academia.sh: can theory and a real field problem live in the same lesson?

Unlike video course platforms, academia.sh makes writing the primary medium: readable, searchable, quotable, permanent in the browser. academia.sh is an attempt to present knowledge the way a textbook does — curriculum, course, topic, lesson — and every lesson is free to read, with no account. The first body of content is computer science, but the model is multi-disciplinary from the start: adding mathematics or linguistics means writing lessons, not changing the schema.

That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is this: a lesson that carries only theory becomes lecture notes, and one that carries only field problems becomes a blog post. What does it cost to hold both in one flow — to write, right after the definition, where that definition breaks in practice?

Holding theory and the field problem in one lesson

A field problem is not a separate “exercise” entity; it sits in the lesson’s own text, as the continuation of the theory. The problems are not invented examples either: they are the ones actually met in the industry. That choice keeps the lesson a single entity.

Splitting it would have produced two products — text to read on one side, a list of exercises to solve on the other — and the moment it split, progress, search and assessment would have split with it. Staying single shows up in two places:

Progress. Completion is tracked per lesson, and the denominator is “published active lessons”. Reading a lesson’s theory while skipping its problem is not a state that exists; they are the same lesson. Assessment follows the same principle: a quiz asks about the whole lesson, not the theory alone.

Search. On a text-first platform search is not decoration, it is the spine — what you cannot search on a video platform is the primary way in here. Postgres full-text search: weights are title A, intro B, body C; ranking is ts_rank_cd, snippets ts_headline. search_vector is not a generated column, and cannot be — though the reason is not to_tsvector, whose two-argument form is immutable. The problem is that the dictionary sits on the row as text and has to be cast to regconfig; that cast is not considered immutable, so Postgres refuses the expression in a generated column. A trigger builds the vector instead.

Free to read, no signup wall, text-first

What came out is an open education platform that does only its job: lessons are free and need no account, there are no ads, and no layer pulls attention away from the content. The course-end exam, the verifiable certificate and the study assistant sit in a Pro tier; reading never does. The content does not originate in the application database either — it lives as markdown in a separate GitHub repository, and the platform feeds from there. That separation also shapes what comes next: the curriculum is kept in the one form that can genuinely be opened to contributions, plain text. Today I am the only author; that does not have to stay true.

The stack is plain: Laravel 13, Blade + Livewire, Tailwind, PostgreSQL 16, Redis, with Filament for administration. Markdown renders on the server (league/commonmark + tempest/highlight), so there is no Node at runtime.

One certificate decision is worth naming: holder_name and course_title are frozen at issue time. A name changed later does not alter a printed document, and un-checking a lesson does not revoke the certificate — undoing a mark is an error correction, not a revocation. The verification page is public but carries noindex, nofollow: a person’s name should not surface in search results.

There is no repository layer. Eloquent already plays that role; anything holding a workflow is an Action, stateless capabilities are a Service. Quality gates are Pest, Pint and Larastan at level 6.

Is the model really discipline-agnostic

The list of remaining work is not why it continues. I believe reading should be public, free and open: the obstacle in front of learning should be the difficulty of the knowledge itself — not a payment screen in front of the text, a signup wall or a company deciding to shut something down. Both the text-first medium and the content living in its own repository follow from that: readable, copyable and continuable by someone else if they want to continue it.

The genuinely open question sits on the content side, and it is not technical. The schema is multi-disciplinary, but the model’s condition is that every lesson also carries a problem from the field. I can write that for computer science because I have been working in that field for years. Adding a second discipline needs no migration — it needs an author. Whether the model is actually discipline-agnostic will only show once that author is found.