Building in public, screenshots included
I work on cursora, a coding education platform. Landing pages tend to oversell — so instead of another feature list, here's what the product actually looks like right now, straight from the running app.
The catalog
27 published courses live today, spanning web, backend, DevOps and more. No "coming soon" placeholders in the grid — these are courses students can start immediately.
The instructor editor
Courses are built section by section, lesson by lesson, with a live "readiness" score so instructors can see how close a course is to publish-ready before it goes live. Our own DevOps course is sitting at 90% readiness as I write this.
The sandbox
This is the part I actually care about explaining. Coding exercises don't run in a fake terminal — each one spins up an isolated container with:
- A real base image (
alpine:3.20for this exercise) - Explicit CPU limits (0.5 cores here) and a memory ceiling per container
- A configurable execution mode — VM-isolated workers for the heavier exercises
- Network access set to
noneby default — no external calls in or out - An optional setup script (plain bash) that provisions the environment before the student's first command
Students run real commands — docker version, docker info, whatever the exercise calls for — against a real environment, not a canned output.
Cursora Assess
For instructors who still want traditional graded tests alongside the hands-on exercises, there's Cursora Assess: generate printable/online test variants, auto-grade scanned answer sheets via OCR, and get a stats/report view per group.
Where it's at
669 learners, 27 courses, and a platform that's still very much being built in the open. If you're curious what practical, hands-on coding education infrastructure looks like under the hood, take a look: cursora.org. Happy to answer questions about the sandbox architecture specifically — that's the part I'd most like feedback on.
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