I just got an unfortunate email from

CodeCrafters.

So, I'm going

uh it linked to this blog post. I'm

going to read through it.

We're pausing new challenges.

Hey everyone, it's Sarup and Paul,

co-founders of CodeCrafters.

When we began work on this project 4

years ago, we were excited to create a

practice platform that would be worthy

of the time and attention of users like

yourselves,

engineers with programming experience.

On some level,

we definitely struck a chord.

Our Build Your Own X repo climbed to

number one on GitHub,

recently becoming the first ever and

only one in history to cross half a

million stars. Okay.

Wow.

Our

Our 400,000 users

plus

have included prolific open source

developers, CEOs of hyper-successful

infra startups,

and staff engineers at household name

companies.

Right.

Above all, every other day we'd receive

a note or a comment from someone from

literally everywhere in the world

telling us how CodeCrafters helped them

build confidence and level up as an

engineer. Oh, that's kind of sweet.

At times when we even doubted ourselves,

it's those notes that kept us going.

Wow.

I actually The only I I actually wrote

in to say to give them suggestions. I

actually suggested that they should do

uh

like a Kubernetes from scratch

code challenge.

Um anyway, despite this, in all these 4

years,

the reality is that we were unsuccessful

at turning CodeCrafters into a business

that justifies the time, energy, and

capital we've put in.

Damn. We experimented a lot. Product

experiments, conversion experiments,

countless ways of profitably getting in

front of more engineers.

We've held on for far longer than the

numbers numbers justified because we

love this thing and the community around

it. But the gap between people love it

and people pay for it at the scale a

startup needs has turned out to be one

we couldn't close.

So, as of today, we've decided that

we'll pause developing new challenges.

This has been one of the hardest calls

we've had to make in our career.

This is honestly kind of heartbreaking.

What this means for you? Nothing

material materially changes day-to-day.

Andy Lee, our head of developer success,

has done an excellent job supporting

customers this far and he will continue

to maintain CodeCrafters and support our

customers.

The existing challenges and infra will

continue to be available.

We'll give a clear advanced notice if

that ever changes. Okay, hopefully it

doesn't change cuz I like this stuff.

A possible new home. We're also open to

CodeCrafters finding a suitable new

home. If you're part of a company whose

audience is engineers and you think

CodeCrafters would be a fit, please

reach out.

And then, thank you to everyone who

starred the repo, tried our challenges,

sent us an email, told a friend, sent in

feedback, or defended us passionately on

Hacker News.

I'm I'm amazed that they would even have

to be defended. Like

who could be against this?

And if you don't know what CodeCrafters

is, I'll tell you in a second.

I'll actually show you the catalog

because I've paid for CodeCrafters.

This Anyway, they're saying a huge thank

you genuinely. You made this the most

meaningful thing

Paul and I have worked on and we're

going to carry what we learned into

whatever comes next. So, if you guys

don't know,

CodeCrafters is a website where

you clone a repository

and it you run some tests

and then you you have to implement the

next thing and you continue implementing

um until you have

built that project

effectively from scratch.

This is the catalog here. Let me just

zoom in a bit. So, you can see you've

got examples like building your own HTTP

server. I completed this one.

And it was great because I did it in

uh you can do it in whatever

you know, any of these languages you can

you can use. I used Rust because

I enjoy Rust.

So, yeah. I mean, when I did this

challenge or part of the catalog, you go

through each of these stages

and you complete them one by one, get

the test passing, and then at the end,

you have something that is

pretty much functioning.

This one in particular, making a HTTP

server,

it helped me to understand

how something like Envoy proxy was

created

uh from you know, from scratch by the

engineers at Lyft and in particular by

Matt Klein.

And it gave me a huge amount of respect

uh for for those engineers.

And it gave me the possibility that I

could do something like that, too. I

could make a version of Envoy proxy

in Rust if I wanted to. And that might

be

uh quite attractive for a certain user

base and you know, that that's the kind

of thing where you can build a

community, you can build a career out of

that if you create a successful open

source

project like that.

And that's this is just one of the

uh of the

pieces of the catalog. If you look back,

there is make uh building your own

interpreter where this follows along

with the uh free online book crafting

interpreters.

Building your own grep, building

building your own SQLite.

You know, take your pick.

Uh these are all amazing projects. If

you build all of these, especially if

you build them in multiple languages,

how can you look at yourself and think

that you're not competent? You have

stacks of evidence that you are able to

build things, especially if you take

these

uh projects and not only complete them,

but then extend them afterwards and make

them your own, personalize them to how

you want it to be.

Add in dependencies

that help you to

build out all the features. Make it

something that you've always wanted. Not

to mention that while you're doing this,

you're learning

perhaps learning a new language, perhaps

getting better at languages you already

know.

This to me, this

product is something that people have

been screaming for, and maybe there's

just not enough uh attention or or maybe

people are unwilling to pay for it.

I don't know exactly what's going to

happen to CodeCrafters, but if I was

you,

or if I was a junior engineer or even

someone that's senior,

and you feel like you've never done

projects like this before, I would

highly encourage you to go to

CodeCrafters

and sign up, get the

3-month or yearly membership.

And give some of these a crack in your

spare time. Spend an hour every day,

stream it on Twitch, upload a video to

YouTube. Why not?

That way you can you can build your

knowledge, do something fun

and rewarding.

Anyway,

I just I received that email and I just

wanted to call it out and and go through

this

with everyone because

it's just a shame

that such a cool product didn't make

didn't make it to profitability, I

suppose.