My open source story begins in 2014. I was living in NYC and benefiting heavily from going to free tech meetups like Hacker Hours, where strangers would come together to cowork and help one another out with programming questions. As a recent college grad who didn't have a hugely collaborative learning experience on campus, finding that knowledge sharing culture in the learn-to-code movement at the time was a lot of fun.

The only problem with meetups was that they could be distracting. Instead of finishing the MOOC courses I'd signed up for, I'd get pulled into side conversations about tutorial recommendations and general chatter.

The "running partners for code" idea

That summer, while participating in a program "to launch a side project" taught by Gary Chou from Orbital, I accidentally discovered that the act of screensharing with a study partner on Google Hangouts was a brilliant way to …