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Comment by njaxe | Hacker News Reader

Incredible work. You made something that someone would make by reading a bunch of rails beginner tutorials and you want to monetize your "work". I am sure that will be some people who will give you their hard earned cash, but when I see such mediocre approaches, I just want to scream. Moodle does what your open source creation does in much better ways. This project of yours should have been something to play around with to learn about rails, not a attempt to make money out of this.

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I actually don't see the value in the comment you just made, besides making an Ad for moodle. This guy made an app, open sourced it and you pay him if you want him to install it for you. I do not see a problem here. This product is not geared towards programmers, it for people who do not have technical skills and if you have you can build your own or use his for free. I think your feedback is very unhelpful for someone that is trying to make money from their skills why not say something positive or encourage rather than call them a beginner and tell them to go hang out in their sandbox. Well he is on the front page of hacker news so clearly other people here see the value in what he is doing.

You may or may not have a point, but I don't think you are making your case. The complexity of a piece of code is not a means of detecting its value. Facebook was originally written in something like a weekend or less. Twitter was not originally a complex piece of code. Also, writing the code is only half the battle. The other, and often more difficult, half is getting the word out, and this guy has managed to get a very visible notice on Hacker News, so he's way ahead of the curve. Also, you don't really prove that the code was easy to write, we just have to take your word for it.

1. Isn't this that negativity we were trying to avoid?

2. Who's Moodle? Never heard of them.

3. Coursify is a more memorable name for the product than "Moodle", isn't it?

Ref. 2: Moodle [1] is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments. According to their own stats, it is installed on 50k sites, and hosts millions of courses (but many of those could be samples or now defunct).

[1] https://moodle.org/

And ref. 3: indeed, "Coursify" seems to be a better name. But Moodle has a cool acronym: "modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment" :-)

1) Its a new user, but it seems to be too perfect for a troll.

Thanks for your feedback.

We used Moodle at my last University (UON) (transitioned from blackboard) but this is a very lightweight product for a very different purpose (Online courses).

Granted It didn't take too long to build (about 13 weeks in my spare time) but It's actually a lot more work than you might think.

The challenge is not in the "coding" but getting the user experience right.

Beginners cant install this. Someone has to do it for them :).

His product doesn't seem to do everything Moodle does but maybe that simplicity or lack of extra features is what some people want. In any case, he's created something and is trying to make money from it, as well as offering a free MIT-licensed version - nothing wrong with that IMO. No matter how many lines of code, why not let customers (or lack of) decide whether he's created something of value?

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