←back to thread

258 points somebee | 1 comments | | HN request time: 2.03s | source

Hey HN,

I'm Sindre, CTO of Scrimba (YC S20). We originally launched Scrimba to make video learning more interactive for aspiring frontend developers. So instead of passively watching videos, you can jump in an experiment with the code directly inside the video player. Since launch, almost two million people have used Scrimba to grow their skills.

However, one limitation is that we've only supported frontend code, as our interactive videos run in the browser, whereas most of our learners want to go fullstack—building APIs, handling auth, working with databases, and so forth.

To fix this, we spent the last 6 months integrating StackBlitz WebContainers into Scrimba. This enables a full Node.js environment—including a terminal, shell, npm access, and a virtual file system—directly inside our video player. Everything runs in the browser.

Here is a 2-minute recorded demo: https://scrimba.com/s08dpq3nom

If you want to see more, feel free to enroll into any of the seven fullstack courses we've launched so far, on subject like Node, Next, Express, SQL, Vite, and more. We've opened them up for Hacker News today so that you don't even need to create an account to watch the content:

https://scrimba.com/fullstack

Other notable highlights about our "IDE videos":

- Based on events (code edits, cursor moves, etc) instead of pixels

- Roughly 100x smaller than traditional videos

- Recording is simple: just talk while you code

- Can be embedded in blogs, docs, or courses, like MDN does here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/curriculum/core/css-fund...

- Entirely built in Imba, a language I created myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28207662

We think this format could be useful for open-source maintainers and API-focused teams looking to create interactive docs or walkthroughs. Our videos are already embedded by MDN, LangChain, and Coursera.

If you maintain a library or SDK and want an interactive video about it, let us know—happy to record one for free that you can use however you like.

Would love to answer any questions or hear people's feedback!

Show context
kamikazeturtles ◴[] No.43771622[source]
Scrimba is really cool. When I first got into programming, a few years ago, I tried to build something similar using rrweb but with server side code execution in docker containers so that it could support all the programming languages like replit.

When I first heard about Scrimba, I abandoned my project because I thought you guys would already go down that path. Why didn't you guys go down that route?

replies(3): >>43772254 #>>43781008 #>>43863325 #
1. mrborgen ◴[] No.43772254[source]
Good question! Expanding from client-side JS to Node.js is our first step in that direction. We considered server-side execution for all languages but chose WebContainers instead, as it’s a better fit for us when teaching fullstack web dev, and easier to maintain.

That said, our new IDE is built to easily support server-side execution down the line.