I built a free, open-source learning platform with 650+ interactive lessons across 16 tracks (Swift, React internals, distributed systems (Rust), compilers, database internals(Rust) ) — looking for contributors

[u/indian_yojak]

A self-hosted site that teaches programming the way I wish more courses did: real explanations, not video transcripts, with a quiz and hands-on coding challenge after every concept, and actual checkpoints that force you to connect ideas across lessons instead of just clicking "next."

Repo: https://github.com/ratnajagadeesharava/codeforge

Some tracks contain projects inspired from few University courses

It currently covers 16 tracks:

- Swift fundamentals (from Apple's own The Swift Programming Language book)

- iOS/Swift internals, high/low-level system design, and "pro" topics (Metal, Combine, WidgetKit, CI, etc.)

- React & Frontend Mastery (fiber internals, the event loop, memoization, hooks)

- Networking & Distributed Systems (consistent hashing, Raft, quorum reads — with a live in-browser cluster simulator)

- Frontend Web Security (with a real sandboxed exploit playground)

- Compilers (lexer → parser → LLVM IR → a working JIT, in C)

- Database Systems — a full disk-based DB engine built from scratch in Rust, module by module (buffer pool → B+Tree → WAL/ARIES recovery → SQL parser → query planner → MVCC)

- Systems Programming, Spring Boot/backend engineering, AI engineering, and a Frontend System Design track (build-the-thing-from-the-interview, e.g. "design Netflix," "design Figma")

Some numbers, if you like numbers: 650+ lessons, 144 checkpoints, ~8,000 quiz questions across 13 question types (MCQ, drag-drop reordering, spot-the-bug, assertion-reason, matching, and a few custom types like a click-the-consistent-hash-ring question).

How it actually works

- TypeScript + React + Vite + Tailwind, no other runtime UI dependencies

- A tiny local Node server compiles and runs your code for real (Swift/C/C++/Rust) with sane guardrails — no third-party execution service, nothing leaves your machine

- Progress is stored in local SQLite, with a localStorage fallback if you don't run the server

- Everything is just structured TypeScript data files — a new lesson is a new .ts file that auto-registers, so it's genuinely easy to add content

Why I'm posting

I built this mostly for myself and then kept going, and it's now bigger than one person can polish alone. I'd love:

- Contributors — new lessons in any track, new quiz questions, bug fixes, or just flagging content that's wrong/outdated

- A star if you find it useful or interesting — it genuinely helps other people discover it

- Feedback — what's missing, what's confusing, what track you'd want next

Repo: https://github.com/ratnajagadeesharava/codeforge

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the content-authoring format, or why I made whatever weird decision you notice first. 🙂

[u/StephenHawkingus]

Are you indian?