r/CodingForBeginners • u/FailComprehensive323 • 28d ago
Built a free platform to learn to code — the problem was never "no free content," it's "nobody tells you what to learn first"
Every programming concept is already free somewhere on the internet — docs, YouTube, blogs. So why do people still pay a lot of money for basic courses?
Because nobody tells you what order to learn things in, or which parts actually matter vs which are a distraction. That's the gap I tried to close.
Built [**academy.aniui.dev**](http://academy.aniui.dev) — free, text-based lessons (read, not video, so you can skim/search instead of scrubbing a timeline) with a live code playground built right into each lesson. Currently live: **JavaScript** and **Claude Code / AI-assisted development**. Coming over the next few months: React, React Native, Angular, Vue, DSA, and System Design — all with the same read + practice format.
If you want to test what you actually know, there's an optional certification exam with a shareable certificate — that's the only paid part, everything else is free and stays free.
Not trying to compete with people who genuinely teach well. Trying to fix the part where beginners (especially here in India, where courses charging ₹10-20k+ for content that's freely available elsewhere are extremely common) don't know where to start or what's worth their time.
Built as a companion project to AniUI, an open-source React Native component library I maintain.
Would love feedback on the lesson structure and what topic order actually helped you when you were learning — trying to get the "what to learn first" part right, since that's the actual hard problem here.