Scrimba v2 is Here! Create Your Own Scrims, Use the Advanced Code Editor, and Learn Coding the Right Way, with Per Borgen

Scrimba v2 is here! And you probably already know this if you've visited our website recently. Scrimba cofounder and CEO Per Borgen 🇳🇴 is joining us to reveal what this update is all about. 

You might have noticed the redesign - but the update is not just on the surface. Scrimba has been rewritten from the ground up to support further development, and you can already enjoy a lot of new features. The platform is no longer a closed platform, which means you can make your own scrims, create and follow profiles, and make use of numerous templates. You can also use Scrimba's code editor to create your own projects - even if you're not following a course. It even features an advanced version control! Per and Alex also talk about AI and how it will change the way we learn coding and which AI features are already being worked on at Scrimba.

🔗 Connect with Per

• 👨‍💼LinkedIn
• 🐦 Twitter

⏰ Timestamps

• Scrimba v2 is a complete rewrite of the entire platform (01:00)
• "We also rebuilt the tools to build Scrimba" (02:45)
• What are Templates? (05:49)
• You can now use Scrimba as an online code editor (07:34)
• You can also add commits! (08:31)
• Scrimba is now open to anyone to create content and scrims (09:15)
• Scrimba profiles (10:59)
• The future of pedagogy on Scrimba (13:02)
• Backend courses are coming! (14:40)
• Visual rebrand: is Scrimba still playful? (17:12)
• The state of using AI to learn to code (24:44)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• Scrimba v2

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Creators & Guests

Host

Alex Booker

Host of The Scrimba Podcast

Producer

Jan Gregory Arsenovic

Producer of the Scrimba Podcast

What is The Scrimba Podcast?

Learn from inspiring developers about how they found meaningful and fulfilling work that that also pays them well. On The Scrimba Podcast, you'll hear motivational advice and job-hunting strategies from developers who've been exactly where you are now. We talk to developers about their challenges, learnings, and switching industries in the hopes of inspiring YOU. This is the podcast that provides the inspiration, tools, and roadmaps to move from where you are to work that matters to you and uniquely fits your strengths and talents.

Per Borgen (00:00):
We want you to come here to experiment with code, to build your portfolio projects, to mess around. Whatever you have an idea you want to express with code, we want to be the place you come to.

Audio (00:15):
Scrimba.

Alex Booker (00:16):
That was Per Borgen, co-founder and CEO of Scrimba. I wanted to talk with Per because last week we released Scrimba 2.0 into the world, representing the most significant update to Scrimba ever. This is a complete rewrite of the Scrimba code base that enhances the experience, adds new features, and lays the important groundwork so that we can release bigger and better courses plus features that encourage you to get hands on and become the best developer and builder you can be. It's not just the code that's changed though, Scrimba's fundamentally branching out a little bit and that's exciting. Here's Per to tell you more. What's new in your world since you were last on the show?

Per Borgen (00:59):
A lot of things. We just launched Scrimba V2, so the complete rewrite and redesign of our app.

Alex Booker (01:08):
V2 has been a long time coming. Am I right?

Per Borgen (01:12):
Too long. It has been, to be honest, literally three or four years. It feels so good to finally be on the other side of that.

Alex Booker (01:20):
Well, I'm so glad to have you on because I know some people going to scrimba.com today, they're going to be experiencing a brand new experience and they might be wondering a bit about what's this all about.

Per Borgen (01:30):
Yeah. So as I said, it's a complete rewrite of the entire platform, complete redesign, and we are changing around a lot of different things. So we are going from being just a school to also being a tool. We are going from being a closed platform where only Scrimba teachers create content into being an open platform where anyone can come on and create their own scrims and templates and even courses.

(01:58):
And perhaps the most important thing, we are on a very solid foundation now. So Scrimba V1 was a little bit of building on a house of cards. It was a lot of technical debt. But now with V2, we have a super solid foundation that will enable us to run faster than we ever have in the history of Scrimba.

