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Fill-in-the-blank projects to learn new tech skills faster?

Problem
The best way to master a new tech skill is projects, but those take a long time. Many people who need to learn skills don't have the time or drive to create something that demonstrates mastery from scratch.

Target Audience
CS college students, since they have the greatest need to build a portfolio and learn job-relevant skills. But also indie hackers who want to learn new skills and build a portfolio. Maybe even people switching jobs to a new tech stack, but I have less knowledge of that experience.

Solution
A service that finds open-source projects built on a tech stack you want to practice, and turns them into fill-in-the-blank puzzles. It automatically creates a fork of the project to your GitHub account, removes and jumbles some chunks of code (this can be scaled with your skill level), and lets you figure out the inner workings of the project, fix it up, and even turn it into your own thing. It helps you learn skills with large projects without starting from scratch and helps you build your portfolio.

Here's a very early and low-quality landing page.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this before I take the plunge.

posted to Icon for group Ideas and Validation
Ideas and Validation
on June 30, 2021
  1. 1

    Good idea. Your uniqueness will be sorting the projects by difficulty as this is tough to do.

    But also, I'm curious about the product here - how will beginners know what is right or wrong? Will there be a guide?

    1. 1

      I'm thinking that depending on the selected difficulty, the missing snippets can be provided in a file to assist. And if you want to match the original project exactly, you can always look at the original forked code.

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