via cards.codecademy.com

Codecademy managed to win the holiday news cycle last year with its Code Year pledge that even got Mayor Bloomberg to learn to code in 2012--or at least tweet his New Year's resolution. It was hard to miss the headlines crowing about coding as the lingua franca of the 21st century. But despite the best intentions, some of us fell off the wagon, hard.

However, the well-funded New York City startup just launched a more lightweight plan to make learning to code seasonal: a Code Cards site that lets anyone build holiday cards with HTML/CSS or through a drag-and-drop interface. Cards can be remixed and shared with friends, cofounder Zach Sims told Betabeat, calling it "a continuation of our philosophy that people learn best by doing and creating."

Building the cards gives users "the opportunity to make something, see the code change in real time, and understand what drives websites," he added.

As for last winter's ambitious Code Year pledge, Mr. Sims declined to disclose numbers, "beyond the fact that we have millions of users." But he did point us to a collection of stories from "people who have made it through Code Year and done really awesome things."

The "vast majority" of Codecademy's users are not from Code Year, he noted, "and are definitely from outside the tech scene." For instance, more than 50 percent of its user base is outside the United States and includes both school systems , like the after-school programs listed here, and governments.

Retention and growth are always top of mind, said Mr. Sims. To boost the former, Codecademy has been focused on quality. "Beta testers help to edit courses, and we've monitored courses with bad quality to get them fixed," he said. "Beyond that, we've launched courses in new languages and added other features to help people stick with it (including better email reminders)."

Now it's just up to users to resolve not to ignore them.

UPDATE: Union Squares Ventures' Andy Weissman shows you how Code Cards are done--with a little help from Abbie Hoffman, of course.

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn (Photo: About.Me)

The Principal of New York

Before Mayor Bloomberg signed up for Codecademy, before General Assembly signed its first lease in the Flatiron—even before Peter Thiel started paying kids to skip school—Skillshare founder and CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn was trying convince New York investors to finance his peer-to-peer learning startup. He billed the company as the Etsy of education, since it set up a market for anyone to teach—and learn—practical skills through an affordable hands-on class, starting at $25 a night. (The hybrid online classes that Skillshare launched this August, with Livestream office hours, start at just $20 a night.)

But in 2010, two years before The New York Times dubbed 2012, “The Year of the MOOC” (massive open online course), venture capitalists weren’t biting. As with hardware and clean tech, investors begged off education—burned by one too many startups shut out by the gatekeepers of traditional K through 12 and higher ed. “Some of my favorite notes that we got from investors were, ‘We don’t think education is a big market,’ ‘We think education is a shrinking market’ and ‘We don’t think people enjoy learning at all after they graduate,’” he said. “‘You have to get a master’s in education before you can teach,’ was another.”

Economic realities like persistent unemployment, mounting student debt and an army of jobless graduates without the skills to fill open positions quickly proved otherwise. The time was right for Skillshare’s modernized approach. Through its online platform, the company promotes the classes, procures students, processes credit cards and books rooms for in-person offerings—often in a tech company’s lounge or lecture hall—all in exchange for a percentage of the sales.

In the early days, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn, whose previous employer Hot Potato was acquired by Facebook, and his co-founder Malcolm Ong, a product manager at game-maker OMGPOP, gravitated toward the kind of programming and entrepreneurship classes they wanted to take, like Mr. Karnjanaprakorn’s popular course, “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less Than $1,000.” As the Silicon Alley refrain goes, meeting tech people is easy: just take a Skillshare class and drop by General Assembly.

Skillshare’s emphasis on nonacademic classes with real-world application paved the way for other local players like CourseHorse, Lore and Codecademy. Signing up felt less like an indulgence than a practical necessity. “There’s a real-world application” to Skillshare classes, he said, “something that you could use immediately.” Headlines about an instructor quitting his day job with the $100,000 a year he made teaching Ruby on Rails to aspiring programmers helped attract instructors as well.

In 2012, the company expanded to other U.S. cities like San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, and kicked off its large-scale online-only classes with an offering from Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson—a Skillshare investor—that reached 2,500 students all over the world. Mr. Karnjanaprakorn said that it would take him two years to teach that many students if he taught every week here in New York City.

