🎉 Exercism Research is now launched. Help Exercism, help science and have some fun at research.exercism.io 🎉
Sign up Log in
About Team Supporters Strategy

We are a not-for-profit organisation providing opportunity through programming education

Developing programming skills is fun and empowering. It is also a powerful route for economic and social mobility.

Exercism aims to provide opportunity for people of all backgrounds by helping them develop their programming skills through practice and mentorship. We provide thousands of exercises spread across over 50 language tracks, and offer both automated and human mentoring.

Our current platform is targeted at people with some programming experience who want to deepen their knowledge or learn new languages. In time, we will also offer support for total beginners.

Exercism is 100% free. It is entirely open source and relies on the contributions of thousands of volunteers. Our platform is designed to be fun and friendly, and we place a strong emphasis on empathetic communication.

Exercism is a great gift to the programming community and I hope when I finally achieve my Rock Star status I won’t forget to give back and do my own bit of mentoring.
- Dr Moxie
1.4m
solutions submitted
236k
conversations
330k
users in 200 countries
50
programming languages
2.5k
mentors in 29 timezones
53k
git commits
3.6k
contributions

Created by volunteers. Grown purely through word of mouth.

Supporters

Exercism relies on both the generosity of individuals with their time, and the generosity of organisations to financially support us.

While much of Exercism is run by our volunteer community, the website and core infrastructure are managed by a full-time team. We also undertake specific larger projects, such as the development of our automated analyzers, which require a committed team working more intensely on something over a fixed period of time.

In order to fund this core team and these products we rely on grant funding from companies or organisations that wish to contribute to our vision of helping providing free programming education for everyone.

Could you support us?

Current supporters

Your Organisation Here
Decisions Leadership Execution
Balance quick wins with long-term vision Mixing top-down direction with community wisdom Focus on small, regular, high-quality improvements
Product-driven and grounded in science Empowering and supporting our contributors Providing openess, honesty and clarity.
Sticking to our principles Enforcing our Code of Conduct Always learning and being empathetic

How we work

Exercism is developed through a mixture of top-down leadership and a collaborative community. We focus strongly on making product-driven decisions guided by our strategy, and then utilize the value and goodwill of our community, who implement those decisions across our 50+ language tracks. We work closely with key volunteer contributors to canvas opinions and knowledge, improving Exercism daily, while also staying focussed on our long-term vision.

Read Exercism’s strategy

Our story

Exercism was originally created by Katrina Owen in 2013 as a tool to be used by her programming students. Over the next three years it grew unintentionally and organically to 200,000 users. In 2016, Katrina decided that for Exercism to fulfill its potential, it needed a professional product team to rethink Exercism from the ground up. She recruited Jeremy Walker as co-founder, and working with Nicole Chalmers and the team at Thalamus, they reconceived Exercism as the fully-fledged product you see today.