Why raindev.fyi exists

Why I built this

During my four years of undergrad, I met people who could write code but had less practice setting up projects, debugging, and deploying them. I built raindev.fyi to make those first steps easier to find.

Computer science programs are good at teaching you to think algorithmically. You learn sorting algorithms, recursive functions, big-O notation, and how to traverse a binary tree.

But when you get your first real job, you're immediately confronted with things nobody taught you:

• How do I use Git without destroying the main branch?
• What's a pull request, and how do I write a good description?
• How do I deploy this to the internet?
• What's a .env file and why does everyone say not to commit it?
• Why is CI failing? What even is CI?
• What's Docker and do I actually need it?

These skills are covered in documentation and courses, but it can be hard to know what to learn next. This site puts the steps in order and explains how they fit into a working project.

What this site is

raindev.fyi is a practical, interactive field guide for the software engineering skills that live between "I can write code" and "I can ship software."

Each guide is written to be:

• Practical. Real commands, real workflows, real code.
• Interactive. Where possible, you can experiment directly in the page.
• Honest. We explain why things exist, not just what they are.
• Opinionated. We recommend a starting point and explain when a different approach makes sense.

What this site is not

This is not a comprehensive documentation reference. It's a curated set of guides for the specific things that trip people up most when they're starting their career or trying to level up.

It's also not a "bootcamp in a website." We assume you can already write code. We're teaching you the layer on top of that.

How it's built

raindev.fyi is built with Astro, React, TypeScript, and MDX. It's a fully static site, no backend, no database, no tracking. It deploys to a CDN and loads fast.

The interactive widgets are built with React and embedded inside MDX files using Astro's island architecture, only the interactive parts hydrate JavaScript.