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A New Codecademy

codecademy.com

182 pointscodecondo103 comments

Damnit, Codecademy, you're so close. As someone who had to bang their head against the wall for years to learn how to program, you're now doing a great job solving steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 (whereas before you did a great job solving steps 4 and 5). But for people starting out, the problem is that this is all still theoretical.

Sure, you are now actually building a project, but still only in this cute little console. What is a text editor? What is hosting? What does DNS mean? How can I make what I typed into my text editor show up on mydomain.com? What do I actually do with all of this HTML, CSS and JavaScript you're teaching me how to write?

"Let's build the airbnb website" is infinitely better than "this is a 'for loop in JavaScript,'" but it still doesn't solve the main problem of understanding how I can build technology. Solve that problem, and the motivation to learn to program goes up 10x, because all of the sudden it's real and it's live. Stop teaching us how to dick around in apps you built and teach us how to make something real.

What might be cool is to actually create a 'simulator' that puts people through the process of 'purchasing' a server, domain name, and through the actual server and DNS configuration up to the point where you can get a 'success' page on a server, then have them add some code and show them how all the files interact with each other.

Then teach them how to code the files.

Maybe after that something like a whole MEAN/LAMP stack development course. Personally I think the technologies used in MEAN are easier to understand and you can do a lot of neat things with angular in just a few lines of code. An interactive angular course would be really awesome. But people definitely need to know how to interact with a database. What would be nice would be to actually learn MEAN and LAMP side by side to actually understand the differences, but I guess that's diverging from the 'beginner friendly' approach.

thanks for all of this feedback. we're launching some stuff next week that will help you get even closer to realizing all of this -- it gets you out of the terminal (the main UX now for users) and explains a lot more about the concepts you're learning.

would love to hear your feedback when this goes live!

Since you're listening... I've emailed you guys before about a bug I found while working through your ruby module and hit radio silence at your contact@codecademy.com address.

Got a more appropriate area for bug reports?

feel free to email me personally - zach@

Zack, what's wrong with /dashboard? I mean, it's not working now. Are you going to get rid of it or you're rewriting it?

email him

The issue is gone (solved by the Codecademy team)!

Yes!

It is like teaching someone to read and write: you teach the letters, how they sound, how they go together to form words and then phrases. And how to construct paragraphs and essays and etc. But you somehow forget to teach that in order to write you need a paper and a pencil. And if you want something more permanent you use a pen!

This is how I feel with the little knowledge about programming that I have. If someone sets everything up for me I can write the functions and they will perform as expected. But if someone give me a new computer I have almost no idea where to start.

I would spend about 4 hours coding the software to perform, let's say, a very basic ecommerce website, with menu, product pages, payment integration (with paypal) and stuff. But I would spent easy more than 10 hours to know where to upload the file, with which name, where to host, how to host, how to test in my computer, how to put in production, how to integrate it with a domain, etc.

Some context: I spent 4 months this year learning how to code using a lot Treehouse and Codecademy, reading Heads First C# and then Google+StackOverflown. With all this help and a lot more from Visual Studio I was able to create a complete, functional web app hosted at Azure. But I can't say I can code, there are a few basic things I just don't understand. For example, I can't learn how to create a webapp based on a API. The basic rules of how ask for information from an API I understand, but I have no idea where to put it to make it work.

Wholeheartedly agree. This really strikes a chord with me, and it's the exactly problem I'm working to make a dent on.

Earlier this year I created a free course called the New Year of Coding [1] with the goal of helping anyone learn what they're doing and, more importantly, why things function in the way they do.

I'm attempting to tackle the problem at a larger scale with my upcoming book, Your First Web App [2], which will walk anyone through the entire process of creating a web app, from start to finish. The goal is for someone to be able to understand all of the pieces, starting with the text editor, the development environment, etc., and gradually working into the actual development, all the way explaining how everything fits together.

It's proven to be a great deal of work so far, but it sure is rewarding getting the "Hey! This is was super helpful! Thanks!" messages.

[1] http://www.alexpcoleman.com/new-year-of-coding/

[2] http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/

I wholeheartedly agree that building a project is many times more useful as a learning tool than little 'for loop' exercises, but completely disagree with the idea that you should be learning DNS/Hosting/Dev Tools as step 1.

