# academia.sh: can theory and a real field problem live in the same lesson? > A free, publicly open, text-first learning platform that holds textbook theory and problems actually met in the industry inside a single lesson flow. - What it does today: Live as a free learning platform with no signup wall: the field–curriculum–course–unit–lesson hierarchy, full-text search, progress tracking and verifiable certificates all work. Anyone who wants to read the computer-science curriculum can use it today. - Form: Web app - Maturity: Beta - State: In development - Focus: Education & research - Started: 2026-08-13 - Technologies: Laravel, PHP, Livewire, Blade, Tailwind, PostgreSQL, Redis, Filament, Pest - Tags: #education, #content-platform, #open-access - Website: https://academia.sh - The research behind this work: Laravel's preload curve: 123 files buy eight times what the last 1,912 do (https://www.muhammetsafak.com.tr/en/research/laravel-preload-curve/) · opcache preload cuts the deploy bill by up to fourteen times — but five of seven frameworks do not hand it to you (https://www.muhammetsafak.com.tr/en/research/opcache-preload-deploy-bill/) - Source: https://www.muhammetsafak.com.tr/en/labs/academia/ - Language: en-US - Author: Muhammet Şafak --- 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 — discipline, curriculum, course, unit, lesson — and all of it is free. 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, no signup wall, text-first What came out is an open, free education platform that does only its job: no paywall, no ads, no layer pulling attention away from the content. 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 knowledge should be public, free and open: the obstacle in front of learning should be the difficulty of the knowledge itself — not a payment screen, 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.