Alex Booker (02:19):
Scrimba is quite a complicated technical product when you think about it with the nature of scrims, very unique. It must have been quite a lot of work to port that over to a new version and eliminate technical debts in the process.

Per Borgen (02:33):
Yes, it has been a lot of hassle and with all the users and the data that's in the courses and everything that's been built up, just the migration itself was a ton of work. But also what made it even more work is that we haven't only rebuilt Scrimba from scratch. We've actually also rebuilt the tools to build Scrimba.

Alex Booker (02:52):
What?

Per Borgen (02:55):
Counterintuitive and against most startup advice. But what we've done is built a new version of the underlying programming language that we've built Scrimba on top of because as you know, Scrimba is built on Imba, which is a programming language for the web. And we built a new version of Imba and a framework or data layer for Imba tailored towards building apps like Scrimba. So we've really tried to reinvent the wheel here, which is something all investors tell you to not do. You should rather launch quickly and iterate, though we have really went all in. And yeah, it took some years, but finally we're here.

Alex Booker (03:34):
That is next level. And you saying that reminds me of something which is that there are a ton of programming topics that there could be Scrimba courses on. People request courses all the time on different subjects. And obviously as a smaller startup, you have to choose where to prioritize and invest your time. What made it so important to invest time in rebuilding the foundations instead of cranking out more courses which have proven to be really successful already?

Per Borgen (04:01):
Time will tell whether it was the right thing to do to go back and rebuild it from scratch. I'm pretty sure it was because as I said, Scrimba V1 was largely a house of cards that had been built over the years as we explored many different directions. And what we saw was that building new features on Scrimba V1, it just took too much time. We weren't able to build it in the way we wanted. The result wasn't as performant or as polished. It didn't work as well, essentially, as we wanted it to work.

(04:37):
So we realized we needed to get the foundations right here in order to, for example, launch new programming languages on top of Scrimba. Then we need a super solid editing experience, we need super solid IDE itself and that couldn't grow out of the previous version of Scrimba. So, to be completely honest, it's been a challenging period to rebuild this from scratch.

Alex Booker (05:01):
Four years in the making.

Per Borgen (05:02):
Yeah, four years in the making. It has been a challenging period at times, especially with so many users wanting these new features and wanting Scrimba to improve. But now we're here and we're going to be able to run faster than ever before, so yeah, it's going to be epic.

Alex Booker (05:17):
I'm looking at the new experience right now and I've actually made Scrimba full screen. So it could be a desktop app if I didn't hover and see the browser bar and it's just so delightful. It's fast. There's little user interactions like how when you click on the React course there's a blue glow at the top and when you switch to JavaScript and it turns to yellow. Obviously the eye catching details are first to mind, but there are some deeper improvements here as well.

(05:41):
I'm also trying to see what I can learn by looking at the structure of the navigation because you have this home where you can quickly jump back into what you were learning. There's also courses and topics. But something that I don't think has had as much prominence before but now is right there at the top is this idea of templates where you can quickly spin up, for example, a React template or maybe a TypeScript template.

(06:03):
Does this perhaps feed into this idea where you can envision more users using scrim, but not only as a learning platform, but maybe as a starting point to build a project and flesh it out without having to worry about creating a local project and spinning up all the local tooling. Plus of course the link should be shareable, I would imagine if you create something on Scrimba too.

Per Borgen (06:23):
Yes, exactly. It's one of those things where we take a step from being just a school to be more of a tool. We're taking responsibility essentially of a larger part of your learning journey. So not just going through courses and learning and solving challenges and growing your skills, but also the building part of learning, which is just as important I would say as when you are acquiring the skills themselves because you've got to put them into practice.

(06:49):
And this template picker which you were looking at is a super-fast way of quickly scrubbing through a bunch of different templates, trying out all of them instantly, and then deciding, "Ah, this one feels right for me. This has the setup I want for React. It has the Tailwind or Bootstrap or Bulma or whatever CSS framework and it has the folder structure I want. Boom, I'll start from here and hit the ground running."