These concepts/tools are important to learn eventually, but are not the core of building software. One of the great things about Codecademy is that it abstracts away all of the yak-shaving/ops work so you can dive into what is actually interesting. Obviously this approach can only take you so far, but from my experience[1], I can't think of anything that would motivate a prospective learner less than banging his/her head against the command line, googling cryptic error stack traces, for X hours just trying to get a dev environment setup, just to (finally) write your first line of code.

[1] Quick background: I'm a full time developer, completely self-taught (did the HTML/CSS, and basic JS track on Codecademy back in early 2012 before diving into The Hard Way series and Michael Hartl's book)

Hardly anybody teaches all that boring, infrastructure stuff, and it's a shame. Most web programmers I know can't provision a Unix server, and that's a shame too.

Some people call this stuff "system administration," "operations," or what-have-you. To me though, it's all programming. It's a decidedly more annoying and less glamorous aspect of programming. But it's so essential.

As the parent commenter said, HTML, CSS, and JS are useless without a place for them to live. That place consists of a properly configured Unix server, pointed to by a domain name. It takes a while to understand how it all works together. But at the very least, you need to be able to cargo cult it just to get your project off the ground.

Provisioning a Unix server is not programming. Programming, according to the dictionary is "The action or process of writing computer programs."

Deploying computer programs is, strictly speaking, separate from writing computer programs. With that said, it's certainly a skill that could be better covered by introductory texts.

Let's not get loose with our terminology though.

A fair point. I guess I should have said: "it's all stuff a programmer has to do." It might not be programming proper, but it's part of the job, at least for many (most?) programmers.

We created One Month Rails to address specifically this problem.

It's all online and here are some of the lessons we teach: The command line, Setting up Github, Going online with Heroku, Registering a custom domain.

The idea is to show people how to build a simple Pinterest-like photosharing web app. We're going to be expanding that to include other web apps (like Airbnb and Reddit).

If you're interested @austenallred I can give you access and I'd love to hear your feedback. Email mattan at onemonth dot com

What you're looking for isn't "how to code", it's "how to architect". I'm unaware of any courses that go over the general structure of an entire solution, but that's the direction you want to take.

I agree, it would be infinitely useful to have a lesson on: "Okay this is where programming Python fits into the architecture of a website. Now that you're oriented in the world, let's learn how to program in Python."

I think a lot of the in-person classes do cover the entire ecosystem of the web, and how whatever the course is teaching fits into that.

I teach an Intro to Rails course with HackerYou in Toronto, and we certainly cover the web in general, how requests work and are interpreted by a browser, how to use a text editor, programming concepts in general, git, etc. I don't really think we're particularly unique in that regard, either.

I won't say we're absolutely comprehensive on all of these topics, but if the bar for "making a Rails site work" is that you've read SICP, configured your own Unix server, and can implement something in raw HTTP, we're essentially giving up on the notion of programming as something novices can do at all.

> I won't say we're absolutely comprehensive on all of these topics, but if the bar for

I think you're right not be comprehensive, trying to dig deep would be ridiculous. I think the parent is specifically looking to address the problem of teaching an abstract concept (programming, often through algorithms, data structures, object orientation, all extremely abstract things), which can be aided by some orientation of where the topics in the class reside in the larger concrete, applied space.

I remember when I was sitting in my first object-oriented programming class trying to figure out what all of the "objects" and "instances" were that the instructor was talking about. I didn't have the mental model to associate the groupings of code snippets on my page to "things" that could be manipulated and could "communicate" with each other. Once I was able to build that model, I was able to grok the concept of object composition, etc.

Years later after designing a few systems, I am able to construct large mental models and know where what I'm looking at at a given time (whether that be a database, business logic snippet, or HTML elements) lives in relation to the rest of the system.

It's far from essential to learning "how to program procedural code", but it's essential in building entire things, or even pieces that touch other parts of a whole.

Completely agree. I tried to learn HTML/CSS first, then Python, Ruby, then Rails. Needless to say, I didn't make any progress and was no closer to building out anything on my own.

