[LINK] Codecademy, learn to program for free

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Codecademy Lands $2.5 Million From Investors

By JENNA WORTHAM  www.nytimes.com  October 27, 2011

http://www.codecademy.com

Codecademy is an online tool designed to give computer science newbies a 
crash course in the basics. 

Codecademy, a Web site that teaches people how to program for free, just 
got a lift for its lesson plan: $2.5 million in venture financing.

On Thursday, the start-up announced that it raised a Series A round of 
cash from a bevy of noted venture capital firms ..

“Our main goal is to hire people to help manage content and add new 
features,” said Zach Sims, who co-founded Codecademy with Ryan Bubinski, 
a developer and former classmate at Columbia University. 

“Right now, there are still only two of us working on the company.”

Codecademy was introduced over the summer and has attracted a flurry of 
interest since then. More than half a million people have used the site 
and close to 1,000 developers submitted sample lessons to help others 
learn how to program. The new venture financing will help the company 
sustain that early traction, Mr. Sims said.
 
“We’re starting to build a community around our lessons,” he said. In 
addition, the company said it would use the money to establish its 
headquarters, which Mr. Sims said wouldl most likely be in New York.

Part of Mr. Sims’s and Mr. Bubinski’s vision for the start-up is to give 
the average person a crash course in computer science — with built-in 
rewards to keep them motivated — either to help jump-start their career 
as an entrepreneur or help them be a more competitive job candidate in 
their field. Currently, the coding exercises on Codecademy are largely 
limited to JavaScript. It would be challenging for anyone to be able to 
build the next Facebook or Foursquare after completing the lessons on the 
site. Mr. Sims says the fresh infusion of cash will help the founders 
flesh out their course offerings, nudging that notion closer to reality.

“We’re pushing out more JavaScript courses and getting close to releasing 
more languages, like Ruby and Python,” Mr. Sims said. 

“As soon as we have more content, this site becomes a very deep 
experience and way to make basic coding knowledge available to people for 
free.”

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Cheers,
Stephen