Former SlideShare and Naukri developer launches Hackr.io, an online education community

Tuesday April 14, 2015 , 4 min Read

It's an online world; from groceries to education the internet is affecting every aspect of our lives. "Education is going online and we expect formal degrees to get obsolete in a few years from now. We already hear people saying that four years spent in learning android programming would have given better returns than four years studying engineering," says Gaurav Gupta, founder of Hackr.io, a community, where individuals can share and discover programming tutorials and courses online.

Instead of creating its own content, Hackr.io aggregates some of the best online courses and tutorials. "We intend to become a community (and maybe later a marketplace), where people can find, rate, up vote, and review the best places to learn anything that they would like to, irrespective of the content provider. Both, free and paid, content would be listed and ranked,"adds Gaurav.

Background

After over eight years of experience in software development and having worked with organisations like Naukri and SlideShare, Gaurav started Hackr.io in March this year. "In today's world, technology is evolving fast and a developerhas to constantly learn and stay up-to-date. However, whenever I wanted to learn anything new and upgrade my skill-set, it was always a challenge to find the best tutorials and courses," adds Gaurav.

Gaurav explains that a Google or Youtube search would usually throw up the best SEO-optimised tutorials, not necessarily the ones with the best content, or the best style of explanation. Says he: “I realised that most developers like me had got into this bad and tedious habit of starting off from those results, spending a couple of hours trying each link, and then weeding out the bad ones.”

This approach obviously had several problems like:

It was a time-consuming process of selection and rejection.
If a user selected a bad course, he/she was likely to learn half-baked concepts and develop bad fundamentals.
You may end up buying a paid course or book, whereas a far better course or tutorial would have been available elsewhere for free.

Gaurav feels that almost all the developers he knows have faced this problem at some time, and continue to do so. That is when he decided to build a community that lets developers submit, vote, and rank the best learning resources they find online. “Inspired by how community sites like ProductHunt, Reddit, StackOverflow and others work, we launched Hackr.io in the middle of March 2015," says Gaurav.

Interestingly, there have also been people who have believed in the idea from the beginning and have contributed towards Hackr.io unofficially. Citing an example how a friend helped spread the word, Gaurav says, "Misbah helped us spread the word about Hackr.io on nearly every social network on the internet and helped us get tremendous coverage all over the web when we launched. He is still very actively involved."