Manifesto
What we believe, and what it costs us
Every one of these has made the product smaller. That’s usually how you can tell a belief is real — it deletes something you’d otherwise have shipped.
- written by
- The people building it
- status
- Argued about weekly
- length
- Seven, deliberately
- 01
You learn by typing.
Reading about a loop is not learning a loop. Watching someone write a loop is not learning a loop. Writing one, getting it wrong, and fixing it is. Everything else is preparation for that, and preparation should be short.
- 02
A lesson should end.
If you can’t finish it in one sitting, it isn’t a lesson, it’s a commitment. Ours are a few minutes long, and finishing one feels like finishing something — because it is.
- 03
Confusion isn’t a rite of passage.
Some people learned the hard way and now think the hard way was the point. It wasn’t. If a concept can be explained clearly in forty words, taking four hours to get there isn’t rigour, it’s a badly written lesson.
- 04
Struggle is fine. Being stuck for six hours isn’t.
The productive bit is the twenty minutes where you can’t see it yet. After that you’re just tired and slightly ashamed. Good teaching knows the difference and steps in at the right moment.
- 05
Projects beat exercises.
An exercise proves you followed instructions. A project — even a tiny, ugly one — proves you can decide things. You’ll build small real things here, and you’ll keep them.
- 06
Nobody needs the whole language on day one.
Most courses teach in the order the language is documented. We teach in the order you need it. You can go a very long way in Python before anyone has to say the word ‘decorator’.
- 07
Free should mean free.
Not a trial, not three lessons and a wall. A free tier you could learn a language on and never pay us a penny. We’ll charge for the deeper stuff, and we’ll say the price out loud before we ask.
In short
We’re not trying to be the biggest place to learn code. We’d just like to be the one you actually finish.
— Loopwise, still building
We’re building it.
One email, the day it opens. Nothing else, ever.