PracticeJS – Coding exercises in a mobile friendly web app

I think coding on a phone is doable if we "rethink" the keyboard part.

I've built a PoC (also a Web app, but requires a backend), video demo here:

https://vimeo.com/339574087

The neat thing is that all the heavy-lifting of syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc are done by Vim, so I don't need to port everything to the front-end.

This seems very similar to codingbat.com. My CS teacher in high school made me do codingbat and it was very helpful; I could see this site doing the same for JS learners. Codingbat is not as mobiles optimized but is still usable on my phone. As another commenter mentioned, some important differences are:

Number of problems, sorted into levels of difficulty / focus areas (this has only one problem that I would consider 'hard')

Help (not just solution) is available to those who want it

Helpful error messages

Syntax highlighting

That said, I really like the interface here. It works well on my phone and looks nice on a desktop, and is straightforward and simple. The only issue is that keyboard auto capitalization/autocorrect gets annoying to deal with on a phone. Hacker's Keyboard (free software Android keyboard) could help with that; it would be nice to have a link to something like that for Android+iOS on the website.

I'm not convinced coding on a phone will ever be a thing. I've tried a few challenges on my phone while interviewing and it was just a clunky and slow experience

I like the initiative, but the 'editor' on desktop is just an input field. Would have benefited from something like Ace Editor or CodeMirror.

Not sure what the test cases are for the Fibonacci sequence (just happened to pick that one first), but it gives an error for my code, and I'm not able to figure out why. (please ignore my bad variable names)

  function(index) {
   var fib = [0,1];
   for(var i=2; i<index; i++){
     fib[i]=fib[i-2]+fib[i-1];
   }
   return fib[index-1];
  }

1) would benefit from some kind of keyboard help so that it’s not capitalizing every first character.

2) getting errors when trying to use single or double quotes which makes things difficult:

>SyntaxError: Invalid character '\u201c

Otherwise, nice work.

The test cases for the Fibonacci sequence is terribly bad, you can cheat by returning fn = n=>[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34][n] You need random test cases and larger test cases.

Codewars is definitely better than this.

Neat! Are there any programming keyboards for iOS out there that help with common operators /characters?

Can you add syntax highlighting to this?

Seems very procedural-oriented. Would be really cool to see a procedural and functional orient solution.

Terse and you don’t learn anything. You should build levels and offer explanations to YOUR code.