It's an interesting balance between architecting an entire technology web app and understanding a programming language on a meta level. Most people learn from the ground up - i.e. syntax first, then simple commands..etc. No one starts by building the practical stuff and getting it to work before understanding the details.

I finally built an online food ordering site only after sitting down...and building an online food ordering site. I didn't try to learn Ruby, or Python, or Javascript. I just brute forced my way to getting a functional app. I googled a lot, trolled stackoverflow, debugged errors, nagged people for help, and ended up hacking together a Rails app.

Learning to build apps is different than learning to code. So why are we still learning it the same way?

- Susie

Founder at https://baserails.com

I agree. I've struggled for years with programming. I would complete every Codecademy-like course or tutorial I could find, only to be left feeling as if I just learned how to go through the motions of programming. I always knew there was a significant void in my understanding that prevented me from both fully grasping the basic ideas underlying programming and making any meaningful progress. The cliche advice people had was "ok, now create your own project," which is much, much, much easier said than done for a beginner. I have a million projects I started and never finished because I got sick of just not understanding what I was doing. SO answers were utterly baffling and copying/pasting them got me nowhere. What is a data structure and why are they using that one? Why would one algorithm be better than another? And for web programming: What're the basic components of the internet? What are HTTP requests? What are all these protocols? How much should I know for the task at hand? It was so overwhelming. Thankfully I found a set of books that have been wonderful in methodically building my knowledge and skills.

There is so, so much more a beginner should be exposed to than for loops and cleverly slicing lists.

Edit: For those asking for books/resources, here is what I would suggest to someone just starting out. I chose python for myself because I wanted a language with broad potential (ie web development to statistical and biological computation). It's absolutely critical that you complete every exercise provided.

Programming basics:

- How to Think Like A Computer Scientist - http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

- Think Complexity - http://greenteapress.com/complexity/thinkcomplexity.pdf

- SICP - http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

---

Web/Development basics:

- Team Treehouse modules on git, shell commands, DNS, etc -http://teamtreehouse.com

- How Does The Internet Work? - http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande91si/www-spr04/readings/...

- Udacity Web Dev course - https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253

---

Django basics:

- Getting Started with Django - http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com

- Two Scoops of Django - http://twoscoopspress.org/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-6

There's an interactive website for "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist", it lets you edit and run code samples right there in the browser. Very convenient for beginners, I can't recommend it enough:

http://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/thinkcspy/inde...

I agree wholeheartedly. I have tried over and over to get into programming and web building. I can go through the courses, retain some knowledge, but when it comes time to build something I'm lost. I feel too often these services focus too much on the middle, but not the beginning and end. As you said, understanding and learning about loops are important, but should not be the full focus.

For example the API stuff on Codecademy doesn't go into the full picture of how you build this into page. I have struggled mightily with understanding how the whole process works. I would love to find a service that walks me through building a page in Flask, hosting it and integrating it into APIs of popular services.

I felt like that, when i finished my first programmin course i was like, well how do i make something useful now? Because you know i could solve some Euler problems. Finally when i started to "get it" was simply when i started to do it.

E.g You break your problem in pieces and start making something. Wanna make a music player? Well how do you play music oh theres a library that you call song.play, cool. How do you read the tags? How do you get the files? Isnt a playlist just an array? And so on...

This is the approach that worked for me.

You'd suggest SICP to someone just starting out?

If a beginner does want to tackle SICP, I recommend they follow the MIT 6.001 lecture series on YouTube. It's much more manageable than simply diving into the text, but makes a great companion if you do want to keep up with all the exercises.

Granted, I'd recommend doing a L*THW or something before going to SICP, but you don't need a ton of programming experience to get something out of it.

I've always heard it's very.. 'mathy' for lack of a better word. It's always put me off of delving into it to be honest

People learning to code would be best advised to find a volunteer group who need code writing (even if they don't know they need code writing), or an open-source project. I agree learning to write code is only half the challenge, dealing with constraints like capacity, users, deadlines, hosting, stubborn colleagues, unsolvable problems it's easy to work-round or ignore with theoretical exercises. You only get those in a real-world job or real-world volunteer effort. The student may also find a mentor there.

