One of your New Year’s resolutions should be to learn how to program—new start-up company Codeacademy certainly wants you to. In what could be one of the most simple yet clever marketing campaigns in regards to computer programming to date, Codeacademy recently launched a website called Code Year. The motivation behind Code Year is to get as many people as possible to sign up for a set of free email-based programming lessons provided by Codeacademy. So far, over 250,000 people have signed up to learn how to code, but why should you? Not only is programming a useful skill in our growing digital world, but it also can pay pretty well too.
There’s no denying that our economy is becoming more technologically oriented, and because of this, talented programmers are in high demand. Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a technical person, websites like Codeacademy exist to turn the process of programming into an easy to understand set of instructions. Being only seven months old, Codeacademy offers three exceptional courses on a popular coding language called JavaScript. The great thing about JavaScript is that it is used on almost every modern website to date, and it is really easy to learn the basics of the language.
Besides just learning JavaScript, Codeacademy promises its users that they’ll be able to program entire websites, games and applications from scratch. These types of skills are highly sought after in the current job market. After making a quick scan over job sites like Monster.com, it is pretty clear that technical jobs like programming aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, growing tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are constantly looking for new capable and technically savvy people to hire. The idea of coding may be surrounded by a web of geeky stereotypes, but it’s worth noting that said geeks aren’t running out of jobs anytime soon. Codeacademy couldn’t have appeared at a better time.
In all my searching for coding tips and tricks over the years, I have never come across such an impressive site built specifically to teach people how to program. Further investigation into Codeacademy yields a list of optimistic investors. With some luck, this new coding site may not only help people code, but turn a decent profit too. Here’s to hoping that Codeacademy continues to grow its list of users and available lessons. I know I certainly appreciate the simplistic approach the site provides. In the near future, Codeacademy lessons for popular coding languages like Ruby and Python will be available, but for now users can test and share programs in any of the three languages mentioned on their site.
