Inspiration

From 2010-2014, I fell in love with interactive coding tutorial. At the time, there were a number of tutorials all built upon the ACE Editor which allowed for a coding editor experience in the browser. I credit CodeStreet, CodeSchool & Codecademy with providing me the confidence and knowledge to continue with coding.

As a teacher, I hoped to generate my own interactive lesson content to give back to the community that had helped teach me; sadly, I found there were no such tools for creators. Without community based tools to generate content, in my opinion, interactive coding content had stagnated.

In 2016, I developed an earlier version of CodeRoad using the Atom editor. Atom docs and design towards hackability made it easy to create an interactive tutorial experience. After 6 months I dropped the project, as I found it very difficult to generate and maintain tutorials using the format I had created. I loved the idea, but not the experience I had created.

Years later it hit me that using Git as a tutorial format in CodeRoad would have been a simpler solution for both tutorial creation and consumption. Back in 2015, I had worked on a tutorial series for Angular-Meteor using Meteor Tutorial Tools. Meteor tutorial tools showed me that a tutorial can be versioned in Git, and that it can help ensure each step in the tutorial in cohesive and consistent.

The idea of CodeRoad sat with me for years to the point where the product started to feel obvious in my mind. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to build a platform, but it was a tool I wanted to use, and nobody else seemed to be working on it. In mid-2019, I had spent enough time thinking about how it would work that I decided to use my spare time to design and build it.

Shawn McKay

CodeRoad creator