(07:15):
We're trying to get as many cool templates in front of you to make it as easy for you as possible to just get started building your next portfolio project or playing around with the new technology or whatever. So that's why we've floated the templates to the very top.

Alex Booker (07:34):
Previously, users came to Scrimba to learn and interact with lessons and courses and scrims and this kind of stuff, but now can you imagine people using Scrimba as an alternative almost to some of the existing online code editors to let you spin up quickly and share the project with your friends?

Per Borgen (07:49):
Yeah, that's one of the things we want to support you doing. We aren't supporting that wide range of frameworks or languages yet, but for what you learn on Scrimba in the front-end developer career path for example, you can definitely build through scrims instead.

Alex Booker (08:04):
That's so exciting. And what about the editing experience? Because I guess VS Code is probably the gold standard for all the plugins and all these keyboard shortcuts and this kind of stuff. Scrimba was always in a very good place in terms of interacting with scrims. Does the new version have parity with the previous version or are there some improvements as well to the editing experience?

Per Borgen (08:25):
Lots of improvements much under the hood of course, but specific things is that we now have commit support. You can add commits in your code whenever you want.

Alex Booker (08:34):
From Scrimba?

Per Borgen (08:34):
Yeah, so we're not syncing it with GitHub yet, but that'll come obviously, though you can have it inside of the scrim so you can easily scrub back and forth in your commits. And actually even more than that, we register every keystroke and every interaction you do inside of a scrim and record it all so you can rewind back, not just to a commit, but actually when you were typing out the CSS for this specific button and you digressed and you messed up after that. You can rewind back in time to just that point and continue on from there or fork it at that point or just see out of curiosity what you were doing. So we're trying to improve the Git possibilities actually.

Alex Booker (09:15):
At one point Scrimba was very, going back years frankly, Scrimba was very open to having external teachers come on the platform and teach. And they were great courses and oftentimes they would make use of the scrim formats by inviting students to interact with the code and complete challenges. But over the course of a few years, Scrimba really learned how to take full advantage of that scrim formats. Everything had to be interactive, there had to be projects and solo projects, challenges, all these things associated. And I would say that the pedagogy and the slides and the formats, it all took a similar shape, you could say, as we figured out the best practices for teaching new developers.

(09:55):
So Scrimba used to have quite a few external contributors, over the years all the teachers became in-house, and I've always thought to myself as someone who makes YouTube videos teaching code, I'd like to do it on Scrimba because of the formats. I think it's great for pedagogy. How could it look in this new world of Scrimba? Could perhaps people record their own scrims and share them and maybe even create courses in the future and things like that?

Per Borgen (10:18):
Yeah, that is one of the things we have done, opened it up to anyone to create. As you say, it was technically possible to create scrims before, but it was a very clunky thing. It was hidden. You couldn't do much with the content. Now you can pick a template, create a scrim of it, write some code, click record, record your tutorial, even put that in your own organization and gather it together with multiple other scrims into a playlist or a course and build up this little Alex Booker coding school, for example, easily. So your dream can come true of that school. Anyone can do that and you can get followers on it and essentially we'll see where it takes you.

Alex Booker (10:59):
So just like I could make a YouTube channel and start teaching coding, I could basically, I guess you'd call it a profile or something in Scrimba, but I can make something equivalent and start to grow my follow accounts in the way I might on YouTube?

Per Borgen (11:10):
Exactly. Now we have a follow concept. That's actually quite powerful because whether it's you, like your personal Alex Booker account, whether it is your organization account, whether it's a topic or a course, you can follow whatever you want essentially. So it's possible for you to build your own personal Scrimba brand or your personal Scrimba channel, you could say. And it's possible for the students themselves to personalize it on their end, following the exact creators they want to follow and the exact topics and organizations.

Alex Booker (11:43):
I am so excited about that because you mentioned individuals, but then you mentioned teams or companies. And I could see teams doing this for internal type scrims to talk about code, but also for example, if you're an open source project, let's just dream here for a second, Per, and say React had a Scrimba profile.

Per Borgen (12:00):
Yes.

