There are many online platforms for developers that can help you learn new skills or start using a new language, such as CodeCademy, Leetcode, and CodeSignal. Some guide developers step-by-step through the process while teaching them the basics, while others provide detailed video tutorials.
Codecrafters is a platform where developers don't want to be shown developer videos or held hands when learning a new language. Instead, we want to provide difficult challenges for advanced developers to build projects, master programming languages, and learn other concepts along the way.
The Y Combinator-backed startup was founded in 2022 by Sarup Banskota and Paul Kuravilla. The two met at IIT Preparatory School in Chennai.
Sarup Banskota-Paul Kuravilla Image credit: Codecrafters
After graduating from college, Kuruvilla became a manager at the company he worked for, building a Redis clone (Redis is an open source data structure store) from scratch to upskill and motivate his team members. I set myself a challenge. Eventually he created a workshop based on this experience and published it on his website with instructions. Banskota told TechCrunch that this is essentially Codecrafters v0, but for Kuruvilla's workshop.
After Banskota left his job at Vercel, the two started building Codecrafters. They thought people would come to this site to learn the internals of Git, Docker, or Redis. But instead, people started learning programming languages.
When the startup joined Y Combinator, it wasn't profitable, so the two needed to adjust their product to fit the market.
“In the first few days of YC, advisors asked us about monetization. We added a pricing page to our site. But when we started charging, users didn't like us as much. During that time, we needed to build features to justify monetization and make the platform better to use,” Banskota said.
The company is led by Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, former Vercel COO Kevin Van Gundy, Supabse CEO Paul Copplestone, and individual VCs from BaseCase Capital. The company raised $1.8 million in a seed round from notable figures such as Alana Goyal and PlanetScale. Co-founder Jitendra Vaidya.
Krieger, who is now Anthropic's chief product officer, told TechCrunch in an email that he's always learned new skills by building projects.
“I've found that building software end-to-end is a much more satisfying experience than just learning syntax. What I love about Codecrafters is that all the learning is real-world. Assignments such as building Redis or SQLite from scratch deepen students' understanding not only of the language they are learning, but also of core concepts such as distributed system performance. . And API design,” he said.
platform
The core premise of Codecrafters is a “build your own x” project, including BitTorrent clients, Git, Redis, Docker, Shell, and text editors.
Once you create an account with Codecrafters, you'll be able to choose from an array of these challenges. The platform has divided these challenges into different stages and assigned difficulty levels for those stages, along with details on how the project will work.
Image credit: Codecrafters
You can choose any programming language for that project and also choose your proficiency level in that language. For beginners, the platform will introduce you to resources. You can start there, get familiar with the language, and then come back and try again.
After the initial setup, Codecrafters builds a repository that can be cloned onto your system. The initial repository contains the code to start your project. You can use the development environment (IDE) of your choice to build your project and commit your code to the repository.
Each stage has a page explaining the task, a discussion tab with comments and tips from others who have taken on this challenge, several coding solutions for builders to compare the core logic, and conceptual explanations and resources. is included. The company also implemented an AI chatbot that explains code solutions to users in the context of the stage.
Image credit: Codecrafters
For paying customers, the company offers a continuous integration (CI) layer so you can quickly test your code, get automated feedback, and keep working on your projects.
Developers can access the challenge for free, but only the content from the first two stages (or all stages for that month's project). Pay to access unlimited content, practice anonymously, take advantage of CI features, and receive priority support. Currently, Codecrafters offers a 3-month plan for $120, an annual plan for $360, and a lifetime plan for $990.
opportunities and plans
Currently, most of the people working at Codecrafters are contractors. The team is constantly creating new additions and enhancements to current challenges and thinking of new challenges for programmers.
In addition to a bot that explains code, the company is also working on features that provide AI-powered hints to users. Banskota said the advantage over other general-purpose chatbots is that the company trains its models in the context of solutions to different challenges.
“Any chatbot will tell you a code block or a solution to your problem. However, code is being submitted by different developers for the same problem. Therefore, creating better contextual hints We have the advantage of being able to do it,” he said.
Kevin Van Gundy, an investor at Codecrafters and former Vercel COO, says there are plenty of tools for beginners, but not many companies are building solutions for experienced developers to acquire new skills and capabilities. he said.
“There are tons of videos on YouTube and resources like Khan Academy and MIT for people to learn from, but an interaction layer for developers is essential. For a platform like Codecrafters to keep developers engaged It is important to build incremental steps for this,” he said.
“This platform allows developers to go through the process of building an entire application. Engineers who have gone through all that set of problems tend to become better builders.”
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are building tools that generate code and allow engineers to automate parts of the process. In this context, Krieger believes that advanced software design will become a required skill.
“As LLMs continue to improve their ability to generate code and assist with more end-to-end agent coding tasks, the skills valued by employers (and useful to entrepreneurs as well) are becoming more advanced. It’s software design, and Codecrafters teaches that through their courses,” he said.