In this DLD talk, Zach Sims, co‑founder and CEO of Codecademy, shares his personal journey from a political‑science student at Columbia to building a global coding education platform with over 25 million learners. He frames programming as a new literacy and a way of thinking—centered on algorithms, explicit variable definition, debugging, and flow—that mirrors core mindfulness practices such as present‑moment awareness, labeling experience, patience with errors, and deep focus. Drawing on anecdotes about the early days of Codecademy, the pressures of startup culture, and his own meditation experiments, Sims illustrates how learning to code can teach people to slow down, break problems into steps, accept mistakes, and achieve flow. He supports these claims with learner testimonials that describe increased patience, analytical thinking, and better decision‑making. The talk culminates in a vision of teaching children not just to code, but to “code their minds,” using programming as a scaffold for mindful, collaborative, and iterative personal growth.
Chapters
So we were joking before, this is the third year I'm speaking at DLD, and every year we start by saying it would be really awesome if there were other people to serve on a panel with me, but somehow at the last minute I always get stuck giving a talk. So I'm here talking to all of you instead of talking to three other people on the stage. And what I'm going to talk to you all about today is coding the mind. So as Steffi talked about, I run a company called Codecademy. We teach more than 25 million people around the world the technology skills they need to find jobs. And so those people come from all over the world. We have people in every single country that learn on Codecademy. And they come and they learn small bits of programming interactively online. And so as promised, though, I'm going to spend not so much of the talk talking about Codecademy and more of the talk talking about the mine. So— So, when you hear the words "coding the mind," you might think I'm here today telling you how to actually write code that makes your mind work, but that's not what we're doing today. Instead, I'm talking about the intersection between a term that's become pretty popular recently, mindfulness, and something I spend a lot of time working on, programming. So, at the intersection of both of these is a key question: Can technology teach us not just a skill, but about how to live a better life. So in order to talk further about that, I want to start with my story. So in 2011, I was a student at Columbia University in New York. I was studying political science. I thought one day I might be a lawyer. I spent some time working at technology companies. And what I saw was everyone I was in school with wasn't in the library studying Homer and Herodotus, but were instead spending their nights and weekends studying to become investment bankers. They were studying things like the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, because when they got to college, the first thing they were told was that success meant getting a job at an investment bank or a consulting firm. And so they spent their time not focused on what they had originally come to school to study, but instead studying what they thought would make them financially successful. And so what I realized was that people that started going to elite colleges, and other schools all around the world, are motivated not from what happens inside, but from what the outer world projects on them that they should be doing. When I was at Columbia, it was the people that graduated with the most prestigious jobs were those that made the most money and those that were the most successful. And so it set up this weird process where for years you'd study things that you didn't actually want to study, just because you thought you needed to be successful. So we found that— the slides are misaligned— we find that instead of learning what people actually wanted to learn, they were going to get jobs that society said they should have wanted instead. So in 2011, my co-founder Ryan and I looked around, we asked if we could start teaching people the actual skills that they needed in order to find jobs, and maybe in doing so, finding a way to teach them a different way of thinking about their lives and their careers. So, um, what we had as a fundamental thesis was that programming is the new literacy. We looked around and realized that every different part of industry was being undertaken— had a huge change that was being undertaken in it as more and more people were affected by the technological changes that were happening in every single industry. We realized that beyond just programming being an important skill within which to view the world, there were also millions of jobs that would be available and a huge shortfall that people had, that the world had between now and 2020 when looking at the number of computing jobs that are available and the number of computer science students that were available to fill them. And so we did what anyone in college with an idea does, packed up our bags, headed to California, and started a company. So this was our first office. It was a one-bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale, California. And a couple months later, we launched. Codecademy was a simple way for anyone to learn job skills. And on the first couple of days after we launched, after having ramen and spending all night and all day programming, more than 200,000 people used Codecademy the first couple of days. And we equated what we were doing at the time, which was filling ourselves with energy drinks and pizza and junk, and not really sleeping, and spending all of our time