Qvault.io: Go Mastery course review

Last week I found out about QVault.io, an online platform to learn programming which offers, among others, the Go Mastery course. Their selling point is offering a small but curated selection of hands-on, self-paced courses without trying to monetize them at all costs. As an added bonus, they write multiple blog posts every week and I find them usually quite interesting.

QVault gems #

When I signed up (for free) I received 250 gems (their platform’s currency), which are enough to purchase their Basic intro to coding course. Simply making progress in a course grants gems, proportionally to how good one’s progress is: for example, completing the Go Mastery course granted me more than enough gems to purchase the Interview Prep Go course; after completing that one as well, I found myself sitting on 1K+ gems, enough to purchases two more courses.

That is, simply by learning what I wanted to learn anyway!

So, while it is possible to purchase gems with fiat currency (in their store), it’s not strictly necessary.

The course #

The course provides a basic introduction to Go (its difficulty is rated 2 out of 5) so it’s likely to feel too simple to someone who has some prior knowledge about Go (like me). Nonetheless, its many small lessons helped me consolidating my understanding of the language and gaining more familiarity with it. Taking the course was a very pleasant experience since everything happens in the browser (see Running Go in the browser with WebAssembly if you’re interested in the implementation details) and each lesson presented me with a small coding exercise or a multiple-choice question to test my understanding of what I had just learned.

What I liked #

• everything in the browser
• hands-on
• fast issue resolution: one of the lessons wouldn’t accept my (correct) answer no matter what, so I mentioned this issue in QVault’s Discord server and it was fixed in a matter of minutes

What could (IMHO) be improved #

• right now, it feels quite similar to golang’s own A tour of Go
• some lessons provided too many hints, making them trivial
• in general, it could be a bit more challenging

Conclusion #

I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to spend a couple of hours to get a Go primer in a funny way and at a relaxed pace.

Footnote #

As I was writing this blog post I received a notification about QVault’s latest blog post: Running Python in the browser with WebAssembly… looks like there will be more courses coming up soon!