New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been increasingly vocal about his love for all things tech over the past few years, but now he’s taking it a whole new level. On Thursday, Bloomberg (the real one) tweeted that his new year’s resolution was to learn how to write code using the handy, free, game-like online courses offered by New York’s own Codecademy.
“My New Year’s resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me. http://codeyear.com/ #codeyear,” Bloomberg tweeted, instantly moving the hashtag #Codeyear into the top trending terms on Twitter in the New York City area.
Codecademy quickly responded, thanking the Mayor for his free PR boost and making him a generous special offer: “thanks - we’d love for you to come stop by and we can help out in person!” the Codecademy account tweeted back.
The move even prompted London Mayor Boris Johnson to state he was in “awe” of Bloomberg and would consider joining him on the quest to become adept at, or at least acquainted with, programming, as the BBC reported.
“Codeyear” is the name given to a new, year-long effort by Codecademy to get people to use its signature online lessons to learn basic online programming skills for themselves.
Codecademy’s website itself is not even five months old, but already the innovative New York City-based startup company has attracted generated enormous buzz among tech journalists, who praise its timeliness, ease-of-use and, perhaps most of all, the general enjoyment and satisfaction provided by its quick online exercises in programming.
The company was started in June by friends and former Columbia students Zach Simms, a political science major, and Ryan Bubinski, a developer, the New York Times reported. Ironically enough, the idea was born out of Simms’ failed attempts to come up with startup ideas that would be acceptable enough to win him the backing of the famed Y Combinator startup fund in Mountain View, California. Simms kept running into the realization that he didn’t know enough coding to pitch a great startup demo, so he and Bubinski decided to turn that into their startup idea.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham loved the idea, and Code Academy was born. Within days of launching their website in August, over 200,000 users began taking courses on the website. Within a month, that number had reached over half-a-million. Coincidentally, nearly 200,000 people have also signed up since the Code Year effort was launched on New Year’s Eve.
It’s unclear just how many users have begun interacting with the website since Bloomberg’s announcement, but one would expect a substantial bump deriving from the backing of the Mayor of the Big Apple. We’ve reached out to Codecademy and the Mayor’s office for more information and will update when we hear back.
Aside from his love for tech, Bloomberg could be courting the increasing political clout that comes with being a tech-savvy politician. As one commentator on Codecademy’s Facebook page theorized: “Now that Obama joined Instagram, it’s become vital to be (even more) tech savvy for US presidential ? :-). [sic]”
H/T: Michael F. Nunez.
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
Breaking: Lady Astor takes sewing lessons.
Too bad about his administration's lousy record with housing codes.
Jeesh, I guess after getting rich and worth $13+ Billion, you get pretty bored?
How about learning something useful for a billionaire, like playing the piano, or devising ways to turn his $13B to $26B.
Pretty sure his learning to write code is actually code talk for something else.
Lord, save us from Codekiddies! I pity Bloomberg's IT department, as they'll be needing to (a) explain everything to him and (b) re-write all of his "code" from Codeacademy-style to reality-style.
You'd think that all of these "journalists" pimping Codeacademy would realize how they're being played. But maybe the big blanket they put over themselves to screen out their integrity during an election cycle is also blinding them to how they're being used as pitchmen for this amazingly ham-fisted, amateur service.
You wanna hear masters of code, forget Codecademy, just listen to some Teabaggers talk about race relations
fargo116 But they're not subtle or clever, they just think they are.
I know. Get a load of their debating style. They actially think pretending to be stupid makes them look smart. aleksh
Interestingly, Mitt Romney also plans to learn how to speak in code this year. Of course, he's going to be taking lessons from a number of old, white politicians from the deep South.
They only seem to have Javascript courses -- as language bigot, I'm not convinced that counts as "learning to code".
Richard Ferrante It's learning to write code but it's the most free form of coding languages but why do they only have one language and only up to functions? This is the content they came with?
Richard Ferrante Read the "About Us" page on their Codeacademy website for the answer.
