guest mode if feel like you dont want to singup

khurs•about 6 hours ago

Vibe coded AI Slop?

Looked at the 'build your own os kernel' course and it doesn't appear to be written as a course by someone with experience in teaching that. A normal course also introduces and builds on concepts.

This appears to be generic info laid into topics.

https://shipthatcode.com/courses/build-os-kernel/lessons/wha...

acley•about 6 hours ago

Vibe coded AI Slop? Feel free to contribute (even with the help of ai). If something closer to it exits I wouldnt have made it

khurs•about 5 hours ago

My advice to you:

Mark each course as beginner/intermediary/advanced and the required background knowledge assumed. As people have very different levels of experience.

Take some course in learning how to teach.

acley•about 5 hours ago

I think you didn't go through a few courses. Many of those are actually better than whatever you can get from other places

chkmr•about 5 hours ago

https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog

acley•about 5 hours ago

PAID with fewer courses.

lohith1710•about 20 hours ago

Looks a lot like CodeCrafters, except it's free. Was it built by humans or AI?

isityettime•about 20 hours ago

There's a book about doing this with Git. I wonder how much of the content is cribbed from sources like that, laundered through LLMs.

https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

xqb64•about 19 hours ago

I've been watching this space closely and have been on the lookout for new releases. Besides "Building Git", there is also "Building a Debugger"[0], "Writing a C compiler"[1], "Crafting Interpreters"[2], "The Raytracer Challenge"[3], and a few others that I can't vouch for as they appear to be low-quality compared to the ones I listed out.

The potential for technical authors in this space is enormous.

[0]: https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger

[1]: https://nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler

[2]: https://craftinginterpreters.com/

[3]: http://raytracerchallenge.com/

asibahi•about 18 hours ago

Writing a C Compiler is really good. I enjoyed myself doing it with Rust and Zig.

xqb64•about 17 hours ago

Yeah. I did it in Rust only, but went a bit farther than the book and implemented some constructs that were not found in the book. I was able to compile my other compiler written in C with the C compiler I had written in Rust.

yakshaving_jgt•about 20 hours ago

I had a similar suspicion, though I thought the source material was from DAS.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog

qainsights•about 21 hours ago

Signing up is throwing `rate limit exceeded, please try again later`

acley•about 21 hours ago

bots are hitting tons of endpoints bro. You can keep using the platform as guest

philipallstar•about 10 hours ago

Why are you talking like this?

anonzzzies•about 8 hours ago

I do not care that much but all this user's comments sound like they are unprofessional / 10 years old. Careless commenting to everything while trying to promote a product that's already rather broken.

tyre•about 15 hours ago

I would recommend removing "bro" from your lexicon, at least how you used it here. It comes across as aggressive and immature.

Not a huge deal, but you'll get better results in life without it.

threethirtytwo•about 3 hours ago

I would also recommend you not lecturing other people and posturing as if your superior. The way you said it puts yourself above him and is condescending to him directly. You don't lecture strangers this way so why do it here? It's because you're protected by anonymity. You know what you say can piss people off but you say it here because the consequences are minimal.

It's ironic because an outside observer sees what you say as reasonable and mature but that's just posing because the statement only appears that way because they are not the subject of said statement. To put it simply, imagine you went to your boss and politely asked him to "Please be more mature when talking to others, it will make your life better."

Do you actually think saying that will improve your boss's life and make him thank you for such advice? No. It incites more conflict because of the condescension.

And here's the thing. You're perfectly aware of this on a certain level. Everyone is on some level. They say it because they WANT to be condescending, and at the same time they are unaware that they want it. It's subtle but I'm doing it too, right this instance.

A better way to say it is: "Hey, no offense, but personally when someone says the word bro to me, I personally don't like it, if makes me uncomfortable. I'm happy to have this discussion but I don't like that word. And that's just me" This statement removes the condescension and statements of immaturity and advice about his life.

