Still Looking For A New Year’s Resolution? How About Learning To Code …

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Sunday, January 1st, 2012
Screen Shot 2012-01-01 at 2.30.03 PM

After eating something greasy to get rid of last night’s Jello shot-induced hangover, many of you are probably in the middle of writing your New Year’s resolutions. Well, here’s a good one (especially considering that the tech sector seems to be the only bright spot in a sort of lackluster economy) … Learn to code.

The folks at Codecademy  have teamed up with a number of partners like Girl Develop It, Techstars and YCombinator to help make coding skills a reality for those that wish they had them, with Code Year, a program designed specifically for those that want to make 2012 the year they build technical skills.

Signing up for the free service will hook you up with a new programming course each week. Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims tells me that the courses will be a mix of everything so people have “well-rounded basics,” beginning with Javascript and then continuing to server-side languages like Ruby and Python. He hopes that the curriculum will turn people into competent developers by the end of the year.

“People should make their New Year’s resolution something that can improve their quality of life,” says Sims, “We’re giving them new skills and actually helping them keep their resolutions. This is just the beginning of our big effort to get lots of people to recognize the importance of learning to code.  I think 2012 can be the year we finally get programming to start entering the mainstream.”

*Signs up for Code Year*


Company: Codecademy
Website: codecademy.com
Launch Date: 2011
Funding: $12.5M

Codecademy is a web-based programming tutorial designed to teach HTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, Python, Ruby, PHP, and APIs.

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