Alex Booker (12:01):
There could be all kinds of scrims teaching new React concepts.

Per Borgen (12:04):
I would love that, and that is the intention. We got to probably start with some smaller projects and then build our way towards the bigger ones.

Alex Booker (12:13):
Is there or are there any plans to add an almost social or discoverability element to it? Because as a creator, one reason I go to YouTube is because I can reach new people because of the recommendations and maybe through the social aspects. Is that something on your mind at all when it comes to the latest update to Scrimba?

Per Borgen (12:33):
It is. It's not in the feature set of V0 or V 2.0, which is out now, but it is definitely coming. We're going to pull the community much more into Scrimba and float the content. Because of course, if you invest time in building cool scrims and templates and record your own courses, we have to help you with the discoverability.

Alex Booker (12:53):
I'd love to see a community tab or nav item with a trending tab within it maybe, so that you can just see what's trending and learn something new maybe.

Per Borgen (13:02):
Totally.

Alex Booker (13:03):
So one reason developers have come to love Scrimba is for the courses, the pedagogy, the career path, all this kind of stuff. Talk to me a little bit about what the future of education looks like on Scrimba. Are there any new courses in the works and would they perhaps take advantage of the new updates to Scrimba to make them even more engaging and better for learning?

Per Borgen (13:24):
One thing which we as an immediate improvement upon the previous Scrimba in the course learning experience itself is the small ghosts you'll see on the timeline. So now when you get to a challenge, we auto pause for you and force you to actually get your hands on the keyboard.

Alex Booker (13:41):
What? So I won't hear Bob Ziroll saying, "Okay, now pause the video and try this for yourself," anymore? The video will pause?

Per Borgen (13:48):
We've recorded all of our courses with that sentence, so they will still be there for a little while until we figure out how to edit it out or maybe some kind of AI that modifies it. That'd be cool, but for now we auto pause after Bob said that and then you have to code and submit your solution or you can cancel your solution and continue on without. But then you have to actually confirm that you want to do that because we really want to push you to get your hands on the keyboard.

(14:16):
And one thing we've been playing around with is getting AI to give you feedback on your solution there and then, just like an obvious thing to do. So it can pick up, "Oh, you actually seem to be misunderstanding React prompts here a little bit. So how about you do this and that and that, and then you might be able to solve it."

Alex Booker (14:34):
I'd love to learn a bit more about the role of AI in this new update to Scrimba. But just quickly on the topic of courses, is there anything upcoming that we can look forward to maybe, any future plans, backend courses maybe?

Per Borgen (14:46):
Yes, backend content is coming. We have a developer working full time on just implementing Node.js support. He's come very far. Going to have backend courses on Express and Next and whatnot. Also, an advanced JavaScript course is coming, which goes a little bit beyond what we teach you in the front-end developer career path.

(15:06):
And by the time I think this podcast has been launched, I think also we'll have a course on what's new in React 19 from Bob Ziroll, our React guru. I think people are going to love that. And also he has created a TypeScript course. We have two previous TypeScript courses. They will still be accessible from some links, but it took some time to nail that subject actually.

Alex Booker (15:28):
TypeScript is very much dependent on the TypeScript compiler, isn't it? So there has to be a very tight integration with Scrimba that's seamless. I can imagine that's quite difficult to nail while also nailing the course.

Per Borgen (15:39):
Yes, exactly.

Alex Booker (15:40):
What about paths? One of Scrimba's most successful exports is the front-end developer career path that brings together in a series, a few different courses, which you could watch independently, but you will often choose to watch as part of a path because it guides you from one topic to the next one and doesn't really let you move on until you've mastered one so you're building from the right foundation. Is there a plan to add more paths or maybe make that part of the new website? I always imagine a little map where you, I don't know, go from top to bottom, A to Z, whatever. How are you thinking about paths these days?

Per Borgen (16:15):
So we launched our second path last year as you know, the AI engineer path, and we're continuing to improve that, and as AI develops, we need to keep it up to date and add the latest cool things you can build with AI. But then of course the big question is backend, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how paths plus backend will look like. There are many ways we could do this.