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn compared making a case for accessible education outside of a university to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “If the first phase is awareness and huge institutional change,” he told The Observer, “The second step is making something that will fix it or being a company that tries to solve it. I can feel that happening. It’s less about why should people learn. Nobody asks that question now anymore.”

Next: Rick Webb, Tumblr: The Undercover Ad Man

Back to the beginning

"More and more companies are using SecondMarket as an incentive tool," Aishwarya Iyer, public affairs manager for SecondMarket, told Betabeat. "We have CEOs who are telling their employees, 'We're doing this for you.'"

Seventy-six percent of the sellers in the private stock market were current employees, up from 60 percent in the second quarter, SecondMarket said in a release, and a dramatic reversal from previous years: former employees made up 90 percent of sellers in 2010 and 2011.

The continuing shift in the supply of shares wasn't the only change evident in SecondMarket's third quarter report: for the first time, the consumer web and social media category didn't rank first or second in total dollar volume, accounting for a scant 1.2 percent of transactions. In part, that may be a residual effect of Facebook departure initial public offering in the middle of the second quarter, but Ms. Iyer said the shift was also due to a more diverse mix of companies using SecondMarket to provide private liquidity.

What categories gained share? Consumer electronics dominated third-quarter trading, accounting for more than 75 percent dollar volume, with eCommerce responsible for another 19 percent.

Biotech and pharmaceutical companies may drive future sales. SecondMarket collects data on companies whose shares aren't available on the platform to gauge interest—there was $77 million in demand for the biotech and pharma category last quarter, with consumer web second at $45 million and software third at $43 million.

Meanwhile, SecondMarket highlighted companies that are attracting increased interest: potential buyers "watching" Meraki, the cloud-based network infrastructure firm, quadrupled in the third quarter, and interest in Codecademy more than tripled.

Zach Sims (Photo: Twitter.com)

With UPenn making moves on the title of "Stanford of the East" and Eric Schmidt advising Cornell on the evolution of its new tech campus, NYU doesn't want its students left behind in the college tech revolution. Hence the school's new partnership with Codeacademy. Students in the Steinhardt School’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) can now opt in to a ten-week course where NYU professors and Codecademy instructors will teach them how to code.

This reporter can attest that on NYU's campus, there's a definite attitude that startups are where the jobs are. Students and recent grads are flocking to community manager and marketing positions at startups. Two of our sophomore year roommates made the switch to computer science and both said, "If I know how to code, I'll be fine when I graduate." Tech@NYU, one of the school's fastest growing clubs, now hosts weekly HackDays and DesignDays where members can collaborate on their own products.

The program will cover HTML, Javascript and Python, and students will also be able to attend monthly talks with leading industry insiders. Sessions start next week and run until the end of the semester. Visiting assistant professor Liel Leibovitz will teach the classes with coding instructor David Hu.

“We’re very excited to help NYU teach scores of students to learn to program--it's great to work with a world class institution like NYU that thinks on the cutting edge and wants to teach its students the skills and creativity that the labor market require,” said Zach Sims, CEO and cofounder of Codecademy, in a press release sent to Betabeat.

"It's cool that things like this are around more," said Cody Brown, NYU graduate and founder of Scrollkit. "I imagine it will be as much a learning experience for Codecademy as it will be for the students." He further explained that this would be new for them, because "they are going irl."

In 2011, NYU's journalism department announced a digital journalism concentration designed by Jay Rosen. But the program hasn't really taken off yet, perhaps because it requires journalism students--who already have to have a double major--to take several additional credits.

Besides the Code Academy initiative, the plans for NYU's Applied Sciences Center in downtown Brooklyn are still in motion--which is a good sign for the university. Wouldn't want to get stuck as the plain old "Berkeley of the East," now would we?

(Photo: Opening Ceremony)

Opening Ceremony There hasn't been much fashion fun in tech since last year's Raise Cache fashion show, but now Opening Ceremony has partnered with Gin Lane Media to create an interactive iPad application as a companion piece to Opening Ceremony's new annual print magazine. Here's a video of what this thing looks like (très chic!) and if you're iPad-less, then you're free to try it out in all of Opening Ceremony's stores. Note: Chloë Sevigny still not available for download.

