As someone who makes developer courses / training material I think it's a really bad idea to use online services like PythonAnywhere or Cloud9IDE.
It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this.
Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for my own stuff) and it's been a smashing success. I do get occasional people questioning "why" but after I explain what the process would be like to set up a proper Python dev environment without Docker they immediately see the wins.
Of course I do get Docker related installation questions but it's a small percent compared to questions on the course content. One of my courses is building real world web apps with Flask and it's probably 80% Flask / 20% Docker related questions.
That's much better than punting a local development environment off to a third party service / pre-built VM and then leaving people stuck in the dark for getting anything done on their own.
It's really important to learn how to set up your own development environment as a developer and if you're making this content, I believe it's our responsibility as teachers to show people how to do this.
Personally I use Docker in my courses (because it's what I use for my own stuff) and it's been a smashing success. I do get occasional people questioning "why" but after I explain what the process would be like to set up a proper Python dev environment without Docker they immediately see the wins.
Of course I do get Docker related installation questions but it's a small percent compared to questions on the course content. One of my courses is building real world web apps with Flask and it's probably 80% Flask / 20% Docker related questions.
That's much better than punting a local development environment off to a third party service / pre-built VM and then leaving people stuck in the dark for getting anything done on their own.