Code Year

A year ago I made a resolution to finally learn some programming, and a week later I heard about Code Year. It seemed perfect, so I signed up and right now I stand at 89% complete, which is pretty good in my books considering in 2012 I also worked a full time job, a freelance job, and produced 30 minutes of films and one daughter.

I find my own lack of programming knowledge glaring. I was good at math. I have always been good with computers. I used to make HyperCard stacks as a kid, and further back one of my earliest brushes with video games was coding my own on the ZX-81 (the only way to play a game on that thing). For the past couple decades I’ve been fascinated by the web, and I know CSS and HTML, but never made the jump to Javascript or PHP or what have you. So close, but so far.

Codecademy isn’t without its flaws. The lessons are submitted by users, which is to say not made by professionals. Some are great, others broken, impassable without getting some help on the forums. But it’s free and the format is excellent – both the interface and the idea of weekly lessons for a year. I kept chipping away. In the fall my still-rudimentary Javascript knowledge really helped me fix something on my site that had been bugging me for a long time.

I’m trying to finish the Code Year track – hopefully it will turn out to be Code Fourteen Months. Not as catchy, sure. But I also will go on to do the Ruby course, and we’ll see what else. I am enjoying it, and it feels right, and I foresee a lifetime of side-tinkering with tiny, half-broken scripts.

If you’re at all interested in learning to code, I’d say give it a shot.