

Codecademy Surges To 200,000 Users, 2.1 Million Lessons Completed In 72 Hours - zds
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/codecademy-surges-to-200000-users-2-1-million-lessons-completed-in-72-hours/

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hebejebelus
I pointed my younger sister at this the other night. She's 17, and I'd tried
to interest her in programming before with no avail. She seems to have caught
on to this, though, and it's something I'm extremely happy about. It's not
that I think that she'll ever become a hardcode graphics programmer, but I
think it's fantastic that she even has a basic understanding now.

The only criticism I've had from her is that she doesn't know what to do with
what she's learned. Maybe some suggestions on some basic examples might be
good? (say, "Try writing a loop that averages these numbers," or a grade
calculator).

Thanks so much for this - I believe that everyone should know how to program
in the same way that I believe everyone should know how to read or do
arithmetic. It's another form of literacy, and codecademy is definitely a big
step towards much better understanding of programming (edit: that is, for the
general public), and hopefully less social stigma and the like as a result of
that.

~~~
very-pleased
Beautiful. There's a bit of poetic justice in this.

Programmers have been callously obsoleting various careers (and thus people)
for decades now. In fact, it's likely that programmers are _currently hard at
work_ trying to obsolete careers that your little sister may already be
considering!

It's wonderful that the programming field is about to get disrupted.
__Wonderful! __Programmers about to see their skills become as common as basic
reading or writing.

Programmers, fear Codecademy. You're about to taste your own medicine. Expect
your irrationally high salaries to drop — that's justice.

Love the site, guys. Keep it up. :)

~~~
richardw
Hah. I won't downvote you...but you're wrong. I remember when people were
telling me that web designers wouldn't have a job because everyone could just
use Microsoft Frontpage.

Coding takes effort. Really good coding takes smarts + effort. An awesome
application takes effort, smarts, a great idea, luck, good design, lots of
time, etc. Codecademy should be encouraged because it gets people an entry
point to developing, but I suspect you're underestimating the effort required
to produce Call of Duty or Google Docs.

~~~
nhangen
Ain't that the truth.

As I've learned to program, I found that the language was the easy part. The
hard part was learning to think like a programmer, which requires a complete
mental shift, for most of us anyway. That's the hard part.

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citricsquid
> Sims also says that the company is actually a part of the latest Y
> Combinator batch (something they hadn’t previously disclosed).

I love them for that. Having their product loved (here and elsewhere) based on
the product _not_ the connections they have. Awesome.

~~~
zds
Thanks! We're glad you think the product spoke for itself ;)

------
zds
Thanks to everyone in the Hacker News community for being so supportive and
providing feedback on our launch. We really appreciate it! As always, if you
have any issues, shoot me an email - contact (at) codecademy (dot) com. -Zach

EDIT: I'll be back on HN in a bit to answer questions but the next few hours
are a little busy. Thanks again.

~~~
turbulence93
There has definitely been requests and offers to create lessons... When are
they coming???

~~~
zds
Soon!

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fabiandesimone
I've been around programming pretty much all of my life as an spectator (my
brother can code and well I'm a product guy so I'm around coders every day). I
never quite got the grasp of it and programming seem like this huge abstract
thing. Never got myself to take action in learning because frankly I just
dismissed it as being to complicated but deep down I always wanted to be able
to code.

I completed code academy in one hour. WOW. Now I'm hooked.

I'm actually so hooked that I looked more resources on learning JavaScript.
I'm reading this: <http://eloquentjavascript.net/index.html> (found it via a
Google Search in StackOverflow)

I can't wait for more lessons. Thanks so much for this!

Note: there were a couple of lessons were I did need to ask my devs for help
because there were some concepts that were missing. Once explained to me, I
was able to complete the lessons.

~~~
zds
Thanks! We're working on more lessons as soon as we can and we're going to
hopefully help devs help you with some new features coming out.

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sek
Not that i don't like this approach, it think it's a good way to give regular
people a impression what programming is.

I did the fist Chapter of programming books in over 10 different languages and
it always felt good. What comes after that is the problem, the ones where you
have to really think and it just doesn't work on the second try.

I know this from college, the first two lessons nobody is complaining and then
it starts to really freak out the people who didn't know before what
programming really is.

When you find a way to let people deal with this phase, than you really did
accomplish something that makes a difference.

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merubin75
As a non-programmer, I absolutely love this. I was able to complete two
courses within 10 minutes.

More than anything, this makes programming seem like FUN.

Well done and kudos to the Codecademy team!

~~~
zds
Thanks! Glad you're on your way to becoming a programmer.

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Alex3917
"it clearly has loads of potential for one key reason: it actually feels fun."

This is an excellent example of Programmed Instruction. Most of us probably
learned typing the same way, and maybe even Logo. The reason this approach is
good is because, in addition to being fun, it's also compatible with the
Keller Plan:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keller_Plan>

Granted you can get only so far with this approach, but it's still terribly
underused in the current scheme of things.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
>Granted you can get only so far with this approach, but it's still terribly
underused in the current scheme of things.

In the teaching of concrete skills, I am not sure what the bounds are -- the
burden on the instructional designer to administer the skill dependency graph
as the skills become more complicated continues to grow, but I don't see that
as a limiting function.

~~~
Alex3917
The problem is that concrete skills are only a small part of learning. This
sort of approach is great for teaching kids to pass math tests, but less great
at turning kids into mathematicians.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Ah, I'm glad you agree. I suppose my reaction is that most people
underestimate just how far you can go with this approach, and I am glad to see
that you are not one of them; we agree that you can train someone to solve
calculus problems, but not the skills of derivation.

Where we seem to disagree is about wether this approach should be used in
isolation. Frankly, I think most people (successfully) trained in theory are
bored by application so there is a use in multiple educational paths.

While application is a small subset of the available learning to someone
interested in a field, it is often a sufficient subset to be a productively
contributing member of society.

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Joakal
I'm interested in Codecademy's marketing; how did they accumulate so many
active users in 72 hours?

