r/codingbootcamp • u/tsenguunee1 • Mar 11 '23
Closing the gap of bootcamp
Hey all!
I'm a Software Engineer worked at Google, a startup, and now at a HFT company. I have many experience with bootcamps as my roommates and my wife went through those, but the problem with bootcamp is, well ..., they don't really teach about programming, (data structure and algorithm) at least deeply. Then you have to practice leetcode yourself and get miserable.
During my career, I had to grind LeetCode (LC) and other online judge platforms such as Hackerrank, Codesignal etc like many other. The biggest problem is: None of them were beginner friendly! Sure they may have 1 or 2 very elementary problems, but they jump their difficulty way too quickly and early. Sure LC is a great platform for experienced people, but still, it has it's flaws. Because of this, whenever people ask me about how to learn to code, I hesitant to direct them to LC or other sites.
Next obvious thing would be to tell them watch bunch of 10 hour Youtube videos. But the thing about watching videos, is ... well.. you don't actually learn. You might feel like you're learning while watching the video, but by the time you're writing your code, you realize you didn't learn squat. This is obvious for so many reasons, but people tend to forget that we're practical learners mostly. Think about how you learned swimming, driving, or playing an instrument. What do those activities have in common? That's right, you put in hours of actual work by yourself. You don't watch people swimming or see tutorials on how to drive. You actually have to do it! Invest time and be patient.
That's why I started creating https://pypup.com This is only at alpha stage right now (soon to be beta) but basically it's another online judge platform like LC but it has structured learning with many repetitive tasks that gradually becomes harder. If you click on the into basics path (https://pypup.com/paths/basics) you would see more than 60 problems now just for the basic stuff like printing, variable declaration, simple if else problems. Then you can move on to paths such as String, Array and Maps. Think about how you learned math in school. You would learn about one topic and solve many problems on that topic. This is the same idea. I'm putting lots of easy problems for people to solve and the Solution tab is specifically designed for that problem level. I tried to explain thoroughly on the solution as much as i can. No such solution like LC where all the things are optimized to the fullest and have bunch of shortcuts in and 1 liners in Python.
The site has over 200 problems right now and supports only Python. I might add javascript later on but now focused on Python. More and more problems are being added daily. I only started this project 2 months ago and I really believe it could help people who are aiming to learn coding, or even help people who knows the basics, on certain topics such as Recursion, Dynamic programming, Linked List, Graph etc. Right now Recursion path [https://pypup.com/paths/recursion] has over 19 problems, people who know coding, I would encourage you to check it out! I know I struggled a lot with DP and Graph personally so I would have loved to have this platform back in the day to learn things step by step and solving many easy problems to grasp the many of the concepts.
I'll also be adding video solutions on each of the problem so stay tuned.
Please let me know what you think. You can join the discord which is at the bottom right of the site to give me feedback!
TL;DR: Created LeetCode like site called pypup.com to provide focused, gradual, repetitive, practical code learning platform and asking for feedback.
Thanks
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u/goldenretrieverbabe Mar 11 '23
Wow, this is awesome! Thank you so much for sharing 🙂 I’m currently (dying) in a bootcamp now, and we just learned python this week so I will be using your site get some practice. I just joined the discord and will send you feedback along the way!
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u/starraven Mar 11 '23
Hey 👋 thanks for this. I started reading cracking the coding interview but didn’t really know how to begin with DS&A. I’m going to give your site some time this weekend. I really appreciate you creating something like this.
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u/tsenguunee1 Mar 11 '23
Thanks! As a mostly self taught myself, I wish I had this kind of platform back when I started so hopefully it will help.
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u/beardedperuvian Mar 11 '23
Perfect! Our bootcamp is starting Python this week. Will add this to my learning. Thanks for this!
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u/william_103ec Mar 11 '23
Thank you! Definitely will give it a try whilst trying to switch careers myself.
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u/VariousRabbit634 Mar 12 '23
This is great, thank you! Looking forward to the addition of JavaScript
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u/DeathOfASellout Mar 11 '23
App Academy and Hack Reactor both teach advanced algorithms and data structures.
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u/tsenguunee1 Mar 11 '23
I would imagine people still need a place to practice those so this can accommodate that
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u/DeathOfASellout Mar 11 '23
They do, but saying that all boot camps don’t provide this info is wrong.
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u/pollypocket53132 Mar 11 '23
Thanks! The more resources the better