All Coding Courses on Qvault Are Now Free to Audit

Twenty dollar bill in tree

The post All Coding Courses on Qvault Are Now Free to Audit first appeared on Qvault.

Last weekend I did a major revamp of Qvault’s payment strategy, after toying with the first version since I launched in the summer of 2020, as it turns out, the microtransaction (gem) strategy didn’t work out to the benefit of my students, nor to the growth of Qvault. As a result, I’ve flipped my funding strategy on its head and decided to make all of Qvault’s content free to audit. Let’s take a look at exactly what that means.

What is Qvault?

Pro Yearly

If you don’t know already, Qvault is a code-in-the-browser computer science program. A few of the goals I had when I started building it out were:

  • Linear program – clear starting and ending points.
  • Focus on computer science. Too many boot camps and online courses skip CS fundamentals.
  • Hands-on. We learn by writing and executing code, videos have their place but the majority of coding education should be interactive.

All of these were problems for my wife when I told her, “you don’t need to go back to school, you can learn online!”. She had problems just knowing where to start with popular course marketplaces and certainly couldn’t put together her own curriculum.

Free computer science courses

Qvault now works on a subscription model with a very permissive free tier. With the free plan, you can work through entire courses, you just aren’t able to verify your answers without supporting the project. In other words, you can read all the content and execute the code in a sandbox, you’ll just have to decide for yourself when you feel like you’ve mastered a concept.

I like this plan for now for several reasons. Before, since I was charging for courses themselves, my free users would just get a 7-question demo for free, which is practically useless if you can’t afford to spend any money. Now I feel like the free tier is quite a bit more useful, and I hope my free users will still support the project by following Qvault on social, sharing my blog posts, and telling others about the platform.

That said, I think for those that can spare a few bucks a month, the pro plan will be well worth it. Getting instant verification on answers will save students a ton of time, and the ability to take the quizzes will reinforce concepts learned. At this point, certifications are also only available to pro students simply because they’re the only ones that can prove completion, so if you need proof-of-completion for employment purposes you’ll want to seriously consider upgrading.

For just a cup of coffee…

If you supported every open-source project and indie hacker product on the basis of it only costing “the price of your daily coffee” you’d run out of money pretty quickly. Personally, I make my own coffee for $0.20. That said, one of the biggest goals of Qvault is to provide the user experience, certifications, and interactivity that open lectures from Stanford and Harvard are missing while keeping costs well below that of university or boot camp tuition.

  • Traditional computer science degrees cost tens of thousands of dollars and take ~4 years.
  • Bootcamps cost almost as much and take ~12 weeks, but skip important fundamentals.
  • Qvault’s aim is to provide the same quality content as a CS degree via a certificate, but on your own time and for ~$6/mo.

The full CS curriculum is a work-in-progress, though I have a tentative roadmap put together. It’ll take more students supporting the project and more late-nights for me to make it happen! We can get there, even with my 6-week-old daughter making free-time a fleeting luxury.

Thanks For Reading!

If you’re interested in furthering your CS career, take our computer science courses

Follow and hit us up on Twitter @q_vault if you have any questions or comments, and if we’ve made a mistake be sure to let us know so we can get it corrected!

Subscribe to our newsletter for more programming articles



source https://qvault.io/2021/03/15/free-coding-courses-audit/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is Exclusive Or (XOR) Important in Cryptography?

Image
If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the exclusive-or operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers. What is XOR ( ⊕ )? XOR, or “exclusive or” operates on binary data. It returns true if both of its inputs are opposites (one false and one true), otherwise, it returns false. An example in go code would be something like: func exclusiveOr(a bool, b bool) bool { return a != b } XOR Cipher – The Perfect Cipher The XOR operation can be used as a simple cipher for encrypting and decrypting messages with a single key. This is known as symmetric encryption. It is interesting to note that if: The key is the same size as the message The key is kept secret and generated truly randomly Then the cipher is impossible to crack. This is known as a one time pad . However, a simple XOR shouldn’t be used in production due to the key length needing to be too long to be practical. Cipher Example A...
Read more

Base64 vs Base58 Encoding

Image
By Lane Wagner –  @wagslane  on Twitter Base64 is one of the most popular encoding formats for representing data. Have some binary data? Base64 encode it for convenient readability and parsing. Base58 is just another encoding format (with 58 characters instead of 64, and has gained popularity largely due to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When it comes to data encoding, there is typically a trade-off made between: Human Readability: Do humans have a good idea of what is being represented at a glance? Efficient data compression: How many bytes are used to represent the same data? Let’s rank Base58, Base64, and ASCII encoding against each other using these metrics! First: A Note on Binary All data is stored in a raw binary format on computers. These encoding formats (Base64, Base58, and ASCII) are just different ways of reading and writing binary data. For example, in Base64 the binary code 000000 represents the letter A , but in ASCII the binary 00000000 repres...
Read more

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD-5, etc)

Image
This is going to be a basic introduction to hash functions. I will assume most of my audience is here to gain an understanding of why hash functions are used and the basic idea of why they work. My goal is to explain it in a general sense, I will be omitting proofs and implementation details and instead focusing on the high-level principles. Why Use A Hash Function? Hash functions are used all over the internet in order to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, and more. For example,  Qvault  uses hashes to extend master passwords into private encryption keys. A longer list of uses here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Uses I want to focus on several important features of hash functions, arguably the most important features. Hash functions scramble data deterministically No matter the input, the output of a hash function always has the same size The original data can not be retrieved from the scrambled d...
Read more