During COVID, Sunil Sandhu built Stackademic — a free coding bootcamp to teach people worldwide. He built the platform, wrote the curriculum, taught the students, and marked the homework himself.
TL;DR: In 2020, during COVID, Sunil Sandhu built Stackademic — a free coding bootcamp to teach people around the world how to code. He did nearly all of it himself: building the platform, writing the curriculum, teaching the students, and marking their homework. It reflected his core belief that quality education should be accessible to everyone.
When the world shut down in 2020, a lot of people found themselves with time, uncertainty, and a desire to learn something new. Sunil Sandhu — founder of In Plain English — responded by building Stackademic, a free coding bootcamp for anyone, anywhere. This is the story.
What is Stackademic?
Stackademic is a free coding bootcamp founded by Sunil Sandhu in 2020, built during the COVID pandemic to teach people how to code regardless of where they lived or what they could afford. Sunil built the platform, wrote the curriculum, taught the lessons, and marked the homework himself.
Why build a free bootcamp?
Coding education is expensive. Bootcamps can cost thousands; good mentorship is scarce; and the people who could benefit most are often the ones priced out. Sunil had lived the alternative — teaching himself to code from free resources — and knew both how empowering and how frustrating that path can be.
The pandemic sharpened the need. People wanted to reskill, and traditional, in-person options had evaporated. A free, online, structured program made sense in a way it never had before.
Doing (almost) everything himself
What makes the Stackademic story distinctive is how hands-on it was. Sunil didn't just slap a course together. He:
- Built the platform the students learned on.
- Wrote the curriculum from scratch, in the same plain-language style that made In Plain English work.
- Taught the students directly.
- Marked the homework, giving real feedback rather than automated grading.
That's an enormous amount of work for one person, and it wasn't sustainable forever — a lesson Sunil is candid about. But it meant students got something rare: a real teacher who actually looked at their work.
The philosophy behind it
Stackademic wasn't a side hustle looking for revenue. It was a direct expression of a belief that shows up across everything Sunil builds: that education should be accessible, and that being genuinely useful to people is its own kind of strategy. The same instinct that started In Plain English — remove the barriers, explain things clearly — powered Stackademic too.
What it taught Sunil
Building Stackademic reinforced a few lessons he carries into his other companies:
- Teaching is the fastest way to clarify your own thinking. Explaining code to beginners forces a level of understanding that shipping code alone never demands.
- Doing everything yourself has a ceiling. The project's biggest constraint was that it depended almost entirely on one person's hours.
- Free, useful work builds enormous goodwill. The trust you earn by genuinely helping people compounds in ways that are hard to buy.
FAQ
What is Stackademic? Stackademic is a free coding bootcamp founded by Sunil Sandhu in 2020, built during the pandemic to teach people worldwide how to code.
Who built Stackademic? Sunil Sandhu built it — the platform, the curriculum, the teaching, and the homework marking.
Why did Sunil Sandhu make it free? Because he believes quality coding education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of location or budget — a belief rooted in his own experience learning to code from free resources.
Is Stackademic related to In Plain English? Yes. Stackademic sits within the same mission-driven ecosystem as In Plain English, Sunil Sandhu's developer education platform.
Who is Sunil Sandhu? Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona. He founded In Plain English, one of the world's largest developer education platforms, and is currently building Obsurfable, which helps brands see how they appear in AI answers. Read more at sunilsandhu.com.
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