Welcome back to the terminal

• ❯Grademe CLI is here, in beta. You can now take coding challenges from your terminal on macOS or Linux, with your own editor and files on your computer.
• ❯Your code is compiled and tested on Grademe's servers, in an isolated environment. You get fast feedback without using your computer's processing power to run the tests.
• ❯A lot of you asked for this, and it feels right: Grademe began as a small Bash script. The terminal was its first home, so keeping everyone inside a browser was never the plan.

You passed. Now what?

• ❯Passing an exercise used to drop you straight into other people's solutions. Useful, but not much of a congratulations. The right panel now clearly says what you completed, shows your reward and points you towards what comes next. Exercises, daily challenges and challenge levels share this new completion screen.
• ❯Got it on the first try? The panel says so. Otherwise, it shows how many tries it took. On regular exercises, you also get a quick look at community solutions, with access to the full list, your test results and a "Reset to retry" action to start fresh.
• ❯Run tests has a little more kick now. The button responds as your run starts, with clearer feedback while tests are running and when something fails. The animation never holds up your results, and it respects reduced-motion settings.

The workspace got the attention it deserved

• ❯Most of your time on Grademe is spent inside the workspace, so we gave the whole thing a proper redesign. Exercises, daily challenges, exams and the visualizer now share the same calmer layout and clearer controls. It is easier to read and move around, with much better foundations for what comes next.
• ❯You can now hide the Tests panel when you need more room. Running your code brings it back automatically. Test results are presented differently too: the annotated comparison you already knew from Inspect is now the default view. "Full output" reveals the complete raw result, and "Failures only" gets successful tests out of the way.
• ❯Exercise statements now lead with the mission and a concrete example before the checklist. More examples and technical constraints follow as reference, so you can understand what the program should do before working through the details.

Code, pass, commit

• ❯Some of you write a serious amount of C in here, and until now it was all stuck in a browser tab. Connect a GitHub repository and Grademe mirrors every exercise you pass into it: one commit per day you worked, dated to the day you actually worked it. Your contribution graph picks up your whole Grademe history, past sessions included.

A quick holiday note

• ❯I am technically on holiday right now, and work will pick up properly when I am back. Apparently I still cannot leave the laptop closed when one small UI thing annoys me. This time it was that strange corner of CSS where somebody presses Cmd+plus a few times and the browser decides their laptop is now a phone.

Okay guys, this one took a while

• ❯You can finally change your Grademe profile photo. Thanks to @velloxide, @404, @sala7, @ymasqui, @destruidos, and everyone else who kept asking for it.
• ❯Until now, Grademe borrowed your photo from Google or GitHub. That spared a solo developer from moderating whatever somebody might call a reasonable avatar at 2 a.m. It is also why Grademe has never really allowed user-published content.

The doors are open

• ❯Grademe is public. No more waitlist. Exercises, challenges, the Learn path and public profiles can now be read without an account. Send someone an exercise you liked and it opens right there, no sign-in wall.
• ❯You still need an account to run code or save progress. The grader, Daily Challenge, challenges, streaks and leaderboard all write to your account.
• ❯We are still in beta. Opening the doors does not change that.
• ❯Invite codes are retired. They did their job during the closed beta. The dialog, Compete seat counter and weekly invite panel are gone. Who invited whom stays as a record of who carried the beta.

Upvotes are here

• ❯You can now upvote the peer solutions you think are worth reading. Plenty of you asked for this, and @gustavo put the reason best: sorting by time tells you who was fastest, not who wrote something you should learn from. The solutions panel itself only exists because @spike suggested it back in June, so this felt like the honest next step.
• ❯One thing had to be sorted out first. Grademe has always shown the latest solution a person submitted for an exercise, which means a solution sitting on 10 upvotes would lose all of them the moment its author redid the exercise. That would have been a pretty rough deal. So the rule changed: the solution shown for you is either your most upvoted attempt or your most recent one. Votes stay where you earned them.
• ❯A Most upvoted sort shows up once somebody has actually voted on that exercise. Before the first vote it would just be an arbitrary order wearing a ranking costume. Upvotes work on Daily Challenge solutions too, past days included.

We skipped 0.29

• ❯Okay. This changelog got far too big for a release ending in 9. We have been building it for weeks, and every time we thought we had reached the end of the list, there was another whole piece of Grademe that had changed. So we skipped 0.29. Welcome to 0.30.0, easily the biggest thing we have shipped since the beta opened.

