CoderPad was created for me

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of CoderPad, it seems to work on any device and has all the features I need. Their core business seems to be built around phone screens, but I can see great potential in the area of distance learning.

The CoderPad interface is simple and beautiful. They provide a little code snippet to get you started, and everything works as expected. I’ve been using the Vi/Vim editor for decades, and I was completely blown away by the Vim key bindings. When I hit “:w” (write/save) just as a habit, CoderPad translated that to the “run” command. I had not imagined this, but it was a valuable feature. I was able to hack away effortlessly without ever touching the mouse, and without learning or thinking about keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve also been amazed that CoderPad seems to work perfectly on my iPad mini. The keyboards provided by the iPad are a bit painful, but I assume I have some options to remedy that. When I’m at a coffee shop with my iPad, reading about design patterns or JavaScript libraries in the Kindle app, I can flip over to CoderPad and dive into some experiments. I’d love to be able to subscribe to examples and tests in the coding books I’m reading, and have a way to bring them up in CoderPad.

It appears the CoderPad API will let me populate content, so any additional features I can imagine are just waiting for me to implement. I’ll need to take a look at that when I get back to my MacBook.