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.

(Photo: Ben Northrop)

Garry Welding is a programmer with a blog who works as a contractor for an ecommerce company in the U.K. Garry Welding's daughter is an unsuspecting, angelic five year old who would probably like to play legos but is instead being forced to learn how to code by her programmer father because "Hacker News will love it, honey!"

Mr. Welding published a post to his blog about how his daughter had shown a passing interest in his work. He decided to seize on this opportunity and set up a simple program so he could begin to teach her how to code. Before she could touch the computer he filled up her juicy cup with Mountain Dew and told her that if she didn't ship something today she'd have to go back to being a test engineer (not really).

"We wrote a very simple script to make the robot draw a pyramid (apparently the initial script that gets loaded draws a square and that’s just too “boring”), and as expected there were one or two bugs introduced by my daughter miscounting or confusing left and right," Mr. Welding wrote.

For her mistakes, Mr. Welding's daughter must now be the primary on-call engineer for the next seven days, responsible for taking care of any bugs that arise during that time, even if they're during her precious "naptime."

It's a tough life, kid. On the plus side, you're gonna be riiiich!

(h/t Sam Biddle)

Mr. Atwood, probably yelling at you for wanting to learn a new hobby. (flickr.com/pepez)

The "learn to code" meme probably reached its pinnacle around the time Mayor Bloomberg announced his dedication to the initiative, but it has now begun the inevitable slide into backlash territory. Who would have thought that a fluffy gesture of commitment to a burgeoning New York industry would tip over into controversy? This is why we can't have nice things, Internet.

In a post published today on his popular blog Coding Horror, Stack Exchange founder Jeff Atwood publicly decried programming newbies' hilarious attempts to learn the art of code. As if you pathetic wannabes could ever know as much as he does about coding.

According to Mr. Atwood, Keeper of All Code:

Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?

See, there's this thing called hobbies, and sometimes people like to do stuff in their free time because they think it's interesting, not because they want to "learn code just for the sake of learning code," or for the "fat paychecks." We get it: Yours is an elite circle filled with only the most logical, intelligent Python slingers around. But isn't it possible that some people are just interested in the Internet, and learning how to make it work?

Plus, even if it's not intended as a hobby, wanting to learn how to code is still not equivalent to wanting to be a programmer. Considering how prevalent computers have become in our society, acquiring basic programming skills is beneficial for all kinds of professions (including Betabeat writers, though we never went so far as to make a resolution).

Seems like many of the folks on Hacker News also disagreed with Mr. Atwood's controversial blog.

"If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you 'No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead'," wrote one commenter named shin_lao.

"Jeff has interpreted 'learn to code' with 'become a programmer'. They're not the same thing," concurred jkahn.

Look, we agree that the whole 'learn to code' thing probably jumped the shark. But it's kind of hard to see what's really going on from all the way up there on your pedestal.

Mr. Fry (twitter.com)

Remember that whole kerfuffle earlier this week, when the Internet convinced itself that if they could just learn to code that they, too, could quickly become millionaires? Yeah, we penned a screed condemning that theory, but it appears it was not enough to stem the exodus of business dudes to coding professions. Our apologies.

Spencer Fry, cofounder of online portfolio site Carbonmade, wrote a blog post today explaining why he's taking time off from being a "business guy" to learn to code. Mr. Fry put his computer science degree on hold in order to run TypeFrag, and ended up graduating with a psychology degree instead. This has apparently always haunted Mr. Fry. "Looking back at my decision to drop Computer Science for TypeFrag, I have no regrets," he wrote. "However, not being able to contribute directly to the building of my products often left me feeling empty."

Now, he's decided to put his business aspirations on hold in order to spend ten to twelve hours every single day learning to code. He's been at it since February 1st, and we are impressed he hasn't yet gone crazy.

Mr. Fry also argues that programmers often work harder at startups, which we're pretty sure will unleash the wrath of Business Dudes Everywhere upon him, but he does have a point.

While being a successful Business Guy can be tremendously important for the company, and has more impact than many developers and designers acknowledge, there are times when you cannot contribute to the product as much as you'd like. In the meantime, the makers seldom have a free moment, as a product can always be improved. A new design tweak here. A refactor of code there. The Business Guy is left with an internal struggle: wanting to do all they can do for the company but knowing deep down inside that pulling out a code editor or Photoshop would often be the most helpful thing they could do — and realizing they can't do it.

Despite the many issues relating to the "business guys vs. programmers" discussion, Mr. Fry's commitment to learning the technical side of the startup world is quite commendable. We only hope he knows that being able to spit out a few lines of Ruby doesn't automatically guarantee a million dollar payout.

The new product is based on work done by Codecademy's first new hire, Amjad Masad, a Jordanian who's open source work was already powering a big part of Codecademy. The aim is to get people writing and sharing programs without the hurdles of downloading software and learning to work in an IDE.

Like their initial offering, everything begins on the web. Once users create programs, they can share them with friends via Facebook and Twitter. But since Labs runs entirely on the client side, meaning you can use it when your computer is disconnected from the internet. Users can run their programs in Labs, or download them as executable files to run somewhere else.

As founder Zach Sims points out they have addede Ruby and Python in Codecademy Labs, even though they don't have any courses for those topics yet. "Know that it's just as big of a priority for us as it is for you, and stay tuned for some news on that front soon."

Image via Business Insider

It's easy to stop sweating the small stuff once you get to the top. As a recent New York magazine article pointed out, Mark Zuckerberg used to be a coding machine. These days, not so much:

But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. "Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck's gonna write code," says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. "It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who's an engineer like five minutes."

Dwight Merriman, one of the original founders of DoubleClick, was that company's CTO for a decade, helping to create the DART ad serving technology which currently powers Google's profits. Now he is founder and CEO of 10Gen, one of the leading developers and service providers for the MongoDB database language.

Betabeat was chatting recently with a 10Gen engineer who was impressed by how closely Mr. Merriman worked with the staff. "Dwight is drinking beer with us and writing great code."

In fact, last week's 10Gen's Brandon Diamond told us, Mr. Merriman "Sits in the same place where all the other engineers sits," comes into work everyday, and  "actually writes more code than most of us."

On a technical level, 10Gen is one of the few New York companies that impresses Silicon Valley sophisticates. Kirill Sheynkman, an Oracle veteran who just started running a massive Russian venture fund out of Manhattan, says that 10Gen brings a smile to his face.

As more big companies start deploying apps from the cloud, both consumer facing and within the enterprise, the demand for 10Gen's services will continue to grow. The company just raised $20 million which is plans to put towards international expansion and increased R&D. With his army swelling, it remains to be seen how much longer Mr. Merriman can keep coding in the trenches.

He certainly still finds the job exciting. "We've hit a real inflection point for the database world," Mr. Merriman told Betabeat by phone. "Your traditional relational approach will still be there, but an increasing number of problems will need to be solved our way."

Working at Google, Mr. Merriman saw the challenges of scaling to serve billions of ads per day. "As we looked into that future, it always seemed to us that the data layer was the weak link. So that is the problem Mongo was designed to address."