DivingLinux

I made a post on Twitter and LinkedIn to gather enough participants in the private beta.

The generated traction was somewhat disappointing, but I did receive a few demands from outside my circles, which is always nice to get impartial feedback.

This morning I received a notification from Stripe, someone that saw my Twitter post paid for a full licence!

I made my first Stripe money, such a nice feeling of validation after working for 10 months alone in the dark.

Today, I started inviting peoples to the private beta, the goal is to get around 20 peoples to try DivingLinux before the end of the year.

This will give me enough time to make sure that everything is working fine, and tweak what's needed before the public launch on January 3rd 2021!

After 2 month of complete abandonment, I received a Slack message, an intern wanted to learn more about Linux, and he heard I was building a course a few months ago.

I had zero motivation, but opened my code editor anyway, did some checks to see if everything was still working fine, and gave him access.

Five hours and a few bugs fix later, he already finished two chapters and wanted more.

This gave me a great boost of motivation to work on it again, reviewing my task list after two months made me realize how far I was from an MVP vision.

Now is the time for action, I have two items on my to-do list:

1. Activate the payment form
2. Launch

After 8 months of lonely work on the course platform, I felt the urge to finally communicate openly on my progress and show what I've built so far.

So today I unveiled a first sneak peek of DivingLinux, this is the first of many clue about what the course will look like.

Read the introduction thread: https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1436721058414014468

I started to learn programming around 2011, mostly to escape the boringness of high school, which was not a great fit for me with my 15 minutes attention span.

Realizing that I was not made to do an extensive scholarship, I joined a computer science school where most of the course were organized around project-based learning, which completely changed my approach of learning.

Fast-forward 10 years later, I started teaching in a French IT school and needed to prepare a 5 days intro to Linux course. My first intuition was to go back to the course I got back in my student days.

My Linux teacher at the time gave us a Linux server and tasks to complete with automatic correction. It was one of the best course I ever had, I learned a ton, completing each task in full autonomy and at my own pace.

I knew it was the kind of experience that I wanted to give to my students, and started hacking a similar platform, which was a huge success with the students.

So why not make a full Linux course and share it with the world ?

This is where Diving Linux is coming from.