No account, no streaks, no leaderboard

A lot of sites, channels, and courses are shaped to keep you coming back rather than to get you finished. Streaks you feel bad about breaking. Badges. A leaderboard position to defend. Another video, and then another one. That is tutorial hell, and it is built that way because it is good for the people who made the course, not for the person taking it.

To learn programming you have to write code. There is no way around it. Everything here exists to get you typing sooner and then out the door.

What that means in practice

These are not promises about our intentions. They are things you can check:

• There is no account, because there is nothing to sign in to. No email, no password, no profile.
• There is no streak and no leaderboard, so there is nothing to lose by leaving and nothing to farm by staying.
• Nothing you write is stored. Close the tab and it is gone -- here and in your browser. Download what you want to keep; the file goes to your machine and nowhere else.
• Your code never leaves your browser. Every challenge runs on your own computer -- there is no server here that could run it even if we wanted one.

How it fits with Learn to Write Code

Learn to Write Code is the school: it teaches an idea in plain English, writes it in pseudocode, and then shows the same program in Python, JavaScript, C#, Java, and C++. Coders Rock is the workshop next door. It does not teach its own curriculum and it never will -- it takes what the lesson taught and hands you the keyboard.

Roughly: a lesson gets you to the point where you understand what is going on. Practicing here gets you to the point where you could start building something yourself. That second step is the one nothing but typing can give you.

How the code runs

Pseudocode runs on an interpreter written for this site, which follows the same pseudocode standard the lessons use. Python runs on Skulpt, a Python 3 interpreter written in JavaScript. JavaScript runs in a web worker with no network access. All three run inside the page you are reading.

That has a limit worth knowing about: these are real interpreters, but they are not the full language. If a program does something unusual and the console disagrees with a real Python or Node installation, trust the real one -- and tell us, because that is a bug worth fixing.

Who makes it

Coders Rock is built by Brian Kittrell, a software systems architect with nearly twenty years of writing, debugging, and designing software for a living. He also makes Learn to Write Code and the codeBetter channel it comes from, which is why the two sites teach and practice the same thing in the same order rather than just pointing at each other.

The approach is the same one the lessons use: understand the idea first, write it in pseudocode second, and only then argue about semicolons. Practicing here is the step after that -- the one where you find out whether you actually understood it. There is more about Brian, and why the channel exists, on the Learn to Write Code about page.

Coders Rock is part of Exteran Studios. Articles on the blog are published under the site's own name rather than a personal byline.