You allude to the solution in your last sentence, but I think "find an open source project" is pretty bad advice for someone who is really brand new. Most open source projects have very ad-hoc project management. There is typically a big bucket of stuff that needs to be done, but very little direction on how to decide which things you can and should actually do. More experienced developers can go in and muddle around semi-blindly until they figure out a reasonable starting point, but that's really hard for less experienced people to do. It really takes a mentor willing to do that triage - "maybe this would be a good place for you to start" - but few open source projects seem to be forward-looking enough to provide that level of mentorship.

I'd go so far is to buy the time (through money or barter) of an existing senior web developer in your target language for 4-8 hours. There is nothing like pairing with someone who has already done this to get over so many of the introductory hurdles.

Got any book suggestions? I just started learning how to program about 6 months ago and personally JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Ed. was the first book that got through to me when it comes to Javascript and programming in general, but I feel I'm still lacking in other areas of web development.

>> Thankfully I found a set of books that have been wonderful in methodically building my knowledge and skills

Would you be able to share the titles of some of these books?

Exactly. Each time I told myself "I'm going to learn to code!" it was because I had a specific project in mind I wanted to build. But each time I'd end up spending hours going through tutorials and exercises and not feel any closer to completing my project, so I gave up.

The first time I actually completed a project was when I built the website for my small business, cpustorage.com. I built it by starting with a Wordpress theme and continually tinkering with the HTML and CSS until I got the site where I wanted it to be, using Google to solve problems as I ran into them. This process resulted in more learning, it was more fulfilling and fun, and it actually led to the launch of a business.

Yea, I really wish Codecademy and Treehouse could merge their curriculums. Step 1 has always been the hard part for me.

I'm with you on this. I liked Codecademy a lot, but felt it left people off with too few skills to be useful - like the MVP was underdeveloped.

Side note, I was surprised there was no 'a' after code. I have been reading it as codeAcadamy the whole time. Interesting how something looking different can cause you to pay more attention.

I seriously thought they just changed their name. Turns out I've been reading it wrong all along.

Ha yeah I came to terms with this after doing a double-take some time ago. But we still pronounce it code academy right?

OT: Reminds me of when I learnt I'd been reading deprecated as depreciated for years, until seeing: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/why-is-ther...

I've never noticed the "a" was missing until now, but I've intuitively always pronounced it as one word, like "coda-cademy"

This is because CodeAcademy (with the a) already existed (using the domain codeacademy.org). They changed their name to "The Starter League" in Sept 2012 [1].

[1] - http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/code-academy-evolves-star...

Founder of Code Academy (now The Starter League) here. Thanks for clarifying this! It seems we'll never live it down. Happy to share more about our experience and how we dealt with the conflicting name.

Wow - me too. If you actually go to http://www.codeacademy.com/, it forwards you to this URL. I don't know if this is "new" or not.

I think that they intentionally changed the logo to emphasize the C since so many people pronounced it incorrectly.

this is not new! our name has always been codecademy.

That's so funny - just like @joshdance said, I always read it as "Codeacademy". At least you have both URLs. I'd love to see a blog post one day that explains why you've chosen this name vs. that name. Co-decademy is a meaningless word to me (that's how I read it - "co" as in "codependence") whereas Code Academy makes 100% sense to developers.

If you are really motivated, knowledge you gain from Codecademy will suffice for you to be able to build real-life apps. Have you heard about a non-tech guy (Sam Fellig) who have built one of Time's Top 50 sites of 2013? Check this out: http://www.codecademy.com/stories/99-how-to-outgrow-the-fear...

As for me, Codecademy helped me to understand Python basics and I've built a web-scraper. Now I'm learning Django.

Codecademy is of great use for developing countries -- it's text-based and light-weight, meaning it's the best choice for mobile-connectivity-only learners:

-- you pay less for data usage. (Mobile data is getting cheaper, but to take Udacity's CS 101 I had to spend something around $100 for data packages).

-- you can go through its lessons using USB-dongle even with EDGE/GPRS (2G) connectivity. In our country 3G is available only to 50% of the population, the other half of it use 2G.

It's interesting, how popular is Codecademy in developing countries? What's the portion of the learners coming from African or exUSSR states?

