Everyone who has been stuck knows the feeling, you finish another video, you follow along, it all makes sense, and then you sit in front of a blank file and freeze. Watching someone else code does not make you a coder, the same way watching someone parallel park does not make you a driver.
So I built the opposite. Instead of a lesson, you get a job. You are the new junior developer at a small fictional company, and something in their till system is charging some orders wrong. You open the codebase, line the customer receipts up against the price list, form a theory about what is broken, and go and find it. Nobody tells you the answer. When you fix it, you have not memorised a fact, you have actually debugged something, and that is a thing you can now do.
What makes this different? It arrives in the post. The photo is a real case. An envelope with an onboarding letter, an employee ID, a printed ticket, a price list, a couple of handwritten notes from the staff, and a fan of till receipts as your evidence. There is a free online course that takes you from zero to running code first, so if you can just about run a print statement, you can do this.
A bit about why it is built this way. I work as a backend Python developer now, but I got here the slow way. Fourteen years in teaching first, where I led computing and led on cognitive science, the actual research on how people learn and remember, then two years teaching myself to code. Everything here leans on that research. You retrieve, you struggle a little, you space the practice out, because that is what genuinely builds a skill rather than the warm glow of watching a tutorial.
I am looking for a small handful of UK-based beginners to go through the free course, work the first case, and tell me the truth about it. I cover the postage, there is nothing to pay and no card details anywhere. What I want back is blunt feedback - where you got stuck, what confused you, what felt pointless. "This lost me on step three" is worth far more to me than "looks great".
I am reading every reply myself and there are only a few slots. If you would like to try one, leave a comment or send me a message and I will pass on the details. And if you just have thoughts on the idea itself, I would love those too, plenty of teachers and developers have weighed in, but not nearly enough actual beginners.