Learn to Code

This is a website that is built to help coders to develop skills needed for coding

Comment

Inspiration

I was inspired by the theme of self development for HYP and thought: how can I help others with their self development? And so I came up with the idea of a program that can help others learn how to code, whether they are students or just people looking for a new skill. Furthermore, it can help those who know how to code to develop as there is the opportunity to contribute language syntax and examples onto the site thus leading to a greater availability of languages for aspiring coders.

What it does

It is an interactive website where programmers can find language specific syntax and examples to help develop their coding. It can also allow those with coding knowledge to contribute their knowledge, in the form of JSON files, to make the site bigger and better.

How we built it

I used simple HTML to create a basic website framework and applied CSS to make it visually appealing. I then used JSON files to store all the data needed about the different coding languages so that it was easily expandable; much like buying expansion packs for games, JSON files can be added or improved to give greater functionality to the site. Finally, I used JavaScript to implement the data from the JSON files into the HTML site, adding the different code snippet 'headings' as list items in the navigation bar and then when it was clicked, populating the div 'section' with all of the code syntax and examples.

Challenges we ran into

  1. I hadn't created a proper working website from scratch in about two to three years
  2. Never before had I used JSON files to store data; usually I have used .txt files
  3. The JS Fetch command takes time to return a result, I had to find a workaround for that by using async and await

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. The website works and looks vaguely visually appealing
  2. Contributing knowledge to the site only needs simple knowledge of JSON files and GitHub
  3. It is infinitely expandable

What we learned

Just keep going. There is almost always a solution!

What's next for Learn to Code

Expansion of coding languages from users of the site, as well as the knowledge that we have taught people how to code. I would also like to implement an online code testing system using something like tio.run or a similar system with an API.

Share this project:

Updates