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Show HN: Coursemate – connect with other self learners (coursem8.com)
283 points by collin1 on April 1, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 79 comments
Hey Hacker News!

My name is Collin, 18 years old and doing a gap year after finishing high school last year.

This was my first real project after starting to learn web development around 5 months ago.

I came up with this idea as it was a real pain for me to find other people from my country and especially my age, learning and taking online courses about the same stuff online. Lots of these online courses include their own discord communities and forums, but I still found it very hard to connect with other people in there.

Thats why I built Coursemate.

I would love to get your feedback on it! :)




This looks great, well done.

As an older person in a small country, no results at all come up for me. I suggest a way to find people with different or no filters. Within 4 hrs of time zone might be a good one.

This will help prevent adoption stalling because people come in and see nothing.

I think the way to grow this is to set up spaces for popular free online courses and ask those coursemakers to link to the page for that course on your site.


Sorry to piggyback. As a software person/ex-founder in an Asian timezone, I'd love to connect with other experienced devs who are self-learning and interested in exploring CS, ML/AI (e.g. Fast.ai), software engineering, webdev, and random related topics with learning partners. Bouncing newly learned concepts off each other would be great for solidifying them, and a chatgroup is both free-form and has a lot of immediacy (not to take away from what Collin has achieved).

There are existing groups, but what's important is getting to know people who're at a similar stage in their learning, and are open to really learning together.

I've quickly booted up a Discord server here, if you or others would be interested in joining (from any geographic region): https://discord.gg/Yeavn42fBP (provisional name: Explorers)


Yeah, I'd second this for a couple of other reasons, too...

First, I think this is an example of when it might be _good_ to find people outside your "bubble" and just filtering by demographics works against that for no good reason.

Second, if you want to filter people, timezone as already pointed out, and also spoken languages, and maybe some sort of "pace" or "hours per week" would be more practical and useful filters that are actually relevant to forming a study group.


Yes within a timezone is a good idea. I am based in Australia, teaching myself deep learning, and happy to connect with anyone in Asia. Of course happy to connect with anyone globally, but being in a similar timezone can lead to more serendipity


Snap I am in Australia and working through Andrej Karpathy's videos on neural nets and language models etc.

I am on the fence about having a course-mate as I don’t want to slow down someone else (or vice versa), but might be cool to have a catchup with someone on a similar learning path for inspiration


Cool, sent you an email to the address on your profile


Hey! Thank you so much for your feedback. Have written this down. Really appreciate it :)


What's the value in limiting by age? Part of the value of self-learning is being able to tackle it at any point in life.

If I want to chat with peers who are self-studying data science or Python or whatever, I don't care if they're 18 or 80. I care that they want to talk about Python or data science and are at the same skill level as me.


I appreciate the filtering. Self learning is super life-style dependent and I’d like to work with other people who have the same (classes, part-time work, no real responsibilities like kids or a full-time job, more free time in the summer) lifestyle as me.

Also, there’s a social aspect of learning together and I’d rather spend time with people my own age.


Any kind of social matching app like this naturally draws in a lot of 18-23 year olds who don't want to interact with anyone older than college age. It might not be very nice, but I don't blame OP for it.


I think this is a great idea and a beautiful execution on the landing page.

My feedback would be to show a lot more of the communities that you have, pre-sign up. There are a lot of people already hanging around in Discords or forums, and to try your product they'll need to see there's a potential upside.

So, letting me browse without being logged in what communities and how many people interacting in it would be a better way to entice people to sign up.

Good luck!


Hey thats an amazing idea! Will definitely implement that in a later version. Thank you so much :)


Feedback: don't require password to have a special char. Chrome's password suggest doesnt meet that criteria, adds extra friction to signup


Requiring passwords to follow strict rules makes them less secure, not more: https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/


Password requirements in general are off-putting. It's my password.