I'm feeling like a bit of a spammer posting about this so often, but I think it's just coming up so often because it's a real need.

I've started writing a series of posts about the fundamentals of full-stack development. It came out of what I have been explaining some students I have been mentoring recently.

http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundament...

My goal is to explain the different layers, the concepts at play in them, and how they interact with each other.

"It's a roadmap, not a recipe book". The format is going to end up being similar to this post about microservices I built.

http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53536427f7040a11002ae407/a-fiel...

This is the outline so far : http://i.imgur.com/qsGqFFk.png

Thanks for the links, Adrian.

I was looking for quality learning material on front-end deveopment last week and came across this site: https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Front-end_Web_Development Jeffrey Faden is teaching that free class starting 2012. Videos available on YouTube, links can be found on his website. http://jeffreyatw.com

thanks man!

bookmarked.

i'm the cofounder and ceo of codecademy -- would love to hear what everyone thinks!

Before I offer any critical feedback, I want to first say that the first line of code I ever wrote, my "Hello world", was on Codecademy almost immediately after you launched. Since then I've learned how to use programming not only at my job (as a product manager at a web startup), but also to develop full web apps using several of the popular frameworks (flask, django, rails). I credit Codecademy for breaking down the initial barrier to entry (what is control flow, how do you tell a computer what to do, etc). I am a huge fan, but I think there are a few ways you guys could improve.

1) Put the courses into perspective as part of the onboarding process. Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, or Python? Most people who want to learn have no clue how everything fits together. If you can provide a high level guide as to how and why someone should work through specific codecademy courses you will likely increase satisfaction and completion of courses (just a hypothesis, but this is the most common criticism I hear).

2) I wish codecademy would cover database basics. What is SQL? How should you think about storing data? Until I started researching outside of Codecademy it hadn't even occurred to me that storing and structuring data was a huge part of creating useful applications (I was totally nontechnical). This is the largest hole in terms of actual content.

3) Your classes are already great at teaching newbies the syntax. The big missing component (as some have pointed out), is turning this syntax into real world solutions for real world problems. How do you get past this? You have to break into an area that you aren't comfortable in: Content Production. Unless you can come up with a way to show people how to create and run scripts on their local computer (or maybe a remote server?) through the browser this will continue to be a pitfall of the Codecademy experience. There is probably the potential for you to create some new software that does this (maybe a desktop app), but if you took a codeschool or treehouse approach, only for this stage of the learning, you would be able to truly offer an end to end solution. In your case video content scales just as well as the software. If you were to combine your superior browser interface with high quality video production you would be in a fantastic position to win the "Learn to code online" market. This sets you up with not only a differentiated product offering (your interface is the best), but a future revenue stream. Both of the aforementioned companies are making some serious cash... And thats without even mentioned the real juggernaut (Lynda).

Overall I love the product and think there is a lot of potential. If you have any questions or any of my points require clarification please feel free to shoot me an email (in profile).

Best of luck!

As non-coding Product Manager here is some feedback:

The issue at the moment seems to be that Codecademy focuses on syntax rather than problem solving. For example most of the JS exercises, if I remember correctly, focus on the command line rather than effect on the DOM (the vast use case).

Aside from that, the environment doesn't really give a great feel for how these languages map to their hardware counterparts.

For example Python runs on a server but how does one get a python instance running on a server? How does one even acquire as server? What IS a server?

HTML/CSS/JS run partly on a server and mostly in the DOM. What is the nature of when to run what where and why?

These questions are answered by running through a full stack product problem like starting a website by getting the server ready, pushing code to it, ensuring its live, ensuring you aren't working on the live version, etc.

I'd imagine it would be wonderful if a set of icons functioned as a dashboard and active parts of what you are working in the hardware-stack on are lit up. When code is run, arrows clearly point to where the code is running and where information is being sent. For example when running some webcode you could see it being pushed from the server to the DOM, the DOM running it then displaying the content. When actions are then performed, you could see them being sent back to the server, the server processing it, then sending a result back.

This would go a long way to helping people understand how code really functions to make the products they use every day.