(16:39):
We could expand our front-end developer career path to be more of a general full stack developer career path by implementing backend to it. We could create a backend developer career path itself just to track for that. Or we could create a full stack developer career path that lives side by side with a front-end and maybe also even a backend. So I'm not entirely sure to be honest how we'll solve it, but we'll definitely have the content for you to take a step from just knowing front end into being full stack.

Alex Booker (17:12):
Talk to me a little bit about the rebrand because the new iteration of Scrimba could not look more different, honestly.

Per Borgen (17:18):
Yeah. Scrimba, the first version was very playful. It had these pastel colors. It had these cartoonish characters, had shapes, and it was very different from other code learning platforms. And that was because we wanted to communicate to people that it's not that hard to learn to code. You don't have to be a serious person to learn how to code or a geeky person or these stereotypes people have of a software developer. Learning to code is creative. It's fun. You can be playful and you can build whatever you can think. It's so empowering.

Alex Booker (17:53):
It's not as scary as it sometimes looks.

Per Borgen (17:55):
Yes, scary, exactly. We want it to be the opposite of scary, like very friendly, almost childish in our branding. And I think a lot of people really resonated with that, and we brought a lot of new people into coding or we helped a lot of new people get into coding thanks to that.

(18:10):
With Scrimba 2.0, we're no longer just a school, we're also a tool. The editor in Scrimba has taken the center stage. We want you to come here to experiment with code, to build your portfolio project, to mess around. Whatever you have an idea you want to express with code, we want to be the place you come to. And that means the editor experience and the overall site experience needs to blend much more into each other and it needs to be one coherent experience throughout the editor and the site.

(18:43):
So then we were forced with a decision of either we have to take the existing playful branding and put it into the editor, make the editor very childish and playful as well, or go the other way around and take the more serious editor IDE design and blend that into the site. We debated both a little bit actually, but we quickly realized that an editor needs to be very functional in its design to be a good editor. We've seen some attempts at making editors very playful and childish. It just doesn't work.

(19:17):
So we realized then, okay, let's just embrace that. We'll make Scrimba super slick, super elegant, professional, and that'll put someone off. It looks a bit more serious now, it does, but we are going to work hard to breathe life into the entire page, thus making it at least playful and make it feel alive, even though it is darker and more professional. And for those wondering, light theme is coming as well.

Alex Booker (19:45):
You don't normally hear that. You hear developers requesting dark mode, not light mode more often than not.

Per Borgen (19:49):
But a lot of beta testers have requested it.

Alex Booker (19:52):
When I saw the new design, I mean I thought it was incredibly sleek, but I'd become attached, I suppose, to the playful, approachable nature of Scrimba. And obviously doing so many podcast interviews with people who tell me that they were finding coding a bit intimidating and they found a warmth about Scrimba and approachableness. That being said, it didn't necessarily come from the brand.

(20:14):
I mean, first of all, a lot of the people I spoke to came from other code learning websites with very serious brands, and that put them on the track, it didn't scare them away is when they heard the teachers. That's what makes the difference, the warm friendly way in which they guide you. They don't use language like, "Oh, we should do it this way for obvious reasons," or, "Here's some code I wrote earlier." It's like a thousand lines you don't understand. That's where the approachableness comes in the most substantial way that matters. And tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any of that is going away.

Per Borgen (20:43):
No, no, not at all. That's at its core of how coding should be taught and no one likes to listen to a boring teacher that assumes a lot of skills beforehand. So I think people will find once they get past the initial design, they will meet the same friendliness and playfulness in the app. And actually, we're going to breathe life and playfulness into the app design itself in the interactions and transitions and animations and stuff like that.

Alex Booker (21:12):
I'm so excited to watch it evolve. I think whenever a company or a development team does a migration, there's always a wishlist and then there's a must-have list and usually the product ends up somewhere in between, understandably, as you aim to get something out the door, but also getting it out in a reasonable time. It looks like the latest iteration is in a great place and you can do everything you could before and more, but to your point, Per, this is the starting point now.

