Show HN: CourseMaker – Interactive Course Builder for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CourseMaker – Interactive Course Builder for Developers

coursemaker.org

Hello HN - founder here. My goal with CourseMaker is to create an online course builder which caters to technical course authors (developers, data scientists, analysts, scientists).

The platform allows you to easily create interactive coding lectures (think codeacademy or hackerrank), there's a demo you can play with on the landing page. There are other nods to technical authors - most content is created via markdown (the Ghost blogging platform has been an inspiration), and there is KaTeX Math typesetting. Underpinning these features are all the things you might need to run your course (payments, memberships, custom domains, analytics, compliance).

I've been teaching developers online for a couple of years now (15k students). It's been one of the best things I've done in my career, and hoping CourseMaker can help others do the same. We're in the second month of beta at the moment.

I'll stick around to answer any questions, and would really love to hear any feedback.

Adding interactive coding tasks weaved within lectures is pretty cool. Not sure there is much out there at the moment that provides that kind of configuration.

Not sure what the "free migrations" feature is though?

Thanks, you can also mix and match coding exercises with video, file downloads and text in your lectures.

Ha, "free migrations" basically means that if you already have a course on another platform I'll be happy to upload it all to CourseMaker for you.

Nice site. Handling tax is an awesome feature. Do you have plans to tackle US sales tax too?

Thanks for checking it out. Yes, we're doing a Paddle integration next which will cover US sales tax (auto-remittance). Paddle is a merchant of record, so they handle that side of things. Here's a detailed breakdown explaining the landscape if you'd like a longer read on it: https://coursemaker.org/blog/options-saas-subscription-payme...

Looks great, congrats on the launch!

What kind of computing power is available to teachers for the interactive coding examples? Can it handle machine learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow) for example?

Looks nice, any plans to support Rust in the upcoming features in Q2?

Definitely. Rust is one of the next languages we'll be adding support for, along with C and C++ (we've had a few teachers working on courses on embedded development). Also open to requests from customers on this.

Thank you, I'll look at giving this a go.

the one problem with these solutions is the marketing is left up entire to me to get traffic.

Yes, that is definitely a key challenge for authors. If you have an existing email list or social media following it is a lot easier. Indie Hackers is a good community for learning about that side of things. I also interview course creators on my podcast: https://coursemaker.org/podcast/

If you're starting from scratch, it can make sense to validate something on a marketplace like Udemy and then next time do your own thing (or you are allowed to sell on both Udemy and your own site too)

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