Olivier Lacan

Code School

Platform

Screenshot of the Code School account dashboard
The Code School account dashbord allowed you to track the course you were currently playing, recently earned activity or course completion badges, progress on given learning paths, but also find your team dashboard, and other settings.

I served as Tech Lead on Code School’s Platform team where I built and maintained the Ruby on Rails application that powered codeschool.com.

Throughout the years I’ve been responsible for upgrading our Rails infrastructure from version 3.1 to 5.0; maintaining our security bug bounty; and course building and maintaining billing, team management, and authorization features for the platform.

I’ve also worked with our content team to produce interactive challenges for several courses, and contributed to the development of Code School Projects which allow students to complete step-by-step tasks on their own machines or on GitHub while receiving interactive feedback about their progress along the way.

Several years ago, when Code School was still a baby startup I wrote and taught in several of our excellent interactive courses:

Try Git

Quick animated demo of the Try Git interactive course interface in action.
Try Git had a simplified interface which mimicked a terminal window to help people get acclimated to a command line interface like git.

I wrote this short course with the Code School and GitHub teams. We reproduced a command line terminal to execute real git commands and produce output in order to help people quickly become familiar with git without being intimidated. Try Git was released on July 4th, 2012 and announced by GitHub on their blog. It has attracted over 5 million unique visitors since.

Testing with RSpec

This was my first Code School course as an on-camera instructor. I learned most of what I know about RSpec while working on this course.

Git Real

My second Code School course as a teacher. It visually and interactively explains the concepts of staging, remote repositories, branching, and especially rebasing.

You can reach me by email or on Mastodon.