Regarding your first bit of feedback, there is a Javascript track which focuses on the language itself and then there is a JQuery track which teaches DOM manipulation, events, animation.

http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/jquery

It's great, but as you have both domains now, you should really just run with codeAcademy.com if at all possible (which is what everyone remembers it as) rather than orienting your branding to deal with the name confusion (box around the code etc).

Not that its your fault but your fonts look terrible on Win 7 on Chrome.

The DIN variant is almost illegible in places using Firefox on Windows 7 as well. :-(

Seconded! Quite difficult to read...

Love it!

I started creating a new course, how can I split the code across multiple files?

(http://www.codecademy.com/groups/codecademy-course-creators/...)

Just a nitpick: Hovering over any of the "About Us | We're hiring | Blog" or "Help | Privacy Policy | Terms" links in the footer also underlines the separators.

Hi zds thank you for making codeacademy I've learnt a lot, started building, contributing to hackdays and generally taken my first step forward. No feedback right now just thanks.

It looks great, modern and slick. Somebody else mentioned the fact that you guys are coming out with something that'll take users out of the console. Can you elaborate on that?

on monday, we've got a new learning experience coming that you'll see has an increased emphasis on learning concepts in addition to syntax. more on that then!

I love Codecademy, and this update sounds fantastic. Are there any plans to add Perl courses?

I like the re-design, I really do, but it's hard to be impressed when the same lessons that were broken a year ago are still broken and impossible to finish.

I went through their Python tutorial about a year ago and kept running into problems with the Save and Submit button not doing its job. It would just hang until I reloaded the page (sometimes losing my work if I didn't/couldn't copy the code I'd written.) I didn't try to find out the cause of the problem, granted, but it made me want to not try any other tutorials.

we've fixed a lot of the issues - would love for you to give it a shot again and let me know if there's anything i can do to make your experience better!

I'll check it out again, thanks :)

Can you elaborate? I am a user, and I don't understand what you mean by that.

which are you finding errors in? we keep a pretty vigilant watch on broken exercises (there's a dashboard in our office and we respond to bug reports as well) -- would love to fix these ASAP. thanks!

I just tried the CSS Buttons course on a lark, because I felt I'd be able to breeze through it. I may have hit "Reset Code" at some point, because around checkpoint 4 or 5, the CSS was wiped out and the HTML was back to square one.

I quickly retyped everything, but... only the HTML changes seemed to take effect. I tried targeting the CSS to a class I put on the HTML, then to an id, then to the div itself, and a bunch of different simple litmus tests for whether or not it was working like just applying a color, but nothing worked.

After each change, the preview pane would re-render, so it was picking up the changes. I tried viewing the preview in full screen and refreshing, but nothing got the CSS to apply again.

Anyway, the site looks great. Congratulations on the revamp regardless of nitpicky bugs.

I did the CSS Buttons project earlier this week and had the same issue you described. After checking the Q&A Forum, I realized I needed to include the stylesheet. That fixed the issue. I don't think this is a bug with that project.

Apigee API (2/21) and WebShell API (5/7) are throwing random errors. By the way, I have reported these 2 times before and no one had replied or even acknowledged my reports.

apigee and webshell courses are created and maintained by those companies (our platform lets anyone create courses), so it's unfortunately up to them to edit -- we'll ping them regardless.

Maybe adding a disclaimer to the API section would help then. those were fairly prominently displayed when I first started them and I couldn't finish either of them.

I've been using Codecademy and Dash from the General assembly over this year. I feel like they've equipped me with the foundations to start making and doing things around the web. I've now also started contributing on Mozilla Webmaker which is super exciting. Are there any more learning environments like these or any projects that a newbie like me can contribute to?

Here's the HUGE list of websites teaching all types of code:http://habrahabr.ru/company/mailru/blog/215487/ I'm sure you can find something interesting there. Use translate.google.com if you don't understand Russian, but all links are in English.

This is incredible thank you very much.

I'm interested to learn about their sandboxing. They allow a lot of user-submitted code to run server side. How do they sandbox this? What level of isolation do they use?

    - If language-runtime patches, then there are escapes likely.
    - If chroot, then there are escapes.
    - If linux namespaces, then there are escapes.
    - If ...

Which level did they go for?

