bytelings 0.1.1

Small daily exercises to make you fluent at writing and reading code. Python first; C, C++, Rust, and Go on the roadmap.

🐣 bytelings

Tiny daily exercises that make code feel like a language you actually speak.

Hey 👋

If you're someone who kind of knows Python (or wants to), but still freezes when asked to write something from scratch — this is for you. bytelings is a curriculum that meets you exactly where you are and walks you, day by day, into real fluency.

pip install bytelings
mkdir my-bytelings && cd my-bytelings
bytelings init
bytelings

Now save a file. Watch the tests turn green. That's the loop. ✨

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🌱 The whole idea

Most courses dump you into "implement merge sort" without first letting you read one, fix a broken one, or fill in a half-written one. bytelings is a ladder. You climb one rung at a time and you don't move on until your fingers know it.

Each day teaches one concept, and only one. You go through it like this:

🔍   Read   — a short, story-styled page. Not a textbook chapter. Just enough to feel the idea.

🔧   Drill   — a broken file with a couple of # TODO lines. Fix them. Tests turn green when you nail it.

🪜   Guided   — here's a function signature and a docstring. You write the body.

🦾   Solo   — same idea, no scaffold. Hidden tests. You write it cold, like real work.

🎯   Apply   — a tiny project chunk that uses what you just wrote. The concept lands somewhere real.

The watcher (bytelings) runs your tests on every save and high-fives you to the next rung when you pass. When you finish all 5 rungs, you wake up tomorrow on Day 2.

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🎨 Concept pages don't read like textbooks

This one matters. Same-shape lessons make brains autopilot. So bytelings rotates across 8 different storytelling styles — and you'll never see the same one two days in a row:

📖 Story — "It's Monday, 9 AM. You just got hired. Here's the repo..." 🩹 Pain-point — show ugly buggy slow code first, then the fix ⚖️ Compare two ways — two snippets side by side, you pick the right one 🚶 Code tour — read a real piece of code line by line 🔮 Trace — predict what each line prints before you run it 🛠️ Build it yourself — "Pretend Python doesn't have this. How would you build it?" 🌉 Metaphor — concepts mapped onto things from real life 🕵️ Detective — there's a bug, the concept is the only fix

Your brain stays alert. The fluency builds.

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🗺️ What you'll learn — the 135-day map

Phase	Days	What clicks for you
1. Python core fluency	31	Strings, lists, dicts, functions stop feeling like things you look up.
2. Pythonic tools & I/O	27	Comprehensions, async, dataclasses, files — you reach for the right one without thinking.
3. Quality & production	21	Real-world skills: pytest, logging, profiling, picking threads-vs-async-vs-processes.
4. Data structures from scratch	19	You build stacks, linked lists, trees, heaps, hash tables — yourself, in Python.
5. Algorithms	25	Recursion, sort, graphs, DP, greedy, backtracking — pattern recognition you'll use forever.
6. Packaging, AST, capstone	12	You ship a real CLI tool you'd actually use.

🛠️ After every phase, a 3-day project that combines everything you just learned: contacts manager → async website snapshotter → parallel log analyzer → tiny in-memory database → maze pathfinder. Phase 6 ends in an 8-day capstone where you build, test, and ship a CLI tool of your own design.

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🎮 Commands

bytelings	Start the watcher. Save → green panel → next rung. ✨
bytelings today	What you're working on right now
bytelings progress	Your streak 🔥 and completion bar
bytelings list	Every day with ✔ / ○ markers
bytelings hint [DAY]	Re-read the concept page anytime
bytelings run [DAY]	Run the current rung's tests once, no watch
bytelings reset DAY	Start a day over
bytelings init	Scaffold the curriculum (just once, at the start)

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🌍 Why this exists

I built bytelings because I was decent at Python — I could read code, edit code, get things working — but I still froze when asked to write something non-trivial from scratch. I'd reach for docs. I'd google syntax. The fluency wasn't there, and no course I tried was filling that gap.

Two things were missing from every curriculum I tried:

1. They taught topics in blocks (all syntax → all data structures → all algorithms). Research keeps showing this is the worst shape for long-term retention. Interleaved practice — mixing topics every day — wins by a huge margin. bytelings interleaves on purpose.

2. They skipped the bottom rungs. They'd parachute you onto "implement merge sort" without first showing you a worked example to read, a broken version to fix, or a scaffolded version to fill in. Of course people freeze. The fix is to climb every rung.

bytelings is the curriculum I wished existed. Now it does. 🎉

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🚀 Roadmap

The runner doesn't care what language you're learning. Each track is just curriculum content under the same bytelings UX.

• Python — 135 days, shipped 🎉
• C — pointers, memory, the why behind undefined behavior
• C++ — RAII, templates, modern C++
• Rust — ownership, lifetimes, fearless concurrency
• Go — interfaces, goroutines, the philosophy

Want to help build a track? See contributing below. 👇

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🤝 Contributing

PRs welcome — bug fixes, content polish, new languages. Adding a language is mostly: a new bytelings/_curriculum/<lang>/ tree and a small per-language test driver. Runner core is ~1000 lines of friendly Python.

💛 Credits

Inspired by Rustlings, Codewars, and 100 Days of Code.

License

MIT. Fork it. Remix it. Build your own track for any language you love. 🌱

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_{The fluency comes from the reps. 🐣}