Skill Forge: A Comprehensive Learning Platform for Aspiring Developers

Skill Forge is a web-based platform designed to help developers hone their skills through a diverse collection of programming challenges and exercises. The platform offers a learning environment where users can tackle problems, track their progress, and compare their performance with other developers in real-time. Built with a strong emphasis on flexibility, the platform caters to developers at various stages of their journey—from beginners to advanced coders.

Key Features

• Learning Paths: Skill Forge organizes exercises into structured learning paths. Each path represents a key area of programming, such as algorithms or data structures, and offers an incremental learning curve. Users can dive into topics of their choice while progressing from beginner-friendly tasks to more advanced challenges.

• Wide Range of Exercises: The platform features over 20+ coding exercises, spanning various programming paradigms, difficulty levels, and topics. Including 3 languages.

Technical Stack

Front-End:

• SvelteKit: The user interface of Skill Forge is built using SvelteKit, a modern JavaScript framework that allows for smooth, fast client-side interactivity. The use of Svelte’s reactive programming model simplifies state management and provides a clean, modular approach to front-end development.

• TailwindCSS: TailwindCSS is integrated to handle the styling of the entire platform. With utility-first CSS, we’ve created a highly customizable and responsive interface, allowing for a consistent look across devices.

Back-End:

• SvelteKit API Endpoints: The back-end logic is powered by SvelteKit’s server-side rendering capabilities. All interaction between the front-end and the MySQL database is facilitated through API routes or form actions. Each API call, such as fetching exercise details, user progress, or submitting solutions, is handled with optimized queries.

• MySQL Database: The core data, including exercises, users, submissions, and learning paths, are stored in a MySQL relational database. Tables are interlinked through foreign keys and indexes to ensure efficient querying.

Isolated Code Execution:

One of the more advanced aspects of Skill Forge is the isolated code execution environment. For security and scalability, Skill Forge utilizes Docker containers to execute the code in an isolated and independant environments. This ensures that user code cannot access or interfere with server resources. Test cases associated with each exercise are executed inside this virtual machine, and results (whether the tests passed or failed) are returned to the user.

User Progress and Ranking

Skill Forge also provides comprehensive tools for users to track their coding journey. Users can view their submission history, monitor which exercises they have completed, and track how they stack up against others via the ranking system. A key feature of the platform is the ability to fetch a user’s rank based on the number of distinct exercises they’ve successfully completed. Real-Time Feedback and Detailed Analytics

Users receive instant feedback after submitting solutions. This feedback includes a breakdown of each test case (whether it passed or failed) and detailed performance analytics. In the future, I plan to integrate code profiling tools, allowing users to get even more insights into their submission's performance.

Conclusion

Skill Forge is more than just a coding platform. It’s a learning tool that adapts to each user’s individual skill level, offering personalized progress tracking, real-time feedback, and a robust exercise system. With a scalable architecture and multi-language support on the roadmap, it aims to be a comprehensive resource for coders looking to grow their skills at any level.