About Kolom

Kolom (কলম) is Bangla for pen, the first tool every student holds. হাতে-কলমে, “by hand and pen”, is how Bangladeshis say hands-on, and that’s what Kolom is: a free workbench where you open a tool for the work you have today and the lesson behind it is one click away. Every tool teaches. Every lesson ends in a tool.

Tools first, then the learning

Start with the job on your desk. There are 10 labs that open straight into a working tool (SQL, code, system design, data, finance, product, security, QA, DevOps and AI) and 44 templates for real work, like a month-end sales report, a PRD, a cash-flow model or a runbook. Use your own data, export the result, and nothing touches a real system. See all the tools.

Every template links to the lesson that explains why it works, and every lesson ends in a tool you can use it in. Behind the tools are 56 courses and 323 lessons on the parts of the work most courses skip: how systems hold up under load, how databases find a row among millions, how a team ships safely with Git and GitHub, how product managers decide what to build, and how to put AI features in front of real people.

How the lessons are made

Every lesson follows the same order: an everyday picture before any jargon, the mechanism with diagrams you can read on a phone, a quick check after each idea, real code or a real template, questions to bring to your team, a task checked in your browser, a short quiz and flashcards, and then the tool to use it in at work. Every command and query in the technical lessons was run for real, and the auto-checked exercises run in your browser the same way they run in our checks.

Every lesson also has a podcast episode with two hosts. Nadia is a senior engineer and Imran is a product manager. Your device reads the episode in two voices, and the page follows along.

Mangrove Market

The examples use one company throughout: Mangrove Market, a fictional grocery chain with about 320 stores, an app with 30-minute delivery, a rider fleet and partner corner shops. Seeing the same company in every course means you meet familiar data, people and problems as you move from databases to product decisions. Mangrove Market is made up; any resemblance to a real business is a coincidence.

Who writes it

The Kolom team. Written by a product lead with years of hands-on full-stack experience, and reviewed by working engineers. Every command and query in the courses was run for real.

Free, and staying free

The tools, templates, courses, podcasts, exams and certificates are free. We charge only for optional extras that cost us people and time: Kolom Plus (every lab challenge, unlimited exports, bigger simulations and something new every week) and Kolom Premium (Plus with a mentor, seminars and meet-ups). See the plans.

Contact

Found a mistake in a lesson? Use the feedback box at the end of the lesson, or write to support@kolom.io.

A question about your account, a payment, a course or the labs? Ask us a question (you need an account) and a person on the team will reply in your inbox.