Anyway I'm saying all of this to you to tell you that I AM being 100% condescending to YOU because I SAW what you said and it was completely obvious to me how directed and deliberately condescending it was.

kamikaz1k•about 12 hours ago

bro, relax

neochief•about 2 hours ago

Who's leaving these anti-bro comments? To me it sounds perfectly fine.

throw1234567891•about 18 hours ago

This bro thing is so disrespectful.

notLAYZ38•about 11 hours ago

Kindly add support for Java

noobcoder•about 20 hours ago

a dafor of things are throwing errors, but good initiative

jwpapi•about 17 hours ago

Can you add Zig?

acley•about 10 hours ago

jig is not supported by judge0 (our code execution library)

jaylane•about 12 hours ago

this is such a cool idea.

acley•1 day ago

I kept noticing that most "learn to code" content is tutorials you copy-paste, so I never had to actually understand why anything worked. I built this to flip that: each lesson gives you a real spec (e.g. implement the Redis SET/GET protocol) and you write the code yourself, then it actually runs against tests. Right now there are 80+ of these "build X from scratch" courses — Redis, a database, Git, a compiler, a container runtime, a raft KV store, etc. — across Python, Go, Rust, C, C++, and others. Would love feedback, especially on where the early lessons feel too hand-holdy or too sparse.

alexhans•about 22 hours ago

I've helped people get into programming face to face and also in a site I liked called exercism which also had a multi language track unit test passing style which I really value and it was purely command line, and I can't stress enough how important the command line is for me for people who want to dabble. Nowadays it's easier to get people into the command line because of Claude/codex.

I only have browsed your site from a phone and looks interesting but I wanted to ask if you had particular insights around getting people to approach learning, design through tests, breaking down problems, without having someone to guide them. Have you had a chance to observe people using your tool and adjust or it's been mostly dog fooding something you would've loved to have.

acley•about 21 hours ago

I've also trained over 100 students in Python back in 2021, when Python was often looked down upon in academia for not being a low-level language. My belief has always been that if someone learns one programming language properly, they can pick up another in no time.I've seen beginners spend months going through 300-video YouTube playlists just to learn JavaScript. People don't need 300 videos to learn a programming language they just need to understand the fundamentals and build projects.

This project, however, is aimed at people who already know a programming language but want to understand what goes on behind the scenes of popular software: how it's designed, why certain architectural decisions are made, and what things to avoid.

alexhans•about 5 hours ago

Got it. Different audience. Cool stuff. I'll take a better look as soon as I can.

tccole•about 21 hours ago

Oh that’s really interesting, I never considered that people using Claude has probably made the command line easier to learn.

fragmede•about 20 hours ago

Or made it easier to not learn. Why memories arcane flags to tar when you can just ask AI to "deal with it"?

AlexeyBrin•about 22 hours ago

First impression - looks great. Congrats.

I have couple of questions:

* I didn't see any AI mention, was it entirely built by humans without AI ?

* Were will the tests run ? Your servers or the user machines ? If on your servers, how do you plan to cover the costs if you don't charge for the service ?

* Will you accept contrbutions to the teaching material? How can other people contribute to the teaching material ? What is the AI policy for contributors ?

acley•about 22 hours ago

1. We have temporarily removed it due to abuse (people are sending their own project code through it). 2. Tests are run on our dedicated server. I had some spare servers that we bought for our other platform echoed. gg 3. Will you accept contributions to the teaching material? ofc we would. I am also thinking of open-sourcing the project 4. What is the AI policy for contributors? You can use AI(we also used it), but the quality of the course, should match the rest of the courses

SwiftyBug•about 22 hours ago

Is this going to remain free? I´d love an open source project like this where I could run the tests in my own machine.

acley•about 21 hours ago

Unfortunately, I dont think you can run the tests on your own machine.Tests run on jude0, which takes about 20 GB of RAM to run

SwiftyBug•about 1 hour ago

I have way more than 20GB of RAM. Can I run it in my computer? And why do I need jude0? If I had a suite of tests, I could just run code against them. Just like Exercism.

DistractionRect•about 18 hours ago

So what's the long term plan? If tests require a bunch of ram, scaling costs seem at odds with "Free Forever". Will you eventually have a pay walled tier? Or will you seek donations to pay for infrastructure or...

I like the idea of a community FOSS or source available offering, I have a lovely pile of ram from the before times (when it didn't cost an arm and a leg).