Back to School It's September, which means the kids all over the country are hitting the books once more. Despite the gnashing of teeth over the importance of STEM education, however, many students are returning to schools with shaky or nonexistent computer science programs. That's where Codecademy comes in. The company recently debuted After School Programming, a package allowing schools to, at the very least, get an extracurricular club up and running.

Blammo Scrollkit, the service designed to make website creation easier for those without years of web design experience, has just added new effects for CSS3 and HTML5. Now on the table: blur, grayscale, warp, bomb, fade-in, rotate, and flip. But don't take our word for it. Watch this video featuring a fire-breathing panda with rainbow lasers shooting out of his eyes.

Do Something Nice Charity: Water, a favorite non-profit of Anil Dash, Michael Kors, Sarah Lacy and Pete Cashmore, just turned six-years-old this week. They're celebrating by launching a $1.7 million dollar fundraising campaign to help give 26,000 people in Rwanda safe drinking water. They've produced a video that makes us feel way more charitable than Kony 2012 ever did:

DIY Mobile Brit + Co, the creators of recyclable wonders like the Hitch Clock (made from a repurposed DVD of the Will Smith movie), have now turned their DIY. blog--headed by creator Brit Morin--into an app. It's only available on iOS for now, but not to fear Android users! The site's mobile version was given a facelift as well, so you can still learn how to "make your cooler the coolest" while you're on the go.

No More Stealing Getty Images has partnered with SparkRebel, Pinterest's fashionable and celebrity-obsessed cousin, to create the terribly-titled PicScout ImageIRC. The two companies describe the new platform as "the world’s largest index of image fingerprints and metadata that assures every image gets its credit." In short, it's a legal way for SparkRebel to use Getty's images, while Getty's photographers get their much deserved credit and compensation. Win-win.

Bono Swag Knewton, the digital learning startup that just last year raised a $33 million Series D, is now one degree of separation closer to Bono and Bill Clinton, via their favorite policy stomping ground: The World Economic Forum. Perhaps you've heard of a small annual gathering they host called Davos? Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira is featured in a video posted this morning on the Forum's site discussing key educational challenges.

Who Gon Stop Me, Huh? HopStop recently passed two million total app downloads, only eight months after announcing one million total apps back in January of this year. The company also recently discontinued their Blackberry app, they say, "due to the complexity of maintaining native apps across several different mobile platforms (as well as due to the lack of advertiser demand for this particular platform)." The remaining Blackberry users left in New York can use HopStop via the mobile site of course.

A Nice Experience for U Usablenet, the creator of mobile and multi-channel experiences for brands, have built a new platform for for their services called U-Experience. If you take a look at UatFashionWeek.com from your mobile browser, you can see what the U-Experience is capable of--a seamless exposure to all of a brand's social media platforms at once in a tight-looking interface.

Ads Mean Money Republic Project, a service that lets anyone create mobile and web ad campaigns in about 45 minutes, has announced $1 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures. 500 Startups, Venture51, Ludlow Ventures, Maneesh Arora and Andrew Reis also participated in the round. Their first big client is Capital One and they have established partnerships with Buzzfeed and Pandora.

(Photo: Hackertour2012.com)

Talk to a startup recruiter about hiring young developers, and he'll eventually admit it's hard to compete in the campus cattle call, with Goldman and Google sucking up all the air.

But rather than rely on incendiary exit letters or Aaron Sorkin scripts to convince engineering talent to come over to to the startup side, a number of smaller companies are banding together to flex their collective recruiting power.

This fall, startups like Square, Box, 10Gen and Codecademy are sponsoring a nationwide effort called Hacker Tour 2012 that kicks off September 12th. The tour targets computer science and engineering students at 25 top campuses, including Cornell, Princeton, Penn State, MIT and Harvard on the East Coast—which they claim will reach 20,000 students. The bulk of the positions the tour hopes to fill are in software engineering, with user-experience designers coming in second.

The tour is being organized by Readyforce, a San Francisco job search company that matches college students with the right employers. (Sponsorship for the tour costs $5,000, and Readyforce gets no commission for job placement.) Hacker Tour will be using customized tech talks, career fairs and yes, an Airstream bus. The company was lucky to score mobile payment company Square, founded by Twitter luminary Jack Dorsey, as its first sponsor.