Okay ... I can't help myself, here it is: The two guys in charge got frustrated with trying to learn how to code using the videos and tutorials they found online (!), so they decided that they could do a whole lot better! They gathered a bunch of investors, designed their little "email lesson a day keep the learning going" structure, and started convincing "journalists" that their press release was really a valid story. The program is only a few "lessons" long, and the documentation and other things that typically go along with a programming course get lighter and lighter (because they haven't really finished the system, yet.)
It's a system to learn "coding" developed by non-coders who couldn't figure out how to learn to code using available resources. And, no, they haven't learned how to code, yet.
On another note, I have recently developed a system for teaching people to make lots of cash because I grew frustrated with trying to generate cash for myself using existing methods. Please subscribe to my newsletter! Only $2.95 per month!
@RichardStupidscript Ferrante Easy. Hoola hoops and pet rocks may have made Hawaiians and geologists roll their eyes, but some might say the eye-rollers may have been overreacting.
Richard Ferrante At least its not HTML or XML "programming".
Richard Ferrante Node.js is the future of the internet: http://gigaom.com/cloud/node-js-and-the-javascript...
Also, it's the Khan Academy's choice as a first language: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-as-a-first-langua...
Nice find, Mr. Franzen
Crap, I've been doing this too. Now I'm going to have to re-assess.
In other words, Bloomie will pay a team of consultants $20,000 week to teach him to "code."
In 1993, a very impressed college professor gave me an "A" on a paper where I predicted, one day, learning programming would be as common as learning how to drive. Damn, I'm good!
Last time an old, white man decided to learn code -- it was smoke signals, just sayin'.
great. now we've got to compete with ex politicians.
Pretty cool site. Well worth checking out if you're interested in learning basic coding.
Very supportive of the initiative, but their name is Codecademy and not CodeAcademy. I am the co-founder of Code Academy (http://codeacademy.org) in Chicago, and we teach beginners how to build web applications in 12 weeks. If you could correct your blog post that would be great. Thanks!
michaelmcgee You might want to check your post again. According to my browser, it won't compile. It contains some syntax errors. :)
hrebendorf Haha sorry about that! The link works from where I copied and pasted it from, but it decided to add some nonsense syntax to the end of the url. This link should work - http://codeacademy.org
Could you teach us how to post a link that works? michaelmcgee
stephen-maturinmichaelmcgee Ah, for want of an escape character...
stephen-maturin Sure! Feel free to send me an email at mike AT codeacademy DOT org. Shouldn't take too much time.
michaelmcgee
That stinks. Epic fail.
michaelmcgee Their site is much much better than Codecademy's though. But it's 6,000 dollars and you have to move to Chicago. That's so old school. Why not just get me a Nokia while you're at it?
Curtis Sumpter We are old school! And we love it! Our program is for beginners who want to learn how to build out a web app prototype of their idea or to take it even further than that. We also have people who want to become real software developers, so having an in-person, immersive program is extremely effective for that. Learning online is more convenient, but eventually if you want learn programming to build apps for yourself or to work in a company, you are going to have to do it in-person.
As for the cost, the program is $6,000 because that's we need to pay the instructors and provide the computers, space and other resources beneficial for the students. And if the students put in the adequate amount of time, $6,000 is underselling the benefit of this program. At least that is what a majority of our students from our inaugural class has told us.
OK. "Code" what? What is there to learn that has any practical use?
rickbrew You're using it.
rickbrew As I am learning now, the hard way, you never know when you might be called upon to create a web app or dissect someone's javascript, even though you're not a programmer. After I slog through the job I'm working on now, I think I'll be signing up.
rickbrew Mark Zuckerberg said something pretty prescient. In a speech at a college he told all the kids they should learn to code. He said that he believed it would become a day-to-day part of their jobs whatever their jobs were. That seems to be starting to be the case.
Curtis Sumpter So I need to add to my resume "Able to code?" Hell, I learned Fortran and IBM assembler on an IBM 1620 back in the 60's but I'm no professional programmer.
Know how to code. That's damned ambiguous. It's so meaningless that it's stupid. How about COBOL? C? C++? HTML? Pascal? I gather than Bloomberg looks at the computer as one of those strange boxes in the corner which are catered to by the high priests of computerdom - programmers or something. Sort of like how my ex-wife aimed a car instead of driving it.
Don't let him bring the NYPD. They're liable to smash the laptops.
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