The bill is getting real 💸

• ❯Grademe is growing much faster than I expected. More than 200 people joined in just nine days, and more than 1,000 have signed up altogether. Amazing news, slightly less amazing for the bill.
• ❯A big part of this release is a complete rebuild of how Grademe caches and refreshes your progress data. XP, streaks, exercise progress, and challenge results should now stay up to date without a manual refresh. It also removes a lot of repeated work, which lowers the running cost and gives us more room to let people in.

• ❯Completed challenges no longer bounce back into a ghost In progress session after the final level. The remarkably detailed report from @oeljihad helped us reproduce and fix it.
• ❯That report also made something obvious: Grademe needed a proper way to thank people who go out of their way to help. That is where profile badges came from. Every early member gets Beta tester, while confirmed reports that seriously help us debug can earn Bug Whisperer. @oeljihad and @velloxide are the first two.
• ❯We fixed a case where legitimate work could be misread by the daily authenticity check. Thanks @404, @abenomar, and @razovius for the reports. This system is still in beta, so please send Beta Feedback if it gets your work wrong. Every report helps us understand the edge cases and make it better.
• ❯Valgrind-backed final tests now run correctly, including snake-fmt. We also tightened the graders for int-to-str-base, feb_days, and arg-count. Good catches from @404, @adam4-ux, @ahodor, @owssama, and @spike.
• ❯args_rev now shows the right line breaks in its examples, thanks @reilles. Ctrl+S and Cmd+S also save your exercise draft instead of opening the browser's Save Page dialog, reported by @tom.
• ❯The visualizer stays available on tablets, phones held sideways, and narrow desktop windows. Thanks @sytan and @void. Beta Feedback now closes with a proper confirmation, and flagged daily solutions explain how to request a review.

• ❯I added a tiny thing that's honestly pretty cool: your Grademe profile can now live in your GitHub README as a card. Add it once and it updates itself whenever your profile changes, on GitHub or anywhere else.
• ❯Profiles can have their own background now too. Pick your favorite and everyone who visits gets to see it, including on your GitHub card.

The Visualizer

• ❯This is the big one. The Visualizer takes your C, runs it, and lets you walk through it one line at a time while everything updates in front of you. Variables, the call stack, where your pointers actually point, memory getting allocated and freed. You know that gap between "it compiled" and "why is this segfaulting" where you'd normally just spray printf everywhere? Now you get to watch it happen instead.
• ❯The part we're proudest of. When a test fails on an exercise, that failed test now has a "Visualize this test" button. One click and it opens with the exact inputs the grader used, already replaying, so you step forward to the precise moment it goes wrong. No more staring at "expected X, got Y" trying to guess where your logic took a wrong turn. You literally watch it take the turn.
• ❯There's a Visualizer tab in the sidebar too, all on its own. Paste any C, give it your arguments and standard input, and step through it. Great for hunting a pointer bug, or just settling an argument about what some code really does. Whatever you write there saves itself, so you can close the tab, go touch grass, and it'll still be there when you come back.
• ❯Small print: it wants a real screen, so it's desktop only for now. And it's C only. Maybe more languages later, let's first see if this one survives contact with all of you.

Faster grading

• ❯Grademe is getting busy, and honestly that's the good kind of problem. So the headline this time is speed: I rebuilt a big chunk of how grading works behind the scenes, and exercises and exams now come back a lot faster. Less staring at a spinner, more actually solving.
• ❯The reason this matters goes past speed. The machines that grade your code are the expensive part of running Grademe, and the site is free, so that bill is also the real reason there's a waitlist at all. Faster grading means each machine can handle more of you at once. The list has gotten long, I'm letting a solid batch in this Monday, and I wanted everything ready before opening the door wider.