I used to work there, not sure if things changed (we've given talks and written about it in the past): Language-runtime patches + user permissions (setuid) + rlimit + Linux containers + runner boxes have no access to web server , db server etc, so even if you root, nothing much to do.

They still return code that runs javascript in the main codecademy domain, so you could potentially modify the servers to return tainted data to steal cookies and whatnot.

They don't return code that run JavaScript. All code is executed on the server and only a string of the result is returned. For web courses, evaluation is done client-side and is properly sandbox. See [1] to learn more about the client-side sandboxing.

[1] https://github.com/Codecademy/stuff.js

Knowing you, you already know :D

This is definitely a step in the right direction. For the past year, students have come to Odin after completing Codecademy and asking "okay, I know some syntax, now how do I actually build something?". I'm glad you've got your sights set on getting them out of the sandbox and toward the real world. The empowerment of knowing they can actually build something on their own is totally addictive and you've until now left students still hungry for it. I hope your new offering really helps them take that first concrete step into real-world development and I'm excited to see what it can do.

Plus then I get to focus more on the other major issues with online education like helping students work together :)

[1] http://theodinproject.com

Cool beans! Will defly sign up for it. ;)

I think Code Academy's front page is too much like baby-talking to an adult. It starts "People write programs to make computers do things." then they tell you to try using your computer to add numbers as if that's impressive. Is the layperson supposed to be surprised that his computer can work as a calculator? The entire front page is extremely condescending.

Obviously it's worked for them this far, so it must be somewhat enticing to a certain demographic, but I think there's room for less condescension.

I've been training some of my non-technical staff to support some of our lower-level tickets, requiring them to read and modify some HTML files.

At the beginning for most of them, we open a simple nearly empty page with a few tags and their eyes gloss over.

"Coding" is an incredibly opaque wall to the non-initiated, and, while using a simulated command line to do math won't be surprising, if someone is going to go from 0 to initiated, do not underestimate the size of the baby steps needed.

This appears to be a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't seem to bridge the gap between "this is syntax" and "here's how to set up your IDE, Apache server, development environment, production environment, ect".

Codeacademy helped me learn syntax, but that's about it. After the first few lessons, I had learned all I needed to. What kept me from building the product was all the other stuff (production environment, IDE, ect).

Great! IMHO the main problem with CodeAcademy was not teaching how to build things. I have several non-tech friends who have done 30 exercises about loops but have no idea when to use a loop.

I think this is the right direction. Give a more complete view and do it step by step so the person learning can be rewarded and keep the motivation.

Hi Codecademy: I'm on Chrome on my Android and it's telling me to download a modern browser (such as Chrome)... you may want to update your 'browser detection' or at least design with mobile in mind (especially just blog posts).

This is really great but I think a cross between this and Treehouse would be best. It's close. But if there was some way Codecademy could have a plugin for Sublime Text and have it be connected to the courses it would be pretty amazing.

Viewing the homepage (http://www.codecademy.com/) from within Germany, the translation is all over the place. Paragraphs, buttons, titles are randomly English or German.

can you shoot us a bug report so we can look into this?

Link: http://help.codecademy.com/customer/portal/emails/new?custom...

Really like the redesign, but where can I actually start the Airbnb website project?

it's going live on monday

It would be helpful if the blog post would say that explicitly. Or maybe I just missed it? I spent a while on the website trying to figure out how to access the new content because I felt the blog post implied the content was up already.

Something that really surprises me, as a new researcher in CS Education, is that people aren't doing much research on CodeAcademy. I hope that people within CodeAcademy start publishing any findings that they get.

A small frustration, but browsing from within a HN reader I got put behind a browser detection wall. I can perhaps understand this for some of the courses, but it seems unnecessary to read a blog entry.

I don't really get how it's different. It probably would be more effective to make a video or at least some more screenshots to show how it's different.

I was so pumped to be a part of this, and the new interface they're launching soon is really a step forward in terms of real, implementable skills. Love these guys!

Congratulations on the redesign, and thank god you're finally getting rid of Lobster!

Hoping they add Objective-C to the list soon! I'd really like to learn that next.

I like codecademy, but it sometimes not good enough in detecting mistakes.

Just out of curiousity, what does codeacademy get out of this? How do they make money?

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