In last months of 2011 one fever started throughout the web, specially in the tech blogs and aggregators, about whether or not people should have some programing skills. It’s true that in the technological society that we live in, the ability to code and automate some tasks is very useful.
So, like in any other time when there was a need, a bunch of startups appeared trying to fill that gap. This time that need is to teach the general public how to code and one of companies in the race is Codecademy, which describe itself like this:
“Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to code.”
I’m writing about this company because they had the great idea (for their business) to declare 2012 as the “Code Year”. So every Monday during this year they will give the participants one interactive lesson, with one simple objective in mind, that until the end of 2012 the people who accepted the challenge will be able to create their own apps and websites.
I already know some programing languages and last year I decided that I would learn the Python‘s web framework “Django”, so I could be able to build my web apps (I have had one workshop about Rails but I sticked with this one for now). The problem is that this framework is mostly for the backend/server-side and now I need some knowledge about one client-side technology, so I can be able make the interaction with the user more pleasant and fluid.
This is where the “Code Year” is being very useful to me. They are teaching JavaScript and that was precisely what I needed. So every week since the beginning of 2012 I’m taking the lessons. Until now it has been like “1+1=2”, because I already knew some of the basic stuff but the difficulty will rise in the next few weeks.
You can follow my progress here and I recommend, if you want to start programing and have no hurries, to try the Code Year lessons.