New

• ❯You can now play the Daily Challenge from Compete: one new hidden C puzzle drops every midnight, built around a real bug or strange moment in computing history. The first pool includes the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter unit mix-up, Pac-Man's level 256 kill screen, Heartbleed, Ariane 5, the Zune leap-year freeze, Shellshock, Log4Shell, and a few other "how did this ship?" classics.
• ❯Dailies are meant to be quick. The first ones are very simple on purpose, and they get harder as the week goes on (the difficulty is shown before you start). Solve it cleanly, solve it fast, then compare how everyone else handled the same tiny disaster.
• ❯Each day now has its own leaderboard with time, rank, first-solve and shortest-solution markers, plus a weekly Daily Points board. Points come from your final daily rank: 20 for first place, then down to a floor of 3 for any counted solve.
• ❯After you solve, you can open other people's daily solutions from the board. If someone keeps solution sharing off, they still appear in the ranking, but their code stays private.
• ❯Profiles now show Daily stats: current and best Daily streak, solved count, best finish, fastest solve, weekly points and rank. Streaks also get up to 2 automatic freezes per month, so missing a couple of days does not instantly ruin the run.

New

• ❯After you pass an exercise, you can now see how other people solved it. This is exercises only, not challenges. @spike suggested it (I'd been chewing on the same idea), and that's what pushed me to finally build it. You don't get everything, it's a capped set: people you follow come up first, then the solutions closest to yours, plus a few that go about it a completely different way. Great for spotting an approach you'd never have tried yourself.
• ❯Sharing your own solutions is on by default. The point is to learn from each other, same spirit as profiles already showing everyone's activity. If you'd rather keep your code to yourself, there's a toggle in Settings. Switch it off and you stop sharing, and you stop seeing others too.
• ❯This one took a while, for a reason worth explaining: some exercise statements have changed since people first solved them. So every shared solution is checked against the statement it was actually written for. You won't see one that wouldn't pass the exercise as it stands today.

• ❯Before, we only copied your profile picture once, when you first created your account, so it stayed frozen after that. Now we sync it again when you log out and back in (max once every 24 hours), so if you changed your picture on GitHub or Google, just log out and log back in and it updates here. Thanks to @velloxide for the tip.

Improved

• ❯The activity grid on your profile now shades each day by how much you actually got done. The more exercises you clear in a day, the darker the square. Before, every active day looked the same whether you did one exercise or fifteen. Thanks @justshobee for the suggestion.

New

• ❯When you finish an exercise, a button now offers a next one at a similar difficulty, so you can keep practicing without going back to the dashboard. Thanks @void for the idea.
• ❯On practice exercises you can now open any test, including the ones that pass, to see the exact input and expected output. Handy for double-checking your logic against the edge cases. Exams are unchanged. Thanks again @void.
• ❯Followers and following lists are now visible on everyone's profile, not only your own, so you can see who is connected to who. Thanks @justshobee for the suggestion.
• ❯There is now a live banner that can alert you to an ongoing problem on the grader or the site. The timeout issue @drakula flagged was a real pain these past two days and we had no way to warn you while it was happening. Now we do.

• ❯We rebuilt the test panel on the right of the exercise and challenge pages. Every test is its own line now, top to bottom, with the build step first. When one fails it tells you right away what broke, wrong output, a crash, a timeout or a memory error, and the line opens on the spot with the command and the expected next to what you actually got. Names stay hidden until a test fails, so you still have to work it out yourself.
• ❯We reworked the existing challenges so it's clearer what each one is actually getting you ready for.
• ❯We also added three new ones. Strings from Scratch and Memory & Pointers each go deep on a single topic, and the headliner, Rebuild the C Standard Library, hands you the whole thing: re-implement libc yourself, function by function.
• ❯To fill all that, we added 25 new C exercises, a lot of them small standard-library functions to rebuild yourself.
• ❯A lot of you couldn't tell why an exercise gave no XP, so we made the rules visible. Hover the XP on your profile or the dashboard to see how it works, and when you open an exercise you can still win XP on, it shows in gold with a +. Quick reminder: you only earn an exercise's XP the first time you pass it, whether that is inside a challenge or on its own.
• ❯We got a lot of feedback this week, thank you for that. Nothing urgent in there, so we'll work through all of it over the next few days :)

• ❯We tightened up the profile page. It had too much dead space, so we pulled everything in and used the room for your stats and your streak instead. Thanks @void and @justshobee for flagging it, you were right, there was way too much air in there.
• ❯You can now add your school to your profile.
• ❯Your streak shows on your profile now, not just the dashboard.
• ❯"Review" became "Reinforce", and it finally means something. Before, it would show you exercises no matter what. Now it only surfaces the ones you actually fought with, the kind worth redoing until they really stick.
• ❯Profiles load faster.
• ❯A big round of UI and UX polish, basically finishing what we started last release. Everything is a bit cleaner and the look is settling into what we actually want Grademe to be. Still beta, so if something feels off, send it our way.
• ❯PS: if your Reinforce tab is empty, that's a flex. It means nothing really gave you a hard time.

