17 Opportunities with CodeCrafters

CodeCraftfers is a tool that helps you to sharpen your engineering skills, build your knowledge and improve your portfolio with a wide range of structured projects. Why?

Because “If You Build It, They Will Come” see figure 17.1.

Figure 17.1: The phrase “If You Build It, They Will Come” is a quote from the film Field of Dreams where the lead character, played by Kevin Costner pictured above, builds a baseball field on his farm after hearing a voice in his head telling him that “If You Build It, He Will Come”. (Robinson 1989) Fair use image from Wikimedia Commons. ⚾️

If you build it, they will come because:

• Building stuff will help you learn new things
• Building interesting software and hardware will help your CV stand out from those of your competitors
• Building anything will supercharge your skills and knowledge by applying what you have learned in your formal education
• Building a project for your portfolio will give you lots to talk about in your job applications and interviews
• Building stuff for curiosity can be fun! It’s easy to lose sight of this fact during the hard grind required to get a degree. So, build it because you want to, because it’s there, not just because some teacher, lecturer or professor made you do it for their course.

These are all strong arguments for working on all kinds of PROJECTS: personal, solo, voluntary, hacking, collaborative, freelance, tinkering or a pet side project, as outlined in section 8.7.5. But:

• where do you start?
• how can you keep going?
• when will you finish, if you finish at all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software is great fodder for portfolios but can be intimidating projects for beginners and outsiders, see section 5.3.5. Whether it’s open or closed, building a portfolio can sometimes feel like drawing the owl shown in figure 17.2:

1. draw some simple lines
2. draw the rest owl

There’s a BIG piece missing in the middle, the missing docs, to help you start, keep going and help you finish your engineering project(s).

Figure 17.2: Drawing an owl step by step should be an easy project: Step 1 just your draw an oval and some simple lines, then Step 2 fill in the rest of the owl. Easy? Not really, most people need more steps and help from the elusive missing docs. Creative Commons licensed screenshot taken from Google’s Tech Writing course, see section 4.6.2. 🦉

17.1 Crafting Your Future with CodeCrafters

The missing docs is a problem that codecrafters.io can help you with. Their coding challenges take you through building your own \(x\), step by step. You won’t just build your CV, you’ll become a better engineer too. Choose from a range of challenges from making your own shell or interpreter to building your own Git, Redis, SQLite or DNS server. There’s plenty of projects to choose from in whatever language you feel comfortable with or whatever new language you’d like to start using and learn more about, see figure 17.3.

Figure 17.3: Become a better software engineer with CodeCrafters. Stop following tutorials designed for beginners. Start working on PROJECTS that actually challenge you. Become a better engineer through deliberate structured practice, screenshot from codecrafters.io

Co-founded by Sarup Banskota and Paul Kuruvilla, CodeCrafters was backed by ycombinator.com in 2022. The free tier of codecrafters gives you limited content access and community features, but if you’re a student at the University of Manchester, we’re excited to offer you something better.

17.2 Free CodeCrafters for UoM students

If you’re a student at the University of Manchester (UoM), we are pleased to be able to offer a one year membership for professionals, which normally costs $30 per month for free (YES free!) via manchester.ccio.dev.

Figure 17.4: Move beyond basic tutorials and classroom exercises. Build real-world projects that push your technical boundaries. Develop industry-ready skills through hands-on practice with codecrafters.io. If you’re a University of Manchester student, you can register using your student credentials at manchester.ccio.dev

17.3 Summertime and the Coding is Easy

Unfortunately, Summertime coding³¹ isn’t always as easy as we might hope. Building a portfolio of interesting projects takes time and resilience. These demands need to be balanced with your academic commitments, social life and possibly a part-time job if you have one. Codecrafters doesn’t make this easy but it does make it easi-er by giving you structured projects to work through in your own time at your own pace. Their projects will help you build your knowledge and provide a portfolio of concrete evidence of your skills that you can use in your job applications and job interviews.

Apart from any career considerations, it is fun to challenge yourself to build stuff just for the sheer enjoyment of it. To engineer is human, engineering can satisfy some of our most basic human impulses. (Petroski 1985)

If you build it, they will come, whatever field you are dreaming in. You’ll improve the chances that they will invite you to interviews and you will improve the chances that they will offer you the job. So get building and get experimenting with CodeCrafters. The only question is, what will you make?

Figure 17.5: “Summertime and the coding living is easy, fish are jumping and the cotton is high”: Ella Fitzgerald performing Summertime in 1968. (Fitzgerald and Armstrong 1959)

17.4 Acknowledgements

Big thanks to Arpan Pandey for negotiating and building CodeCrafters access for students at the University of Manchester, shown in figure 17.4. 🙏

Summertime is an aria composed by George Gershwin for the opera Porgy and Bess. (Gershwin 1934) Many versions of the song have been recorded by different artists including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong shown in figure 17.5. (Fitzgerald and Armstrong 1959)