

RoR in the browser (Heroku + Code-academy) - bevenky
http://codelearn.org/

======
hhemanth
Hi,

This is Hemanth , Founder at Codelearn. We had unprecedented spike in our
traffic this morning. Thanks very much for trying us out.

frank confessions :

1\. We did not expect that codelearn will get posted on hackernews, leave
alone make it to the front page!.

2\. We wanted a smaller audience to try it out first before releasing to a
larger audience at hackernews .

3\. We have been working on this only for 2 months now and there are lots of
rough edges, some of them are really silly, like making the rails environment
production and ideally we should fixed these small things.

4\. We are working to fix these problems and will post a message here as soon
as we are done.

5\. Some of you have pointed that there were Grammatical errors in the copy.
We understand that it is important, but we did'nt expect such a large
audience.

I would like to reiterate my gratitude for the support .

warm regards hemanth

~~~
binarydreams
I would like to know a bit more about the architecture behind it.

When 1000 users are coding together some RoR app, how do you guys execute that
many behind on your server ? I can understand that file browser and all can be
done with HTML5 APIs, but then on execution you have to take the entire app
(controllers, models, views, asset pipeline, etc. etc.) on the server execute
them, get the output.

Are you guys going to run a lot of web server instances then (maybe 1 per
user)?

Would love to know if you got no problem with sharing. Just for knowledge :)

Cheers and good luck with it!

~~~
hhemanth
We would definitely write a big blog post on it. Right now I can say we had
about 200 users on just a EC2 micro instance. We dint expect lot of traffic
and users. and I have to run to do damage control.

------
Smerity
I know I'm just nitpicking, but the grammar in the title of the video
("_Whats_ the best way to learn coding?") kills my confidence. Admittedly that
isn't indicative of the quality of the product but it's something best
avoided.

I spend my summer teaching high school students to code, but I doubt this
resource would help at all. To be honest, I'm not sure what the target
audience is for this. The tutorial assumes knowledge of Unix (otherwise you're
copying commands such as mv, cd, touch, ...) without explanation, meaning it's
not necessarily about coding anymore. Yes, knowledge of the Unix command line
is important, but that complexity should either be approached explicitly or
hidden away, especially with a tag line "the best way to learn coding". Coding
is quite independent of the OS you're using.

I'd also question using RoR as "the best way to learn coding". This is nothing
against the framework, simply the complexity and the amount that's magically
set up for you defeats or complicates the learning process. If they really
want to go with that tag line, I'd be more specific -- something like "the
best way to learn RoR/webapp coding".

There's also a lack of information on the CodeLearn site. Is it a pay service
after the beta ends?

~~~
schrijver
Speaking from personal experience, a large MVC framework like Rails is
horrible for learning coding. I tried to learn Django at the same time I
learned Python and my head exploded with all the conventions you try to learn
at the same time. Flask provided a much better start. There is a direct
coupling between query and response, and the web-app is but a thin layer
around the basic language.

In the Ruby world, this would mean starting with Sinatra instead of Rails. The
added benefits of MVC only become apparent in larger projects.

Learning this kind of stuff in the browser is a great idea though.

------
cubicle67
the slight irony here being this was something you could do with heroku when
they launched in 2007

~~~
ether
Dejavu! :)

------
arikrak
I signed up for the site and got the error message below. I really like the
idea of what they're doing, but if they're going to be teaching rails,
shouldn't they know better than to show all that information to users?

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in Devise::RegistrationsController#create
SQLite3::BusyException: database is locked: commit transaction

Rails.root: /home/ubuntu/codelearn

Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace

~~~
jarrettcoggin
This is typically a sign of having the SQLite DB open in a DB browser such as
SQLite DB Browser.

I do agree with you on this point though. Hide this type of information behind
a user-friendly error page.

~~~
bevenky
agree with you on the fact that this needs to be abstracted. however, i guess
its their pre release beta version, so work can be expected.

------
hhemanth
Looks like the db lock error was transient (due to large traffic) and now
people are able to sign up. So pls try again now, In case you still face the
error, please mail us at founders@codelearn.org, and we would mail you once we
have upped our capacity.

------
hhemanth
We had to take the site down. We have a few issues, we will fix them and
inform you when we are up!. Meanwhile pls drop us a mail at
founders@codelearn.org if you are interested to sign up and we will revert to
you when we are up.

------
hhemanth
Hey,

We have taken down the site. Please leave your email ids on the site. We will
get back to you ( in a couple of days), once we are up.

hemanth

------
Sidnicious
The videos aren’t loading because Dropbox, where they’re valiantly attempting
to host them, is 509’ing them.

~~~
hhemanth
Really sorry. Moved it to youtube!. Please check now

------
gisenberg
Tried to sign up, received the following error:

NoMethodError in Devise::RegistrationsController#create

~~~
hhemanth
so sorry. Can you send us a mail at founders@codelearn.org . we will revert as
soon as we have upped our capacity.

We are not able to see this error and we see that some people are able to sign
up and some are facing the error.

This is due to high traffic , just a guess. Sorry for the inconvenience.

------
gdi2290
if you want to see everyone's email address

$ cd ..

~~~
hhemanth
We have fixed this , by changing permissions. Sorry for the trouble

~~~
gdi2290
okay that's good. is that why I'm having trouble logging in at the moment? the
console is telling me

No directory, logging in with HOME=/

------
gdi2290
you can't even signup b/c you run into an error

------
jordanbrown
ERRRRRRRRROR

