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A New Codecademy
- joshdance 12y agoSide 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.
- alexkadis 12y agoI seriously thought they just changed their name. Turns out I've been reading it wrong all along.
- ScottWhigham 12y agoWow - me too. If you actually go to http://www.codeacademy.com/ http://www.codeacademy.com/, it forwards you to this URL. I don't know if this is "new" or not.
- zds 12y agothis is not new! our name has always been codecademy.
- ScottWhigham 12y agoThat'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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kapkapkap 12y agoI think that they intentionally changed the logo to emphasize the C since so many people pronounced it incorrectly.
- jebus989 12y agoHa 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-there-confusion-between-depreciated-and-deprecated http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/why-is-ther...
- stronglikedan 12y agoI've never noticed the "a" was missing until now, but I've intuitively always pronounced it as one word, like "coda-cademy"
- ahmadss 12y agoThis 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-starter-league-and-partners-37signals http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/code-academy-evolves-star...
- nealsales 12y agoFounder 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.
- logikblok 12y agoI'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?
- ceasarby 12y agoHere's the HUGE list of websites teaching all types of code:http://habrahabr.ru/company/mailru/blog/215487/ 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.
- logikblok 12y agoThis is incredible thank you very much.
- phorese 12y agoViewing the homepage (http://www.codecademy.com/ http://www.codecademy.com/) from within Germany, the translation is all over the place. Paragraphs, buttons, titles are randomly English or German.
- zds 12y agocan you shoot us a bug report so we can look into this?
- masonhensley 12y agoLink: http://help.codecademy.com/customer/portal/emails/new?custom[labels_new]=contact http://help.codecademy.com/customer/portal/emails/new?custom...
- melkior 12y agoI 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.
- zds 12y agowhich 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!
- melkior 12y agoApigee 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.
- wcarss 12y agoI 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.
- set01 12y agoI 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.
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- austenallred 12y agoDamnit, 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.
- zds 12y agothanks 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!
- dpatrick86 12y agoSince 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?
- ishake 12y agoReally like the redesign, but where can I actually start the Airbnb website project?
- zds 12y agoi'm the cofounder and ceo of codecademy -- would love to hear what everyone thinks!
- joshbert 12y agoIt 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?
- zds 12y agoon 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!
- cozuya 12y agoNot that its your fault but your fonts look terrible on Win 7 on Chrome.
- Silhouette 12y agoThe DIN variant is almost illegible in places using Firefox on Windows 7 as well. :-(
- Serow225 12y agoSeconded! Quite difficult to read...
- logikblok 12y agoHi 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.
- jcenters 12y agoI love Codecademy, and this update sounds fantastic. Are there any plans to add Perl courses?
- mirashii 12y agoA 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.
- sgdesign 12y agoCongratulations on the redesign, and thank god you're finally getting rid of Lobster!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- AdrianRossouw 12y agoI'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-fundamentals/ 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-field-guide-to-microservices-april-2014-edition http://wayfinder.co/pathways/53536427f7040a11002ae407/a-fiel... This is the outline so far : http://i.imgur.com/qsGqFFk.png http://i.imgur.com/qsGqFFk.png
- ceasarby 12y agoThanks 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 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 http://jeffreyatw.com
- AdrianRossouw 12y agothanks man! bookmarked.
- eriktrautman 12y agoThis 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 http://theodinproject.com
- ceasarby 12y agoCool beans! Will defly sign up for it. ;)
- plunchete 12y agoGreat! 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.
- zx2c4 12y agoI'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?
- innonate 12y agoKnowing you, you already know :D
- amasad 12y agoI 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.
- zx2c4 12y agoThey 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.
- amasad 12y agoThey 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 https://github.com/Codecademy/stuff.js
- goeric 12y agoThis 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.
- innonate 12y agoHoping they add Objective-C to the list soon! I'd really like to learn that next.
- tomasien 12y agoI 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!
- davidwparker 12y agoHi 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).
- acbart 12y agoSomething 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.
- it_learnses 12y agoJust out of curiousity, what does codeacademy get out of this? How do they make money?
- rjf1990 12y agoThis 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).
- adamzerner 12y agoI 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.
- WoodenChair 12y agoI 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.
- mattlutze 12y agoI'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.
- cryptex_vinci 12y agoI like codecademy, but it sometimes not good enough in detecting mistakes.
- jumasheff 12y agoIf 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-of-starting 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?