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:
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!
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?
1. There is a cross dependence on the mail server: I used live.com to log in, and was stuck running in edge. I then tried my google account, and was stuck running in chrome, If I used my yahoo account, I could run in any browser. A good idea would be to mail a cookie... and then we could choose any browser, and while this was all happening, Nightly/Firefox took a major dump in many of my systems. So... I used chrome.
2. I would like to be able to mirror the code window in my favorite one of the top 3 editors: so... either I could choose a font in your system, or I have to get my other editor to use YOUR font, your spacing, your beautifier, and your color scheme. I opened three bugs in VS Code, one in a plug-in ( yes, prettier is absolute garbage, I may make a cb(1) plugin. ). I opened a bug in Sublime... Also I opened a bug in Notepad ++.
I am now forcing myself to relearn Lisp for emacs. Its really quite brilliant. I would wonder if it would all be possible to implement this all into emacs.
FYI: When I am taking jobs freelance I ask them 3 questions: 1. What is your tool chain? 2. What editor are most of your engineers using? 3. What is the best font for programming?
I have not used Roboto, but now am forced to do it. My favorite font is Arial Narrow, mono-spaced.
As for the highlighting colors, How hard would be a preferences export for VS Code/Zed/Notepad++/emacs to match your color screen so... ( paper balls loaded and ready )...
"What you code is what you get."
And lastly... why is WSL2 so broken? and why is syncing between containers so evilly difficult. The Alpine community has been a great help.