• ❯Reformatted the profile and its history, thanks @velloxide for the suggestion! The history on your profile tab is easier to read now, and your runs of the same exercise or exam are grouped together instead of piling up.
• ❯Lots of UI and UX changes. At Grademe we polish! It's still beta, the design can move at any moment and nothing is locked in, so if you have ideas send them over. And by the way, very few of you have found light mode. Give it a try and tell us what you think (sidebar, click your name).
• ❯Big improvements on mobile. I still don't really know why I'm polishing mobile, do people actually code on their phone?! Anyway, there's a floating menu now and the top bar gets out of the way, so moving around is clearly easier. Thanks @void for the idea!
• ❯Fixed a bug that showed "Grader currently unavailable", only inside one challenge and only when your program printed a null byte. Thanks @yuuuri01 for catching it, this one was sneaky, and a few of you ran into it. Sorry about that!
• ❯PS: have you tried resizing the left and right panels on the exercise and exam pages yet?

• ❯@tomas2043 noticed the grader was sometimes timing out, and @spike ran into it too, thanks for flagging it. We shipped a quick fix yesterday to get it moving again, and this release fixes it for good: we found what had been slowing the grader down over the past few days and sorted it out, so grading is snappy again and runs faster than before.

• ❯You can now use Grademe on your phone. If you're brave (or a little unhinged) enough to write C on a touchscreen, the door's open
• ❯Your invite code is now a single code for life that never runs out. Share it with as many people as you want, and everyone who uses it gets in.

• ❯Buttons and inputs across the app got restyled, with clearer focus outlines so you can tell where you are when you tab through a form.
• ❯The waitlist button scrambles its text when you hover it. No real reason, it just looked fun.

• ❯The whole app is faster now, especially on slower machines. The dashboard fills in card by card as each part is ready instead of waiting for the slowest one and dropping in all at once, and the layout no longer jumps while the page loads. Thanks to @void for flagging the lag.
• ❯You can now open more than one terminal in the workspace, so you can run your program in one and work in another at the same time. It helps on exam 06, where you need to talk to the server you built. Thanks to @halluicnette for the suggestion.
• ❯If your browser auto-translates pages, it no longer rewrites the code in the editor or the output in the terminal. Your code stays exactly as you wrote it.

• ❯Everyone now has 5 invite codes, up from 2, and you no longer need to send feedback first to unlock them. Open Invite friends in the sidebar and they're ready to share.
• ❯Your profile now shows a Beta tester badge. Anyone who joins before the public launch keeps it forever, including the friends you invite.
• ❯We opened access to a new batch from the waitlist with this release.

• ❯New exam, the chat_relay challenge. You build a TCP chat server in C that takes many clients at once and relays every message between them, all on a single non-blocking loop, and it has to run clean with no memory or socket leaks. It's the toughest exercise on the C track so far, with three hours on the clock and more points than usual.
• ❯When an exercise limits which functions you're allowed to use, we now check your code for that up front. Call something that isn't on the list and you get a message naming the exact function, instead of a confusing build error.
• ❯Opening an exercise or exam is smoother. If you already have work saved from an earlier attempt, the editor shows it straight away instead of flashing the starter file first.

• ❯Open an exercise or exam and the cursor drops straight into the editor. Press Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter) to run the tests.
• ❯Press Cmd+K anywhere to search and jump to any exercise, exam or page.
• ❯Put those together and the whole loop is keyboard-driven: Cmd+K to the next exercise, write your code, Cmd+Enter to get graded, move on. The mouse is optional now.
• ❯Search finds people too. Type a username to open their public profile and see how they're doing.
• ❯You can follow other people from their profile, and your follower and following counts show up right there.
• ❯Profiles are public now, so you can add a short bio and a few social links to yours from the edit dialog.
• ❯Exam achievements on a profile now show in a cleaner, more compact grid.
• ❯Public profiles with a bio and social links started as an idea from @42ang_vusk. Thanks for the suggestion!

