Good morning, Internet!
Yesterday night, I watched Marty Supreme (with Timothée Chalamet as main actor and producer), about Marty Reisman, a crazy tennis table player. It was a great movie, very intense (even though I wouldn't put that in my top 10). I love colors, aesthetics overall, even though some aspects were mid.
Today, I'll focus on figuring out how I could get back in the space of teaching programming. There are objections I'll need to solve (for myself). Things like: "why would you still teach programming nowadays, with the advent of LLMs and so called AGI". Well, first, I do not think LLMs are AGI (except if we keep switching the definition to suite the discourses of the LLMs lords). And it may be as dumb to state that one does not have to learn programming, as stating that one shouldn't learn to read and write the English language, since ChatGPT can write your cover letter.
Asking around about how people first learned programming, I had multiple answers. Some learned through CS50 (hey Pablo!), some through OpenClassrooms (a french website to learn programming turned into a real company/institution) which was partially my case as well, some by toying around with subjects they cared about, some with bootcamps, ...
I know of one guy, my former associate, who actually learned through FreeCodeCamp (since I semi-trained him to learn to program the way I did). And he's got a good job as a software engineer at a popular devtools company nowadays. So I guess, this FreeCodeCamp model can work as well.
I've got a huge belief that once that somebody knows the basics of programming, programming can be used to approach other subjects: from physics, to complex math, to chemistry (or even biology?). And even in the programming space, there are so much things to learn... I wouldn't get out of content to write and offer to students (adults or not).
For example, as an adult programmer, I actually had to learn how an interpreter and a compiler works, by reading Thorsten Ball books (I may be misspelling his name). And there are still crazy amounts of subjects I still have to learn. As an other example, there are tons of things to learn about in the Linux kernel: KVM, how containers really work, file systems... There are tons of subjects that adult programmers could want to learn not to fell behind young vibecoders that would indeed steal their job if they do not level up.
Overall, the subject with the current pace of AI could be about levelling up as software engineers.
Anyway, yesterday night, while watching this silly movie, I started to write a simple Go program that spawns containers for the Go compiler. With proper cgroups, namespaaces, and jailing (maybe using something like gvisor), I may have something easily secure enough to be released. Now, I need to figure out the content, the test suites, etc. Let's jam!
Good afternoon, Internet!
I figured out that I could use yaegi, from Traefik, if I want to provide an efficient way to run Go in the browser of my users. Cool, right?
It means that this operation could be very very efficient: no need to spawn real containers, ...
It could even exist without a database in the first place. Progress can be tracked in local storage.
Another subject: Ads are coming to ChatGPT. I'm wondering which opportunities it could bring to the table...
Random thought: A while ago, I learned about Eliot Peper, a sci-fi writer who happens to be consulting to various startup companies. What a time to be alive for sci-fi authors!
Good night, Internet!
I'm currently learning about Maurice G. Dantec, and I think I've got a lot to learn by reading him... Especially since I was looking for french cyberpunk authors, and I had no idea that there was such a big one! It's time to read some of his books.
Besides that, I'm getting an initial prototype release of "Hypercode" (I'll probably find a better name) ready. It exists at https://hypercode.alexisbouchez.com/, but I still need to solve an issue in production (the Yaegi WASM thing does not seem to load properly).
Go 1.26 is released, I should post something about it on LinkedIn...
I released improvements to Hypercode to production, and I need to "recruit" early adopters/contributors now. Something I'm realizing is that maybe wasn't the right, first, target as it's not the technology with the least content. Niche languages like Zig/Gleam/... could be more valuable. I also need to merge PostgreSQL Hero into Hypercode! Overall, I'll add practical projects, languages, ... Let's see where it goes!
For Zig, there is https://github.com/zigtools/playground that I should look into!
A simple way to differentiate Hypercode from the rest of learning platforms would be to translate things. With AI, it's completely feasible to have the content in multiple languages, and it would be a great way to reach more people. I could even have a "translate" button on each page, and let users choose their language. It would be a great way to make programming more accessible to non-English speakers.
A way to turn it B2B could be to make partnerships with startups that have an interest in developing knowledge of PostgreSQL (Supabase), SQLite: Turso/others, AI agents (any devtool company), ...
A big question is also: how do I teach the Linux kernel/Linux usage? How do I teach C correctly, ... There was https://labs.iximiuz.com/ I can take inspiration from as well!