Almost a 'reality show' from Codelearn- 3 newbies documenting their coding stories

It was hardly two weeks ago when Ashish Sharma, co-founder at Codelearn posted a thread on Hacker News asking people to follow the journey of three newbie coders who’d be learning Ruby on Rails. “Contrary to our expectations, the post became really popular!” says Ashish. The thread pulled in 10,000 visitors to Codelearn on that day and a lot of interest (including the likes of Peter Cooper who is a Ruby on Rails expert). Eventually three coders were chosen whose coding journeys are being documented via blogs and comments.Brush up the basics

Codelearn is a RubyOnRails Tutorial which helps people learn coding by helping them create an app on their browsers. The site has gained good traction with 4k+ signups since their launch in July 2012 and close to 60k unique visitors till now (average time on site of around 10 minutes). This experiment is a way to help chart out the journey of a newbie coder which will help Codelearn in improving their product and the document will also act as a reference material for anyone who has just started to code.

About the ‘Reality show’

The stars:

Rohit Kanwar lives in Bangalore, India, and has been programming professionally for a decade, mostly making mobile apps. He has intermediate-level skill in Java, C# and C++, but has never worked with “scripting” or dynamically-typed languages such as Ruby or Python.

Sagar Shankar lives in New Delhi, India and has not programmed much since Turbo Pascal way back in the late nineties. He wants to pick up programming again for fun, and has been slowly working his way through resources on Python and Ruby.

Shirwa is 17 years old and is attending Saint Paul Central High School, Minnesota. He recently found his love for coding and picked up Android app development and is now learning Ruby on Rails.

The three of them have a plan in front of them to go from Idea to MVP in 2 months. Each of the three participants would be documenting each step in the form of a blog post and Ashish would be guiding and directing them via comments. At the end, the aim is to have all three ready with their product and their journey's documented in the process.

The experiment is 2 weeks into the running now and he progress can be seen on the site.