• ❯You can now practice C++ in Grademe. The first C++ exercises are live: a coordinate class to flesh out with operator overloads, an arbitrary-size unsigned integer, and a small set of bag containers built with inheritance and polymorphism.
• ❯A new developer exam puts C++ and C together in one run. It is the toughest one we have shipped, so go in expecting a fight.
• ❯Two new C exercises work on grids. One finds and fills the largest open square, the other lets you draw on a board and then runs a small life simulation.
• ❯Exams now show every language they cover up front, so a mixed C++/C exam is obvious before you start.

• ❯Five new exercises join the C track, all at the hardest level. pipe_chain and process_stream_open wire commands together through pipes, signal_watchdog runs a function under a timeout, and expr_tree_eval and json_map_parser have you writing parsers by hand.
• ❯Developer Exam 04 is live. It runs three hours at a 100% pass mark, with two levels built from the new process and parser exercises.
• ❯Exercises where you write a single function can now be checked for memory leaks, the same as the whole-program ones already were. A leak shows up as its own result with the details, instead of passing quietly.

New

• ❯Grademe now speaks Python, not just C. You write your Python solutions in the same workspace you already know, and they get graded the same way.
• ❯14 new Python exercises to work through, from palindromes and anagrams to base conversion, list rotation and multi-key sorting. They fill out the Python module in the learning path, which started with just an intro exercise.
• ❯A new Python exam, Developer Exam 03, that runs three hours with a 60% pass mark.
• ❯The exercise library has a language filter. Show only C, only Python, or both, and it remembers your choice next time you come back.
• ❯Every in-progress exam shows the time you have left next to the In progress label, like 23m left or 1h3m. It turns up wherever your exams do.
• ❯Exercises and exams now carry a small language badge, so C and Python are easy to tell apart at a glance.

New

• ❯Valgrind is now available in the terminal, so you can debug memory in your own programs.
• ❯Exercises that allocate memory are now checked for memory safety: a leak or a use of uninitialised memory fails the exercise, with a clear message pointing to the exact file and line. You can no longer pass an exercise that has a memory bug.
• ❯A new developer exam, Developer Exam 03, plus 13 new C exercises.

New

• ❯Python is here. Our grader has been rebuilt from the ground up to support it, with the first Python exercise available today and many more on the way. Support for additional languages is coming soon.
• ❯A brand-new exercise experience. The whole flow has been redesigned: problem statements are clearer and easier to read, tests are presented in a cleaner way, and the interface got a fresh new look.

• ❯We have disabled the mobile version of Grademe for now. If you open the site on a phone, you will see a message asking you to switch to a computer.

• ❯You can now run gdb directly from the exercise terminal to step through and debug your C programs.
• ❯We fixed a grading bug that prevented 5 exercises from being marked as validated even when your solution was correct.
• ❯This changelog page is new. Every shipped change now shows up here so you can see what's evolving without leaving the app.

• ❯Grademe now works consistently for every user, regardless of which browser extensions you have installed.
• ❯Exercises and exams start up more reliably, even after long stretches of inactivity. No more being blocked on the first launch of the day.
• ❯Error messages in the terminal are now cleaner and easier to read when something goes wrong.

• ❯Our first 10 users joined the platform. Welcome to the crew shaping how Grademe grows.
• ❯Signing up now starts with a short questionnaire about your goals so we can match your starting point to the right learning path.
• ❯Inviting several friends at once is now possible thanks to batch-generated invite codes.

• ❯Linker errors now show the exact missing symbol and the file it came from, so failed builds stop being a guessing game.
• ❯Function exercises now keep your program's output and the grader's output in clearly separated panels, so you can see exactly what your code printed.
• ❯When grading fails, the messages now carry the full context you need to spot the problem and fix it.

• ❯The editor and terminal panels in exercises and exams are now resizable. Drag the divider to give your code or your output the room it needs.
• ❯Picking and launching an exercise from the catalog got a polish pass so the flow feels lighter from the dashboard to your first keystroke.

• ❯Welcome to Grademe. You can now work through C exercises and exams inside an integrated editor-and-terminal workspace.
• ❯The exam catalog is live: browse the available exams, pick one, and jump straight into the workspace to take it.
• ❯A feedback button sits in the corner of every page so you can report a problem or share an idea without leaving what you're doing.
• ❯Friends can be invited from the dashboard, opening up access to anyone in your circle.