Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski describe their platform's mission to teach coding globally through learn-by-doing. They share stories of Judy, who became a mentor; Liz, who left drafting for Microsoft; and Martha, a Nairobi student who founded Kenya's first coding school.
Chapters
Codecademy is the easiest way to learn to code online, and it's special for a few reasons. First, Codecademy is a community of millions of people in every country in the world, hundreds of thousands of whom are sharing their knowledge on the platform, and millions of whom are learning from those people all around the world every day. Secondly, Codecademy is focused on teaching people real skills that help them make things and find jobs in a modern economy, like programming.
Lastly, we try to make learning fun and playful. We think it's really important that if you're learning a skill, it should be learning by doing. And so we try to make sure that if you're learning something like programming, you're always actually programming while you learn it. And so we marry those two together to make sure that you have the most effective educational experience possible. I think an innovator is someone who's able to take the impossible and make it possible. At Codecademy, we're constantly asking ourselves, how are we going to triple the number of high schoolers in the world who are coding? How are we going to close the gender gap for women that exists in technology? And how are we going to retrain the unemployed and underserved members of the workforce who are unable to find a job in the 21st century economy?
Some of the people who have learned on Codecademy have helped provide us with the answers to those questions. There's Judy, who without ever writing a line of code, started on Codecademy, learned a lot, and is now giving back as a dedicated member of the community by answering questions and sharing her knowledge with the people on the site. There's also Liz, who mid-career as an industrial draftswoman was laid off from her job. She started on Codecademy, taught herself how to program, and now works at Microsoft. Stories like these that inspire us at Codecademy to keep innovating every day. We think Codecademy helps improve the state of the world by equipping people with the skills they need in order to be successful in the modern economy. Since we started the company less than 2 years ago, Millions of people across the world have started learning how to program, and hundreds of thousands of those have come back to help their community members continue to learn as well. But we think it's the stories, not just the numbers, that tell the story as well.
A perfect example is Ethan. So like me, Ethan started learning to program when he was 13. But unlike me, after starting on Codecademy, he's already created 5 mobile applications and is going to be speaking at a technology conference South by Southwest with over 30,000 attendees.
Then there's Martha. Martha was a high school student in Nairobi who hadn't ever seen a line of code before she found Codecademy. But upon starting with Codecademy, she realized she wanted to become a programmer and left high school equipped with the knowledge she needed. After she was denied a visa to the US to continue her studies, she started the first coding school in Nairobi and hopes to share her knowledge with the people around her. Stories like Martha's, where the people that have learned on Codecademy share the knowledge with the communities around them, that we think will be the lasting impact of Codecademy.
