Show HN: Hexlet – online courses in real dev environment
en.hexlet.io
en.hexlet.io
For the last 12 months my team and I were working on Hexlet — platform for online courses on programming and IT. It's like Codecademy, but on steroids: instead of simple simulators or interpretators we have real containers accessed via browser-based IDE. Courses include videos, quizzes and real-world exercises. Exercises look like this http://i.imgur.com/DqtKD1S.png
The platform is very flexible. Teachers can define any environment they need (software, servers, etc) and write tests to evaluate solutions. You can create your own lessons and courses, both free and paid. There is documentation on creating lessons [0].
Users have root access to the container (which for them looks like a VM more or less). We've written our own IDE for this, and it's open source [1].
We've launched in the Russian-speaking market this spring and have some traction already (63k users, 23 courses, hundreds of lessons and exercises, revenue from paid subscribers), and today we finally have few courses in English.
We're looking for teachers, those who's interested in creating and selling courses.
If someone's interested, I can also explain how Hexlet works under the hood. It's written in Rails with ReactJS, and we use Docker (for both development and production), Ansible and AWS. Oh, and we love Slack. There is even a public slack chat for our community with more than 660 Russian-speaking members [2].
Thanks.
[0] https://github.com/Hexlet/docs/blob/master/create-lesson.md