just working and not thinking deeply about what we were doing, with success, and thought that all the movies we had seen, "The Social Network," uh, and all the others, were true, and that you needed to work all the time endlessly on one goal in order to be successful. So, at the same time, I was teaching myself to program and started realizing that programming wasn't just a skill I was learning in order to work on my company. Instead, it's a way of thinking. And so, the basic building block of programming is something called an algorithm. And at its core, an algorithm is a simple sequence of steps that teach people how to solve a problem. In this instance, the problem is your lamp isn't working, trying to figure out what you can do in order to fix it. So you run through a simple sequence of steps where questions are asked, and you come upon the solution to your problem. Algorithms require you to actually step back, to recognize the problem that you're trying to solve, to break it into small different parts, to work through it slowly, and to be patient about the mistakes that you end up making, which most of us know in common parlance as bugs. So they require you to be explicit in actually defining the parts of the world that you're creating, that you want to exist. For instance, define things like your name by entering explicitly, "Your name is Zach." And so, walking away from this, I wondered, is the way we write code a broader metaphor for the way we can think about our lives? Realize that the latest trend, as we've talked about at the beginning of the presentation, is all about mindfulness. And so what mindfulness focuses on is being conscious or aware of something. It's not necessarily something like meditating all the time. It's not a cult, even though sometimes it is, where thousands of people meditate in Madison Square Park. And what we've read a lot about recently is, does technology actually ruin our ability to be present in a given moment? Are we so stuck to our screens that we can't help ourselves and step out? And so instead of just reading about all this, I decided to start diving in further and meditating myself. Started drinking the Kool-Aid, as it were, and I realized that my passive use of technology was corroding my awareness of what was going on around me. And that instead of actually being an active participant in walking down the street or a meeting, I was instead multitasking between 3 and 4 different things at any given time, reading my phone, bumping into people. Seemed like it wasn't the best way to live life. So, in programming, when you see something and you're creating a world, you have to define a variable. You have to actually say explicitly what it is that you're creating. And in real life, we see that in using mindfulness, people actually apply labels to what's around them and their surroundings, saying that right now all of you are sitting, I'm standing, I'm a little stressed because I'm speaking, and taking that and actually using it to change the way you think about the world. And what we found was that when we asked the people that were learning on Codecademy what programming had done to change the way they thought, they actually said similar things. So here's Eric Wilbourn, who yesterday told us that Codecademy and coding helped him slow down and analyze things more. So actually taking a deep breath before figuring out how to approach a problem. Beyond that, programming teaches you to be at peace with things like bugs, to understand that in any process that you're working through, There will always be errors and mistakes, and it's just a part of the process. I think as we look about life, similar thing happens. Come upon problems every single day, and it's easy to get fazed and to stop working hard on solving them, but instead you should just approach them as part of the process. Here's another Twitter user yesterday said that coding instilled him with patience that he didn't know that he had before, helping him understand that when certain errors happened, it's just a part of the process. And lastly, one of the things that programming and mindfulness have in common is a notion of flow. So when you go up to a programmer sitting in an office full of developers, ordinarily you'll see that someone's wearing headphones, that they're very focused, and they don't want to be disturbed. It's because they're focusing on something so intensely that they've reached this state of flow, which is something that in mindfulness and in life, I think all of us work hard to achieve, where we're so singularly focused on something that we can't think about anything else. Here's someone else who said that programming actually helped them break things down and do them one at a time, and also helped them make major life choices about what to major in in college. So after seeing the experience of tens of millions of people around the world learning programming, and millions of people around the world picking up this phenomenon of mindfulness, I wondered if the two of these things were somehow intertwined. If maybe the teaching technology, like we're doing at Codecademy, was also a way of teaching new ways of thinking, of giving people a way of thinking about how to slow down, how to solve problems, and how to approach problems as if they're something that comes up pretty often and pretty naturally, and that they're simple and solvable. And lastly, what if we taught our children not just to code, but to think about coding their minds, to approach problems in a peaceful way, and to work together in order to think just as if they would with a simple set of processes to solve problems, work together, and iterate on themselves as people. So, thank you.
