Recently, I heard that O’Reilly will permanently shut down the online learning website KataCoda. For the majority of programmers and learners, this is undoubtedly a distressing thing. We will never see the Kung Fu cat that will only become in the future.
Introduction to KataCoda
Founded in 2016, KataCoda is an online learning platform that provides hundreds of interactive courses that users can log in to learn for free. In addition, users can build and publish their own online courses based on the basic image provided by KataCoda, all for free.
You can operate in a temporary container environment according to the prompts, enter commands, and observe the results. This real-time feedback learning method makes you no longer need to worry about preparing the environment, and greatly reduces the threshold for getting started with many technologies. It is said that this method is a “revolutionary” for computer technology education.
KataCoda website interface
These interactive environments do not have any network restrictions, you can visit any website, and you can also build temporary public websites for all users in the Internet to visit. This convenience can be said to be given to us by the cloud native or container era.
Why did O’Reilly close KataCoda?
O’Reilly acquired KataCoda at the end of 2019, and it should be helpless to close the site now. Published on O’Reilly’s website to utilize Katacoda technology only within O’Reilly and the decision to close katacoda.com
In this blog, we can obtain the following data:
- KataCoda has 280,000 members
- Over 387,866 unique users on KataCoda have spent over 74,711 hours learning on the platform
- O’Reilly has 2.8 million members
The above data still cannot support the high operating costs of KataCoda, mainly because the free courses are abused, such as mining and sending bad information (all free courses are connected to the Internet without any restrictions and the network speed is extremely fast).
What happens after KataCoda closes?
Many of the free courses on KataCoda are actually open sourced on GitHub, and they can continue to be used as long as another platform is hosted on it. After KataCoda is closed, there are still many interactive course platforms to choose from, such as the following two:
If you have any thoughts on O’Reilly’s closure of KataCoda, please leave a comment below.
This article is reprinted from https://jimmysong.io/blog/goodbye-katacoda/
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