"Square got it immediately," Anna Binder, Readyforce's VP of client relations, told Betabeat by phone. "The demand for engineering talent is by far the biggest story in Silicon Valley right now. Many people say the challenge you face is not raising money, it's finding engineers to hop on the bandwagon with you to help realize your dream."

One of the goals of the tour, said Ms. Binder, is to "tell the students the story about their options outside of Goldman and McKinsey and the Ford Motor Company. Just because those companies are the ones that are prevalent and super-organized on campus doesn't mean," that they're the only choice.

The time seems right to test out the world-changing waters. Last winter, Occupy Wall Street turned investment bank recruiting events at schools like Yale into a "crucible of controversy." Meanwhile, student newspapers at Harvard, Cornell and Dartmouth urged students to consider a career outside finance. And that was before the "Why I Left," Goldman Sachs resignation bomb exploded across the New York Times op-ed section.

Working at a startup gives students a chance to work in an environment, Ms. Binder said, where you can have access to the CEO and, "Raise your hand and say, 'You know what? I don't think that's a good idea.'"

Partly to reflect the startup work experience, and partly, we imagine, because it's cheaper, Ms. Binder said, "I want to take an approach that's a little bit different than Goldman Sachs's wine-and-dine."

But how does that pitch play amid rising unemployment rates to an audience that will soon have to start paying off their student loans? "Part of the startup dream is this opportunity to really make it big," Ms. Binder acknowledged. "This is your opportunity—if you choose well and you focus and commit yourself, you do have the opportunity to build a billion dollar business. It's more about free time and dogs and beer and Ping-Pong and, you know, collaboration, versus suits and wine."

Maybe leave out the part about what happens to that billion dollar valuation when the public markets get their hands on your stock.

(Photo: www.successstories.co.in/)

Some may tsk-tsk the "learn to code" meme, but that hasn't deterred New York-based Codecademy from sticking to its vision of teaching all of us to code. Today, cofounder Zach Sims announced on the company blog that the startup has raised $10M in series B funding from VC firms Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as angel investors Yuri Milner and Richard Branson.

Folding London-based Index Ventures into its investor portfolio has a lot to do with Codecademy's future plans. Mr. Sims said that Codecademy is a "global movement," and that the company is looking towards international expansion, having already hired people from countries like Jordan and Finland. "We want anyone, anywhere to have access to an education that can change their lives," wrote Mr. Sims.

Mr. McGuigan (left) and Mr. Frazier from Bitbanger Labs

There are only two rules for the “idea dinners” held by New York early-stage investment firm ff Venture Capital. No side conversations and a strict 8 p.m. end time. Every month, the company invites financiers, founders and other “influencers” to its Midtown headquarters for a catered get-together. The meal is served in a glass-walled conference room, situated just past the rows of adjustable standing desks, where it’s not unusual to see startup employees cranking out code well past dessert.

The conversation often focuses on tech-oriented subjects, but this February, as the group fired questions at veteran investor Esther Dyson, the discussion turned to the subconscious.

Josh Weinstein, the 25-year-old founder of YouAre.TV, brought up his experience using lucid dreaming to get over his fear of heights, noting that he first toyed with the idea while trying to memorize Chinese characters during an immersion program in Beijing—using his nonwaking hours to cram for tests. Later, when he found himself flying above the jogging path along the FDR in a dream, “I just let myself drop onto the concrete,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I would hit the ground, but I wouldn’t feel impact. I kept experiencing that sense of falling without actually feeling the pain of impact.” Above him, the sky morphed into psychedelic swirls. “I don’t do any drugs or drink, so when people talk about their experience being high, this is analogous.”

Lucid dreaming refers to the act of being conscious while in a dream state—you’re in the dream, but you know it. With practice, proponents say, you can harness that awareness to manipulate your surroundings. Think Inception without the corporate espionage, or Neo’s trips to the Matrix after he downed the blue pill. (Tom Cruise’s cryogenically induced affair with Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky doesn’t quite fit because, for a good two hours, the poor sap thought it was the real deal.)

