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This article was taken from the September 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Zach Sims, 22, wanted to learn how to code, he was disheartened by the material on offer. "I'd come out of working for two startups," he says -- drop.io, which was bought by Facebook in 2010, and GroupMe, which Skype acquired last year -- "and I wanted to sharpen my coding skills."
He teamed up with fellow Columbia alumnus Ryan Bubinski, 23, who was teaching coding to students in his spare time, but the books and videos available were disappointing. "They were frustrating for me" he says, "and bad materials for him to teach from. Really, the whole process sucked."
The pair set up Codecademy in January to find a better way. The site, currently free to use, gives beginner-to-expert lessons in JavaScript, CSS and HTML, motivating students through badges and awards they can share with friends.
Every lesson is interactive - you type code into an editor and see what happens when it runs. And, even for a non-coder, it's surprisingly easy to begin to grasp the basics of programming. "When something is a game you are more likely to continue," says Sims. "We get people building things early on, seeing how well their friends are doing and competing with them." The site has more than a million registered users, but Sims won't be drawn on how many stay the course. ("Lots" is all he will offer.) But he and Bubinski are convinced they have a business. The pair are working on the startup full-time, with a team of nine. And although there is no advertising, the site, says Sims, will attract "highly skilled people who we could help
to connect with each other. We feel there could be an <span class="s2">opportunity in that."
JavaScript: a simple tutorial (by Codecademy)
//Declare your name in JavaScript var nameMagazine = "Wired";
//Find out how many characters is Wired
"Wired".length
5
//Do some maths
3*9
27
//Run a function to print out the name of the magazine 3 times
var printName = function() {console.log("The magazine is called" + nameMagazine);};
printName();
"The magazine is called Wired"
"The magazine is called Wired"
"The magazine is called Wired"
//Fill in an array
var magazineStaff = ["David Rowan", "João Medeiros", "Wired Reader"];
//Print out the third element in the array
console.log(magazineStaff[2]);
"Wired Reader"
Other places to learn code
Code Club The UK initiative aims to bring coding into the classroom through after-school coding clubs for ten- and 11-year-olds.
A Florida startup offering a gamified platform teaching iOS app building, HTML5, JavaScript and web design.
This UK-based company aims to teach 100,000 secondary-school students to code from scratch.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