~~~
zds
We'll try to do a postmortem on this as soon as traffic dies down a little.
But yes, as a few people have mentioned, it's mostly viral traffic.

~~~
Joakal
I hope you include the subtle parts that help make it viral. For example, a
media button that posts to friends: <Happy Programmer picture> "The Khan
Academy of programming, try it!"

~~~
alain94040
I don't think the shape of the share button matters. What made it viral is
that once you play with it for 10 seconds, you _just want_ to share it with
all your non-geek friends. Because it's fun. Because it finally lets them
understand why _you_ are having fun programming.

Make what you do fun, and it will be viral. Obsess over the language of the
share button with something boring, and pull your hair for eternity.

~~~
Joakal
A startup needs to understand that there's several stages to becoming the next
big thing. The first and most important: Raising awareness. How can some users
tell anyone if they haven't heard about it yet?

How they not only raised awareness but captured the interest of thousands is
important.

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egiva
Great App! I thought the lessons were well commented and laid out. One trick,
instead of bulking up with more features, it to lay out more lessons and
publish a system for letting us know when they're available. For me it would
be more useful if the lessons came in similar large blocks/iterations with a
predefined goal of "by taking these lessons you will learn X". Anyhow, great
work!

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avb_wkyhu
When I saw Codecademy I was quite impressed and I truly enjoyed it, even
though it was extremely basic for me. It was actually really fun, remembering
what it was like when I first started learning I WISH there was a site like
this. I am so happy that this site was released and that I was turned on to
it.

My question is when will we start to see more lessons/courses? Will they stay
at a beginner level or get more advanced? Will there be some sort of
discussion/forum section to the site? And lastly, do you feel there will ever
be an article/paper section to the site (Such as a section where submitted
papers, tutorials, articles, etc are posted when approved by the main staff at
Codecademy)?

All in all, great job guys! Love the site.

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ph0rque
_Sims also says that the company is actually a part of the latest Y Combinator
batch (something they hadn’t previously disclosed)._

I was hoping they would be picked up by YC... looks like it already happened
:~)

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Tichy
Is that web site strictly for absolute beginners? I find it a petty that I
can't skip the beginner lessons to try to learn something more advanced.

~~~
zds
At the moment it is. We'll have content for experts as soon as we can make it.

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pbreit
The "_why" post led me over to TryRuby.org which looks like it may have been
inspiration. The thing I noticed was how much I prferred TryRuby's layout. It
seems like the CodeAcademy instructions are overwhelmed by other screen
elements and awkwardly placed lower left of the console.

I also think you could let people type more a la Learn * The Hard Way.

But really like where you're going.

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bialecki
Alright, loaded question. Can/will this work with other languages? I guess a
related question is, does it have to? The only thing the YC note tells me is
this wants to be a real business, so the big question is, what's the model?

Edit: By the way, love the site. For JavaScript, this is a huge leap forward.
I'd love it to be the same for other languages, I'm just curious if that's
possible.

~~~
patio11
_the big question is, what's the model?_

People are asking this a lot about YC companies within a few weeks of birth.
It's not a silly question, but it is perhaps not the best time to best asking.
Most of them don't know yet. That isn't exactly unprecedented: Google didn't
know it was a contextual advertising company when it launched, etc.

Given the amounts spent on employee training in the US, I think that if you
had a magic box which said "Put non-programmers in the left end, programmers
come out the right end", you would not be in a bad place in life. Heck, people
make millions upon millions doing the same thing just for MS Excel.

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Tycho
I showed this go my colleagues at work yesterday. They want me to teach them
how to program (well, write VBA) but I kind of feared for them since they have
very little free time to devote. And it took me a massive investment of time
upfront to get into programming, although I didn't have access to a resource
like codecademy.

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abiekatz
I wonder if this service will become more of a business or a non-profit. I
feel that this site is providing a great public good, akin to Khan Academy,
and it would be great if donations could cover the costs of further developing
the site. That way, price is not a deterrent to any users getting started with
learning to code.

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mikeleeorg
Non-technical people looking for technical cofounders no longer have an excuse
not to learn how to code ;)

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mathattack
10 minutes in and I can say this is a great website! I hope it has the depth
to match. Great work Zach!

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tomlin
At first I only took it as a "me-too" to Khan Academy, but it really isn't. It
definitely takes away some great features in KA, but it's defined differently
in the sense that the design reflects the web industry rather than how a
typical course would teach.

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danest
What where you guys working on before this and how did this idea start from?

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andrewcross
I actually started working on an idea like this back in January but never went
anywhere with it. These guys have made something very tough look incredibly
easy.

Honestly, very well done!

~~~
paul9290
Yeah I proposed a similar idea at a startup weekend here on the east coast. It
only got five votes, but after seeing this and some other avenues popping up
(good places to market it) we started coding what I proposed at startup
weekend. Hope to have done within the week; excited!

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xiaoma
Weird. Several portions I'd completed before displayed "in progress" today. I
just went back and re-did them to see if they were new. I don't think the
were.

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simonista
I can see this fitting really well with Khan Academy. I wonder if the two have
talked at all.

Congrats on the success guys, the site is awesome.

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alphamale3000
Brilliant but weak. Doesn't belong on Hacker News, should be on n00b news.

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ramkalari
Very nicely done. I enjoyed going through the exercises and it was fun.

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josscrowcroft
Congratulations! It's a great site, you deserve the praise.

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RobertHubert
Seriously, WOW!

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rorrr
Now that's impressive.