(21:37):
It'll be a lot quicker, a lot more efficient to add new features, whether they be to improve the editor experience for example, but also bring you some delights. It doesn't sound so impactful maybe to be delighted when you're learning to code, but I think it does matter. It's something you do every day, all day for a long time, and those little reliefs where you laugh or you're like, "Oh, that's really nice," I think it definitely contributes to the experience.

Per Borgen (22:03):
Totally. That's on the teacher side, the energy the teacher team put into Scrimba of making it playful and fun and just friendly, that helps. And also the same passion that our developer team puts into, for example, making the app performant is also something that is there to help you ease your day actually, because who doesn't hate those loading bars? So we're putting a ton of effort into ... We're looking at speed as one of the core features of Scrimba. You're never going to experience lagging or those loading bars, or at least to a minimum at Scrimba compared to all other platforms.

Alex Booker (22:42):
I like that so much because you've been talking about a tool, not just a school, and you want your tools to be fast as a developer. There's a reason people use editors like Code instead of full-fledged IDEs because they come with bloat that people don't necessarily want. And so if you're going to rely on Scrimba as a tool, then obviously the editor has to be rapid. It has to be very quick to access, to load, and code with obviously.

(23:05):
But then you think about the courses and it's really interesting because I think one of Scrimba's advantages that maybe a lot of us don't really appreciate because we're connecting from countries with fast internet or we just have fast internet, is that the scrim is a very lightweight format compared to a bloated 4K, for example, video on a different platform, or worse, maybe it isn't 4K, but it's compressed a lot and it loads quickly, but then the quality's not that great compared to the rendered text, which is always going to be sharp and nice as possible.

(23:34):
So I think it's an example of playing on Scrimba's advantage a bit there maybe because only Scrimba with that lightweight scrim format could be the fastest if only the experience and the dashboard was rapid as well, which as I click around, and like I say, I'm really enjoying using Scrimba full, full screen with no title bar because it feels very immersive and like a desktop application and it loads just as quickly as well.

Per Borgen (23:55):
Yes, and as you say there, having it both in the scrim and in the interface itself is super important and it's not a coincidence that we have that. Our CTO, Sindre whom you know, he is obsessed with performance and speed and has optimized the hell out of both the interface and the scrim format. It's so prematurely optimized or at least used to be so prematurely optimized. But once you hit scale and have a lot of users and people use it a ton and they have a lot of data, these things really add up and most software just degrades towards being slow and bad. So we really want to avoid that with Scrimba and we're going to make ... It's going to continue to be super-fast.

Alex Booker (24:44):
By the way, have you come across students using things like ChatGPT and Copilot more and more in recent years while they're learning to code? I don't know about you, but I'm often opening ChatGPT to ask for help with my code. And I wonder from a learning point of view what role AI could play without also compromising learning experience if you come to depend on it a bit too much.

Per Borgen (25:07):
I think it comes down to how you use it. If you just get ChatGPT to write a bunch of code for you that you don't understand and you never really take the effort to try and understand it, I don't think you'll get very far with what you build and you won't learn that much either. Though, if you use it as a sidekick that can help you just create your ideas faster and get to a state you are excited about faster, though also trying to keep up with it and understand what's going on, then I think it's a revolution when it comes to learning. And it's also a revolution in terms of when it comes to building because you can build a lot faster of course.

Alex Booker (25:48):
You touched on an AI feature inside of Scrimba earlier. What about more generally? How will AI change code learning, do you think?

Per Borgen (25:56):
So I think it's a revolution for code learning. It'll enable a lot more people to build software and it can enable people to learn a lot faster. So we are surely going to embrace AI inside Scrimba. We could have thrown it into V1 as well. We had some prototypes, but we waited because we want to do this right, and there's a ton of potential there. Though, just the average chatbot that everyone else has, that's not where we think all the potential is or the potential is realized. Of course, it's great, but that's the first step and we want to be able to go past that. Yes, it will change how people are learning, I think. And one thing I'm especially excited about is how it enables you to front load the fun and delay some of the boring parts.