A century after the term “lucid dreaming” was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913, the practice is experiencing a major resurgence. For New York techies, already dutifully maximizing their waking hours, it seems sleep has become the last efficiency frontier. “We need to maximize the output that we get from our time, so if I’m not sitting in front of Codecademy or eating, I should be doing something cool, learning something, analyzing things, having cool experiences,” Mr. Weinstein said later.

After two hours that included watching investors whip out their calorie-tracking FitBits (Ms. Dyson’s was affixed to her bra strap) and blood-pressure monitoring iPhone apps, the takeaway from dinner seemed to be that truly self-optimized life-hackers should be quantifying their bodies’ every input and output, standing while they work, learning to code or speak Mandarin in their free time and using their dreams to overcome personal weaknesses or conjure up the next billion-dollar app. Or at least indulge in some mind-blowing virtual sex—often the first stop on a Lucid Dreaming Experience Tour. “It’s rewarding,” suggested psychologist Stephen LaBerge, who spent decades researching the science of dreams at Stanford and then at the Lucidity Institute and has been credited with proving the existence of lucid dreaming, “and people who don’t have the opportunities for getting sex elsewhere in their lives, then why not?!”

Then again, who wants to be conscious all the time? Weren’t bars invented expressly to avoid the burden of 24-hour lucidity?

At the dinner, Rob Cromer, the 26-year-old founder of a stealth startup called Adcade, chimed in with advice about “reality checks” that he picked up from a lucid dreaming coach at a cocktail party. One of the trickiest parts of lucid dreaming is recognizing that you’re in a dream. Thus practitioners train themselves during their waking hours by, say, drawing a dot on their hand as a signal to look at a clock.

New apps are coming on the market to solve the same problem. In less than a month, the Brooklyn-based duo behind Bitbanger Labs has managed to raise more than $330,000 from more than 3,800 backers on Kickstarter, including Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Cromer, to build a sleep mask called Remee that uses flashing LED lights as a “reality check.” Their initial goal was just $35,000. Kickstarter also hosted campaigns for the book Oneironautics: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, funded three times over; and The Lucid Dream Tour, a “multimedia, multidimensional road trip event” that promises to showcase the “entrepreneurial possibilities of today’s consciousness movement.” Soon that will include a video game designed to elicit lucid dreams currently being developed by a grad student in Copenhagen.

Since Remee first appeared on Kickstarter on April 3, the number of people who subscribe to the lucid dreaming forum on Reddit has grown more than 30 percent, up to 33,300 “oneironauts,” as practitioners like to call themselves. The influx of new users got be such an issue that the moderator was moved to create a separate forum for lucid dreaming memes so as not to interrupt discussion topics like “I can’t feel emotions in my dreams” or “Loosing [sic] track of reality quickly, help!”

The fantasy of controlling one’s dreams goes way back—Aristotle and Tibetan Buddhists were proponents—but for the new wave of technologically-savvy acolytes, dreams are seen more as a form of virtual reality. “The brain works so well it’s like the operating system on a Mac,” said Dr. LaBerge. By exploring your subconscious, “You find out how the system works.”

The last lucid dreaming boom had a more spiritual cast. “I think that was the ’80s,” noted Bitbanger Labs cofounder Duncan Frazier. “It kind of got new-aged a little bit. It went away and now it’s coming back and people are trying to make sure it doesn’t go down that weird road of pseudo-science.”

According to psychologist and dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach, hard-core gamers are more likely to both have lucid dreams and be able to control them. She's releasing three books on the subject this year, including a self-published e-book called “Play Reality” told from the perspective of her 27-year-old son, a harcore gamer.

Still, both Dr. Gackenbach and Dr. LaBerge cautioned against getting too goal-oriented with one’s REM cycle. “Dreaming is specifically designed for information processing,” Dr. Gackenbach explained. “It’s when we store new emotions and process negative emotions and try to make sense of them. If you’re trying to optimize it, what does that mean? Do you want to get rid of your negative emotions in an efficient way? It’s a system that’s doing pretty well on its own.” She expressed some skepticism about the idea of maximizing the use of this supposed downtime. “If it’s just about being able to control this alternative reality and go to a Rolling Stones concert,” she noted, referring to a goal articulated by one of her students, “then I have some concerns.”