Fixed it! Thank you for letting me know :)


to level up, you could also try to integrate some form of passwordless authentication :)


Very cool, looks very polished. 2 points of feedback:

  1. Why only frontend and backend topics? I would love see some mathematical or CS topics.

  2. The back button doesn't work on the site which I always find very annoying.


Feeling this also. I was considering making something similar that's more math oriented because it makes a huge difference having someone to talk about these ideas with. Math in particular can get pretty lonely sometimes!

Also just wanted to comment to OP that the site is really cool, feels quite polished. It's impressive that you're just 18 and you created such a cool and seamless experience. If you add mathematical topics (or create some way for users to add topics), I'll be a lot more likely to use it! Another suggestion would be to create some way for me to invite others to use the site -- some shareable link like "Join <user>'s study group!" not necessarily with that verbiage


Thank you so much, I really appreciate it! Which main topics within Math would you like to see on the app? Will implement them right away!


> 1. Why only frontend and backend topics? I would love see some mathematical or CS topics.

Or non-tech topics actually, I'm self-studying art and finance at the moment, would be pretty cool to find people to connect with


Strong agree with 1. There are so many more areas for self-study. Making those available as categories vastly expands the potential audience for this app.

In addition to math I'd love to see:

-Probability

-Statistics

-Music (could have sub-categories)

-Philosophy

Great work still!


+ History

+ Literature/Art/Opera

+ Logic (technically a Philosophy subject)

+ Kinesiology/Anatomy/Bodybuilding

+ Biomed

+ Physics and it's supporting maths


Hey there! 1: That's a great idea! Which topics within CS and Math would you like to see? I will implement them right away! 2: Do you mean the native browser back button? For me it does work in Chrome! What browser do you use?


+ foreign languages


Pairing self-learners with mentors would be a nice feature.

I recently retrained in IT and had to complement/substitute school material with self-study sources found online (mix of books and video courses).

Instead of teachers, whose added value was approx. zero, I would have benefitted from mentors/sparring partners prepared to do code reviews, architecture feedback,...

Keep up the good work!


Unfortunately the supply of mentors is basically nonexistent while the demand is endless. Multiple sites have tried with little success. I know one that survived by charging for it and paying their mentors but it's still way below their regularly hourly rate while it quickly becomes expensive for the student.


A potential avenue would be for self-learners to act as mentor to other self-learners. With a reputation system à la stackoverflow, mentoring tasks could be made appealing.


Nice work, Collin and I agree: this would be an interesting feature.


I tried the application. Here's some of my thoughts:

1. You can't explore before registering.

2. The only tags are software development related.

3. The exploration/filtering by age or country is none of what I'd want to filter by. I'd only want to filter by "interest" (things beside programming, which isn't there).

With that said, good website otherwise - didn't hit any other problems and fairly straight-forward.


Other filters I could imagine are

1. Level of prior exposure to overall subject. Someone who wants a refresher or go a bit deeper into a specific topic may not want to be in a study group with someone struggling to setup an editor.

2. Time commitment. Someone looking to spend an hour or two a week probably won't mix well with someone really committed to taking courses.


Thanks for sharing your thoughts! These 3 points are indeed the biggest points of feedback from people. We're gonna figure that out!


Similarly, I've been wondering where do you go if you want to connect with experts who can help you with online courses?

Say I'm a professional, I have money, I'm following a Stanford Computer Science course on Youtube or EdX, and I'd like to talk one-on-one with an expert that can help explain.

For language tutoring there are lots of services that'll connect you to an online teacher for a fee. What about for things like coursera/edx/udacity type of stuff?


When you're a carpenter let's say, you spend a suprising amount of time creating and setting up your own tools and scaffolds.

In learning it's the same, you're creating the map in the same time that you are discovering it.

If someone would take that away from you in a sense you'd get very little out of the process.

Now with chatgpt et al. you kinda have a buddy system for stuff like this out of the box.


I really like the idea.

A small feedback, it would be good to also add courses from all over the internet, e.g. MIT OCW.


Extend to other fields, like music instruments. I'm personally interested in connecting to other people learning the violin.


