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

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aacley 1 day ago 60 commentsRead Article on shipthatcode.com

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Discussion (60 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

conferza•10 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

gkbrk•about 20 hours ago

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

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

f3408fh•about 22 hours ago

And entirely AI generated

acley•about 20 hours ago

coauthored by compiler

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/

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

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.

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.

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