What a mixed feeling of (mostly) amazement and (some) disheartenment. I started looking into this space--particularly the autograder feature with full control of the execution environment, which looks look it was added to GH Classroom this March--back in 2016. I was helping teach life science graduate students how to code, and was surprised to find I couldn't find anything that fit my needs. I started working on CodeStories[1] during the few spare hours I had each week after grad school work. I made it decently far and built out a number of cool features. On the instructor side, course creation is tightly integrated with Jupyter notebooks, which is really handy. And the courses themselves have a cool level-based structure where main problems have associated side-tasks. I was able to use the site to teach several summers of courses.
I haven't necessarily kept a super close eye on developments in this space since 2016, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are other players with unique features at this point. But given that GH (arguably one of the biggest potential players here) basically just launched, there's clearly still work to be done. Personally, I had largely paused CodeStories after grad school until the events of early spring made it clear that remote learning is almost certainly going to make a resurgence. Since then, I've been putting in crazy after-work hours to figure out how marketing works (which has been intensely difficult given my lack of experience) and put a final layer of polish on a paid offering. Intermediate Python for Bioinformatics[2] starts in a couple weeks and looks like it's going to be a reasonable success. I'm excited for it and for whatever comes after it.
All that to say, I guess this is what it feels like getting scooped. I'm sure it's possible to argue that I'd already been scooped. But somehow it's different seeing it from GitHub.
Congrats to the team that built this! It looks like an amazing tool and I'm excited to see it put to use, particularly outside of the pure-CS world.
#1 Your story and the landing page are conflicting. I can't seem to understand anything about your product from the landing page
#2 It looks like its time to pivot. Find a niche which you can exploit (like bio it seems) and conquer it. Google Docs looked like it was going to dominate everything and no one had to do anything else in that space, yet Notion comes along and is now valued at $2B.
Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any particular examples that are conflicting? Would be happy to update the site to clarify any confusion.
In a sentence, the product right now is an 8-week bioinformatics course. It happens to use the CodeStories platform, which I developed, but haven't fleshed out into its own product offering yet. Does that help?
re #2: Good point; I suppose there are lots of similar examples. Zoom is a relevant one that comes to mind.
Not OP but, if CodeStories is supposed to be an education platform similar to the Github Classroom, why is the landing page selling a Python course?
Might be easier to understand by example: I'm a user that is interested in education platform, so I land on CodeStories website (because of your comment I thought that's what it is about). I see that the landing page is instead selling a Python course => I get confused and close the page thinking that I landed on wrong page.
Ah, right. That makes a lot of sense. Similarly to what I mentioned in the parent comment, CodeStories as a “platform” isn’t ready for market yet. It’s feature complete enough that I or one of my teammates can easily use it to teach a class. But the instructor side of things needs another layer of polish before an MVP would be ready to sell to teachers.
To be clear, all of our external communication for the past couple months (outside of this conversation, which is primarily about the platform) has been about InPyBio, the Python course.
Even though the separation between the platform (CodeStories) and the platform’s first course (InPyBio) is clear to me, there could obviously be clearer communication about this distinction on the site.
What a mixed feeling of (mostly) amazement and (some) disheartenment. I started looking into this space--particularly the autograder feature with full control of the execution environment, which looks look it was added to GH Classroom this March--back in 2016. I was helping teach life science graduate students how to code, and was surprised to find I couldn't find anything that fit my needs. I started working on CodeStories[1] during the few spare hours I had each week after grad school work. I made it decently far and built out a number of cool features. On the instructor side, course creation is tightly integrated with Jupyter notebooks, which is really handy. And the courses themselves have a cool level-based structure where main problems have associated side-tasks. I was able to use the site to teach several summers of courses.
I haven't necessarily kept a super close eye on developments in this space since 2016, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are other players with unique features at this point. But given that GH (arguably one of the biggest potential players here) basically just launched, there's clearly still work to be done. Personally, I had largely paused CodeStories after grad school until the events of early spring made it clear that remote learning is almost certainly going to make a resurgence. Since then, I've been putting in crazy after-work hours to figure out how marketing works (which has been intensely difficult given my lack of experience) and put a final layer of polish on a paid offering. Intermediate Python for Bioinformatics[2] starts in a couple weeks and looks like it's going to be a reasonable success. I'm excited for it and for whatever comes after it.
All that to say, I guess this is what it feels like getting scooped. I'm sure it's possible to argue that I'd already been scooped. But somehow it's different seeing it from GitHub.
Congrats to the team that built this! It looks like an amazing tool and I'm excited to see it put to use, particularly outside of the pure-CS world.
[1] https://mycodestories.com/
[2] https://mycodestories.com/inter_python_biofx_20/