While trying to sign up, I was rejected with the error:

Your password must contain at least one symbol.

There are studies that show that that restriction decreases security, not increases it [1].

That’s all the friction I needed to not try this website which, from the outside looking in, seems like it might be amazing.

[1]: encouraging users to improve password security and memorability. (Yildirim, Mackie 2019)


That's not _really_ what that study says... what they found was that "A password guideline including three sample password creation methods and a persuasive message and important notes for the experimental group" gave a small improvement over enforcing password restrictions. So it finds that training people to come up with good passwords immediately before they're asked to do so results in slightly better passwords. Notably, they did _not_ test what happens when you train users and also enforce restrictions, nor what happens when you don't train users and don't enforce restrictions.

But then also recognized "the participants in the experimental group spent time to read the information and applied the given methods to produce passwords, maybe just to help a research study by participating. However, in real life, users may not make an effort to read the information provided in the password guidelines unless they have to. Zakaria [64] suggested that one possible way to overcome this is to make reading and understanding the password guidelines compulsory before constructing a password." So even if we were to follow the findings here, the result would be to create _more_ friction, not less.


You’ve made some truly interesting counterpoints here. Thanks!

—

That having been said, friction is subjective. So we’ll have to agree to disagree about your last point.


Fair enough, personally I certainly would find being forced to read through "how to choose a password" every time I needed to create one worse than just having some restrictions... but I also put _everything_ in a password manager w/ long random passwords, so seldom run afoul of the common restrictions either.


Hey! I have fixed this issue now! If you have any other points of feedback, please let me know :)


That's amazing! Thank you. I'll check it out!


What is it with these password requirements? This is not my gmail account or my bank – just let me create an account faster!


This looks nice, and is well executed, but wasn't really what I expected from the description. I was really hoping for something that would work for courses that _don't_ already have some community tools. There are tons of great university courses out there that have never built out fancy LMS content on one of the big platforms but still have curriculum and content publicly available on a website... they just don't have any of the community tools that those platforms include. That seems like a bigger need, and an easier target, than trying to out compete the ones that are built into the big platforms (which by their nature will always have a way bigger audience than any alternatives.)


That's a heck load of polish from an 18 year old - kudos


Really impressive work, Collin!

One quick suggestion is on the domain name. I know it's hard to find available domains these days, but you might consider "coursemate.chat" or "coursemates.io" (both currently available) or another of the new top level domain extensions. I think it would create a better first impression than your current "coursem8.com".

Best of luck with the project and congrats on the launch!


You did encrypt all of those passwords you're collecting, right?

Likewise, all of you who signed up did use a unique or throwaway password, right? If you did share a password, you must immediately change it for all of the other shared-password accounts that matter.


Yes! I use Supabase for the backend, which helps me take care of the authentication and authorization. All password are encrypted on signup and safely stored.


Ok awesome. Good on you.


Wow nice idea and impressive execution!

Why make age a factor in the matchmaking though? I think it's kinda nice to connect with people from different backgrounds and (life)experience levels, so why "restrict" that?


Very impressive for 5 months of web development experience! I taught myself how to code last year and most of the people I learned with across various courses barely manage basic eCommerce apps


Very cool. I love the sleek design, simple to use. sometimes the education materials can be hard to understand, but collaborative learning keeps the progress moving. lol. Keep up the great work.


Hi collin1! Can you reach out to my email? I am registered as "tobias" on your website. I want to ask you about HTML/CSS and possibly discuss a project for you to freelance on? Thx


Perfect place to start for someone like me! What's the tech stack? and How long did you take to achieve this cool platform?


Looks great Collin. I liked the clarity of the home page, it's hard to understand sometimes what a product is about. All the best.


Looks great and I signed up! Nice work. As several people below have said I was looking for it to have math as an option.


I would love to have more specific learning objectives, such as language frameworks: SwiftUI, Flask, Django.


Fantastic idea. Learning with others can be an order of magnitude better than by oneself in my experience. Well done.


Wow that’s very impressive, especially for your age! What tools did you use for design and development?


