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.

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: 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.

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.

(via the New York Daily News)

Maybe it's the revelation that Facebook's IPO might happen as soon as the third week of May (at least according to 143 phone calls made by Kara Swisher and, yes, she's counting), but it seems like even the local press has Mark Zuckerberg on the brain.

The New York Daily News, a paper about as known for its tech coverage as Zuck is known for his formal wear, decided to pick out 12 tech folks to watch and led with the portentous line, "The next Mark Zuckerberg might be right here in the city, sharing space with a dozen other startups in a loft near Union Square." HE WALKS AMONG US!

It's refreshing to see no actual "under 30" or "under 25," cap on this list, but the names were still familiar. In fact, so familiar, it's rather like taking a stroll down Betabeat's archives. There's Union Square Ventures' Christina Cacioppo, Raise Cache's Rebecca Zhou, Codecademy's Zach Sims, Lover.ly's Kellee Khalil, Coursekit's Dan Getelman, Cornell's Dan Huttenlocher, TimeHop's Jonathan Wegener, Fab.com's Beth Ferreira, GetGlue's Alex Iskold, and more.

Congrats, guys! Don't forget who knew you when.

Codecademy is a service that hopes to teach users to program over the web. They graduated from Y Combinator and raised $2.5 million from an impressive group of investors.

Today they introduced a new feature pegged to New Years. It's called Code Year, and it's a year long cycle of lessons that arrive in a weekly email. It will expand the services current curriculum, which right now is limited to an introduction to programming and working in Javascript, so that by the end of 2012 users can create both web sites and web apps, which will require more than JS.

"What we had up till now was very self-directed. The biggest problem with that is motivation. The email gives people a way to direct their learning so that they know what they have to do and by when," said Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims. "We are also hoping to tell people a little bit more about why we are doing what we are doing," Mr. Sims said. The new site makes reference to Douglass Rushkoff's book, Program or Be Programmed, which lays out am argument about why coding is a new form of literacy and the importance of knowing how computer programs work, even if you don't intend to work in the industry.

Ok, since we started more than 1,000 new people have signed up to learn how to code this year. We'll update in the morning with some fresh stats and perhaps some more thoughts from Mr. Sims and the community at Hacker News. For example, this gem from entrepreneur Aarlo Fish:

"Something cool to think about...coding well takes a certain type of mind that most people don't have. Code is, as Fred Brooks says, 'pure thought-stuff.' You need to be able to build and understand multiple layers of abstract stuff all at the same time.Coding is like having a vivid dream in that you're occupied with something entirely mental and disconnected from your physical reality. But unlike real dreams, it's coherent and rigidly structured, and fits in your conscious mind.Some people can think this way. Most people can't, even if their mind is advanced in other ways. I don't think most people, even the ones who are interested in Codeacademy, realize this. That said, I think it's useful for people to try to learn to code to understand the basics. And surely lots of people out there could code, but haven't learned yet. But most people will not be able to build complicated apps and websites."

UPDATE: Day 2 and nearly 60,000 people have signed up. There continues to be some mild pushback from engineers. Foursquare's Harry Heymann joked on Twitter, "Make 2012 the year you learn to be a lawyer with 1 interactive lesson emailed to you each week! http://lawyear.com."

Codecademy founder Zach Sims isn't bothered. "We're not saying that it's magic. It still takes a lot of work." He also shared a link to Peter Norvig's classic post, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, which highlights that there is always someone offering to teach you in less time, be it years, months, weeks or days.

Time to level up, young coder.

Code Academy co-founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski are the quintessential startup duo. They met at Columbia, where Mr. Sims was studying political science and Mr. Bubinski was studying computer science. They worked on several projects together. Mr. Sims was the biz dev and product guy, Mr. Bubinski the coder.

"I kind of grew to hate it," said Mr. Sims. "I wanted to be able to get my hands dirty and help build the ideas we were working on." 

The pair was accepted to Y-Combinator, where they worked on a couple of different ideas. But the pain point they related to most was the gap in their coding skills. "I was a 1X developer, he was a 10X," said Mr. Sims with a laugh.

Reading O'Reilly books and watching Kahn Academy videos wasn't helping. So they ended up building an interactive lesson that taught coding by doing. "I hated seeing smart folks going into finance because they felt like computer science was something they couldn't learn," said Mr. Sims.

Turned out there were a lot of people like Mr. Sims. In the first week more than 200,000 people came to the site from over 200 different countries.

The hope now is that companies will build educational models to teach users the skills they are hiring for. That would allow Code Academy students to learn the bleeding edge skills that are in demand and employers to pick the most promising pupils. Right now Code Academy is focusing on hiring and perfecting the tools that let users build new courses so that they can crowdsource their lessons.

"When you are building a house, you need an architect, who has a high level understanding of what's going on, and you need construction workers to execute that plan," said Mr. Sims. "There are a lot of people without work in America and a lot of demand for people with skills in tech. So hopefully we can connect those two."