Code Nebula - A Vast, Creative Space for Learning to Code

For the month of January 2024, I am participating in the first unofficial Threads Buildathon. In it, participants are encouraged to build something in public, and share weekly progress updates with a video demo to be shared at the end of the month.

My Dream

For my project, I’m going to be working on Code Nebula - A Vast, Creative Space for Learning to Code

My dream for Code Nebula is to build a community driven, online learning platform dedicated to teaching coding and programming skills. It’s designed for learners of all levels, from beginners to more advanced coders, offering a unique journey through various programming languages and concepts.

Each lesson will be structured into digestible sections, with progress tracked in real-time, providing learners with a sense of accomplishment and direction.

Behind the Scenes

I have never built something like Code Nebula before, but the projects I’ve been working on over the past two months have slowly led up to this without me knowing.

In the past two months, I’ve built CodeCapture, which allows you to generate images of code snippets for use in social media or wherever you might have a use case for them. In building this project, I learned about implementing code editors and managing syntax highlighting. These lessons learned will translate nicely to the building the infrastructure for Code Nebula.

I’ve also worked on this website, having migrated it from the NextJS Pages Router to the new App Router. I also switched from using markdown files to MDX files, which is what I will be using to manage the content for each lesson.

For session management I’ll be using iron-session. After playing around with Auth0 and passport.js, I’ve found iron-session to be the easiest to work with.

Finally, for database management, I’m still considering whether to use MongoDB or PostgreSQL. I’m familiar with both, and I am weighing the pros and cons of each option before deciding which one to use.

Progress so far

So far, I’ve made a little bit of progress with Code Nebula. I’ve built a simple landing page and started a draft of the first lesson. The plan for the rest of this week is to complete this first lesson. A stretch goal would be to get started with user management and progress tracking, but I am planning to leave that for next week.

Conclusion

As January begins and I embark on the unofficial Threads Buildathon, the journey with Code Nebula is filled with promise and excitement. The concept of creating a comprehensive, community-driven online platform for coding education is both challenging and exhilarating.