Alex Booker (26:41):
I love that.

Per Borgen (26:42):
Learning to code at Scrimba has never been about, oh, you got to learn about data types in JavaScript because that is what developers know about. No, it's like, you got to learn about data types in JavaScript because the poker app you're building, since you're a poker fan, uses obviously various different data types. It's always been about the underlying purpose you have or why you are building something. And then, ideally get you to experience building something before you have to learn about all of those, quote, unquote, "boring" things.

(27:14):
And I think AI really puts this on steroids where you can quickly throw out a prototype of something and then start understanding it. Because once you've built Alex's awesome poker app, then you're motivated. I mean, even more than starting with a blank slate, you'd be motivated to, "Oh, I want to tweak this color a little bit. I want to change this feature a little bit." It gives you such strong incentives for diving into the code. So we want to embrace that both from a curriculum side and the feature side on Scrimba, like how can we make it easier for people to spin up their ideas using AI?

Alex Booker (27:51):
Are there any ideas that are top of mind for you that you would like to explore forever?

Per Borgen (27:55):
So I'm thinking a lot about the voice modality that have grown to more and more prominence over the last year because we humans, we prefer to communicate via voice, but coding is all about writing. Though, if you have a assistant or a senior developer right side by side with you, you wouldn't sit there and write about the code back and forth to each other. You would communicate through voice instead.

(28:22):
So it's that intersection of voice and code I'm super interested in. Scrimba has been about voice plus code ever since its inception, but now it's voice plus code plus AI. And I think there's just so many interesting things we can do in that space.

Alex Booker (28:37):
It could almost be, and we're just dreaming to be clear, this isn't a feature coming to Scrimba tomorrow, but maybe one day it could be almost like when you're pair programming. Say you and I are pair programming, and then I'm like, "Oh, Per, maybe you should call that function." And then you're like, "Okay, I'll type it." And then we both realize it's not working.

(28:52):
And you almost, as a learner, even though AI is basically omniscient and could know the answer, you almost don't want it to tell you the answer. You want it to play as if it's ... Because it might not, right? If it's right 90% of the time, if it's wrong 10% of the time, but still enough to lose confidence in it a little bit. But if you can instead leverage all that knowledge to go back and forth, but ultimately you decide what is ...

(29:14):
Even if the AI could suggest it and be like, "Ooh, we haven't done this yet. Maybe we should try that. What do you think, Alex? What do you think, Per?" Do you know what I mean? It could be this back and forth type of thing. I'm imagining somewhere between pair programming and the movie Her where Scarlett Johansson is replying to you about your code.

Per Borgen (29:31):
Yeah, and you fall in love with your pair programmer.

Alex Booker (29:37):
It was love at first semicolon.

Per Borgen (29:39):
No, it is super interesting and something we're going to explore, but of course it's a lot of R&D and then playing around that we need to ... We can't promise exactly how it will be, but that we'll explore that direction for sure.

Alex Booker (29:54):
Sounds like Scrimba's in the best place to do it now with this new version and new code base.

Per Borgen (29:58):
Yes.

Alex Booker (29:58):
And so exciting to learn all about the motivation and what we can look forward to as students and users. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Per Borgen (30:05):
Likewise. Great to be here.

Jan Arsenovic (30:07):
That was The Scrimba Podcast. If you made it this far, please subscribe. You can find the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can also watch it on YouTube, on Scrimba's YouTube channel. If you like what we're doing and you'd like to support us, the best way to support a podcast that you like is to tell somebody about it. You can do it on socials, you can do it on Discord, you can do it in person, you can leave us a comment on YouTube or if you're feeling super supportive, you can also leave us a rating or a review in your podcast app of choice. And your coolest comments will also be featured right here on the show.

(30:44):
The Scrimba Podcast is hosted by Alex Booker and produced by me. I'm Jan Arsenovic. Thanks for listening. Keep coding, check out the brand new Scrimba at scrimba.com and we'll see you in the next one.