Mr. Frazier and Steve McGuigan, the 30-year-olds behind Bitbanger Labs, makers of the Remee sleep mask, don’t seem too worried about it. During a late-night visit to Mr. Frazier’s apartment in Windsor Terrace, he talked about flying over the Grand Canyon and being able to push and pull the mountains below him at will, like he was “conducting music.” On the desk next to his left, a handful of Remee prototypes with their circuitry exposed lay in front of a 3D printer Mr. Frazier built from scratch.

Mr. McGuigan plays around with dimension. “I’ve always been into increasing or decreasing my size,” he said. “Shrink down to the size of an atom. Get microscopic and go hang out with subatomic particles.”

Teaching oneself to fly is another favorite pastime of lucid dreamers. “People on Reddit like to ride dragons,” added Mr. Frazier. At the dinner, Ms. Dyson, a trained cosmonaut, said she dreams of weightlessness.

In the late ’80s, Dr. LaBerge actually put out two versions of a mask similar to the Remee, among other “lucid dreaming induction devices,” called the DreamLight and NovaDreamer. But at around $1,000 a pop, he sold only 10,000 or 20,000 in the five or six years they were on the market, though he noted that they “had a disproportionate influence on technical types.”

A standard-issue Remee will retail for $80. The device is simple, using flashing LED lights on a timer—“like the front of Knight Rider,” as Mr. Frazier put it—to prod the dreamer into lucidity without waking him up.

“We’ve had to explain it to most of our friends, and it takes awhile,” Mr. Frazier admitted. “Over beers.”

-ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the May 2, 2012 issue of the New York Observer.

Path? That's hot. (flickr.com/pimkie_fotos)

The climate for Internet startups is heating up. Startups are closing rounds faster, getting popular more quickly, scoring higher valuations and getting acquired with increasing greediness. As local luminary and angel investor Chris Dixon notes, the preponderance of hockey stick growth among the top tier of startups is creating a heavy set of expectations that weighs upon the littler startups. These A-list startups are like the impossibly pretty cheerleaders or the improbably studly jocks who discourage the rest of the high school with their sheer existence. They're the "it" startups, and they can do no wrong. In other words: they're hot. 

10. Foursquare—hot like a new club in the Meatpacking District.

9. Facebook—like global warming, hot and inevitable.

8. Path—hot as ice.

7. Branch—hot like a hot-button issue.

6. Tumblr—hot like the tattooed boys and girls on the L train.

5. Dwolla—hot like $5 million burning a hole in your pocket.

4. Codecademy—hot like the fire of your desire to learn code.

3. OMGPOP—hot like the fever of heroin withdrawal.

2. Pinterest—hot like Stacy's mom.

1. Instagram—hot like a steamy black and white shot of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez.

Who'd we miss?

Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski. (www.successstories.co.in/)

Codecademy, the New York-headquartered startup that builds simple online lessons for aspiring programmers, reportedly hit a million users back in January (including Mayor Mike Bloomberg). Although we're skeptical about the retention rate, there is no denying that teaching yourself how to code is zeitgeisting. So it's no surprise to hear that Codecademy, founded by two fresh-faced 21- and 22-year-old wunderkinds, is hiring.

The former Y Combinator startup recently raised $2.5 million from Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner and others, and its hiring engineers and designers to "teach the world to code." It's up to nine employees and has set up shop at 670 Broadway in Greenwich Village.

On its site, Codecademy only lists positions for a senior developer and a product designer. But it's hiring for more positions. "We're looking for senior dev(s) and product designer(s) but we love smart people that know how to code/design so we're happy to talk others as well," Mr. Sims wrote in an email.

"We're working on a lot of cool problems - compiling platform technologies to javascript, building highly scalable and secure virtual environments, applying our unique data set to personalize education, and more," the company posted on Y Combinator's Hacker News forum. "We also place a high priority on design at Codecademy and we're hunting for both senior and junior designers," the post notes.

Come work with me at @Codecademy! We are hiring :) news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3834656

— Sasha Laundy (@SashaLaundy) April 12, 2012

Codecademy did not immediately respond to a request for more information, such as whether Mayor Bloomberg will use his newfound skills to recode the city's million-page website. UPDATE, 4/14: Mr. Sims got back to us with a few more details and we've updated the post.