Online course "Development for OS X" on Hexlet started

About three weeks ago I wrote on Habr about the creation of a small educational project Hekslet . Thanks to this post, several good people have joined the Hekslet team, and we are pleased to announce that the first free course has started! True, it started a week ago, so if you decide to register for it, you will only need to catch up with an introductory lecture. The second week of classes starts tomorrow (Tuesday, October 30).



The structure and content of the course can be found in the short first module of the first lecture:

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Modifications

You may have noticed: the format of the course is a bit different from the one stated earlier. The fact is that I understood my mistake in time (and the students helped) and corrected myself: instead of simulating a university course online, I decided to do an online course and follow the proven Coursera format: tests right during the lecture, between modules.

About start

At the time of publication of the first lecture on the course, approximately 1,200 students were registered (now 1876), and our VPS could not bear the load. Fortunately, a couple of days before this, thanks to the investment of new team members, user donations and the work of our wonderful system administrator Ivan Borovkov and other Heksleteros, we rented a server, which we moved to safely.

What is under the hood?

The web server runs on nginx, the educational system engine is Canvas : this is a fairly powerful LMS written in Ruby. Cache - redis. Yandex.Mail for domains is used as a mail server.



For the main page and blog of the project, simple Wordpress is used, which will soon be replaced by Jekyll .



For work within the team, the trial versions of Atlassian products are used: Jira, Confluence and Stash.

Plans

In November, the English version of the same course starts. We are interested to try ourselves in the English-speaking world of free education, dominated by giants like Coursera or Udacity.



We are also preparing several new courses, mainly in Russian, the first of which should start before the end of this year.