Dev wise, looks like Next, Tailwind on Vercel + Supabase


I’d like it if I could browse what courses were available before signing up.


Great job. Congratulations. I will join it as I'm begining to learn JS.


The idea is great, but isn't discord server enough for this?


Discord and Slack chat rooms are some of the worst tools for community building. The only reason they are popular is because they are free. It has absolutely no aspect of a community and makes it incredibly hard to have multiple threads of conversations.


I think this project should double down on the getting to know new people aspect and not bother with the messaging aspect.


Which discord server? What if community is on reddit? How do you search for people within your timezone, location, language and are learning same thing together in discord?


Indeed. I found Reddit + Discord sufficient to meet others and make good friends (to this day) when I was self learning Maths.


is there any other service like this? I really like this idea.


Yep really nice! I'm looking for something similar, a place where I can connect with other people who do hobby projects, and where we can meet and show off weekly projects and set goals. I know about https://www.startupschool.org/ of course. Would like something similar but not related to business, just to working on projects. Does something like that exist?


I've been looking for something like that too, for maths. Basically a group of self-learners, we set weekly goals (X pages or Y exercises from some book we'ee reading through) and then weekly meetings (online of course) for discussion of material and perhaps one person giving a presentation as well. Yours is similar but with projects instead. I've seen people using Discord and similar for things like these, I don't know if there's anything else.


Hey, how do I delete my account?


You should now be able to delete your account in your account settings page! Just fixed this issue! If you have any other questions or worries, please let me know!


You're awesome!


Looks good.

What stack did you use to create this?


Keep it up!! Well done


A project about learning while learning is a great way to go.

It’s really nice to hear you are a self taught developer. There is a different kind of free thinking and creativity to solve problems that comes from your path that others won’t have, and doesn’t have to be understood, only experienced.

the site looks real nice. Congrats and keep shipping.

People who use it are the only opinions that matter. This site makes you someone who makes something people want, while solving your own problem as a student, both of which YC like if you ever are interested one day down the road.

Feedback:

Instead of age you might be referring to stage of learning (complete beginner, some exposer, some experience, intermediate, advanced, etc).

Uncovering another way a group of people like to connect and start learning together around those topics is really good. You might be surprised if you modify the age guidelines for the following reason:

- Learning with other pellets around the same stage in a fantastic way to support peer based learning where people are a little ahead and behind of each other and end up reinforcing their own learning by explaining things to others and helping them, and also being helped.

- Having groups with synced schedules is a cool feature. If you focused on students globally their schedules would be different from time zones. Since the time zones would be different, there might be an opportunity to just do it by stage.

- Self-directed learners typically don’t stop learning at any age, they are usually good at being beginners in any age of their life because there is always something new to learn, or to learn from scratch. It lightheaded be hard to imagine it but a beginner to Python at 40 not much different than 18.

- If the site focuses even more on communicating learning stage, and being especially for self directed learners (but all are welcome) that might prove to help get even more of the types of users you are after.

- I agree I don’t think slapping an external discord chat and forums on a course is helpful as much as it’s convenient for the course creator. Chat and discussion should be built in seamlessly like other things we use. Edtech is generally poor at mindful learning and user experiences.

- You may like learning about the difference between pedagogy (how children learn) and andragogy (how adults learn) pedagogy can wrap up around 18-22 and after that learning and coming back to it can be a bit different.

If you’re interested to chat, I’ve also been building online learning since I was 16 or 17. That meant helping design and build a platform to deliver high school, college/university and then industry education and training. I’m into video now as it relates to learning.


Hey! Wow, thank you so much for your time and valuable feedback. Some very interesting points. Have written this down. Really appreciate it! :)


All good, edtech needs a lot more folks in it. I have been dragged back to it 3 times since I was in high school.

The exciting time for you is the time for change is closer at hand than it has been for 20 years.

If you like it, stick with it.


i like this! really captures the spirit of the fun, collaborative, distributed and humanistic internet.




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