Do you know any EdTech startups which would be interested in coming to work next to us, here at Code School? Today happy to announce Starter Studio, a 3 month program here in Orlando for startups which combines educational events with mentorship to help startups succeed.
If this sounds interesting, please take a moment to watch the video on the front page over on the website. Thanks!
We’re excited to announce some updates to Code School support. As Code School grows, we want to make support even more available for our community. If you’re reaching out about a problem, then you want a quick solution. So we asked ourselves, would we be happy with this user experience if we were on the other end?
No, we knew we could do better.
Last week we deployed a subtle new feature that we think will better your experience on Code School.
Previously, when you wanted to contact us on support you would take the following steps:
That’s a lot of steps, and we want to get you help as soon as possible, so we made some changes.
Here’s what that path to support looks like today:
We want to make this entire process as easy and efficient as possible. Most support interactions are as simple as a few emails back and forth, but we value the time spent hearing recommendations on how we can be better, clearer, and more helpful for learning.
With that in mind, we also redesigned the entire support site to match our brand and improve your user experience.
While these changes are only small steps in the right direction, you can rest assured that we’re never done improving!
If you’re developing web applications it is likely that you will run into bugs at some point. They are nearly unavoidable—HTML bugs, JavaScript bugs, CSS bugs, and even problems related to network traffic and memory. That’s where Chrome DevTools comes in. With its powerful debugging engine and ever-growing arsenal of resources, it can help you create a speedy and successful web application.
That is why we’ve teamed up with Google to announce Discover DevTools, our newest Code School course on the Electives Path! Thanks to this collaboration, we’re offering this course free to all users and with Google’s esteemed stamp of approval.
This course will teach you how to take advantage of Chrome DevTools’ powerful suite of resources and speed up development, debugging, and diagnostics of your web app. Through video and interactive challenges we’ll also introduce you to more advanced topics like debugging memory leaks and rendering performance issues.
Play the course now and discover more of DevTools.
In another week or two we’ll be releasing our Rails 4 course, with the theme “Zombie Outlaws.” As you may know, almost every Code School course has a jingle. After being inspired by this amazing course design, I decided to write this jingle as a narrative of the Rails 4 design. With some help from Wendi Hughes, we came up with these lyrics:
He was wanted and captured without bail
Locked and forgotten in a rusty jail
Zombies attacked and the town people fled
Those who were left became the undeadHe’s a zombie outlaw and he rides
on an undead horse with no hide
Hunting the sheriff that left him for dead
till the day someone takes off his head
I knew this was going to be a unique jingle, so I decided to go to Fiverr and hire a few people for $5 to see what they could come up with alongside our veteran jingle musician. Last time I did this (with RSpec) it was REALLY amusing. Here is what I got back from Fiverr and the corresponding artists, listed from least to most amusing.
Country Guitar Jingle by brack3n
Hiphop Jingle by tbf444
Punk Jingle by timsong
Hardcore Punk by tensecondsongs
Sometimes the folks on Fiverr will create a video for you with the jingle. When I saw banjoman15 I knew he was going to be awesome. Best five bucks I’ve ever spent:
These all led to our final course jingle, created by one of our go-to jingle musicians. It is definitely the most catchy:
Johnny Cash Style Country Jingle by Everett Simpson
I can’t wait to release this course in the next week or so; it’s full of some great content. If you want to be notified the moment it’s released, just head over to the Ruby Course Path and scroll to the bottom to find the Rails 4 Zombie Outlaws course, then hit the “notify me” button.
Also, if you’d like to listen to more Code School jingles, visit our greatest hits page.
Because of its elegant deployment environment, Heroku is the most popular hosting solution for Rails applications. In our Code TV screencast about the platform, I walk you through setting up a basic Rails application to deploy to Heroku, and also review the workflow and best practices involved in maintaining it.
Previously this screencast was available only to Code School subscribers, but Heroku has partnered with us in order to make it available to everyone for free! Go watch it now, and make sure you’re not missing out!
We’re happy to announce Try jQuery, a new course release in collaboration with the jQuery Foundation. We’ve completely re-imagined our previous introductory course to jQuery. The course content is now up-to-date for jQuery 1.9 and ready for 2.0.
Our goal for Try jQuery was to create an easily accessible course where you can immediately start playing with the core features of jQuery in your browser. To achieve this, we created new videos, a new interface design, and new challenges. We also snuck in some best practices that might save newcomers from trouble later on, while keeping the complexities of the JavaScript language in check.
If you’re not familiar with our courses, the concept is simple:
In order to save your progress and retain the Code School badges you’ll earn through the course, you can simply log in or sign up for a free Code School Account.
We hope you have as much fun playing through the course as we did building it.
You can Try jQuery right now for free.
Since we’re a bootstrapped company, we have to pick our battles. It’s something we often struggle with. As is common for content creators, if we didn’t have a little bit of self-control we would try to create all the things.
We have had the plan to add English subtitles to all of our course videos for a while now. After Eric built a small tool to help us transcribe videos, we realized how incredibly arduous the task was while working on the first course.
Having done subtitle work in the past, I also feared the difficult process of transforming a literal transcription into more succinct subtitles. It takes time, a lot of time, especially when it’s not your speciality. Because of timing and deadlines, our plans to bring subtitles to all courses fell by the wayside, though it was not forgotten.
We kept receiving inquiries about subtitles from customers, and one day Josh, a developer on our team, decided it was time to add this feature once and for all. He took ownership of this feature and made it a priority. It took some time for us to have all of the courses subtitled, but today we’re happy to offer English subtitles for all of our existing course videos. The addition of subtitles is now part of our course process and they are added shortly after new courses are released.
Look for more improvements to our video player soon.
After launching Paths yesterday, we immediately began working on improvements based on user feedback. The first added feature we’ve shipped is a new way to visualize your progress across all Paths. If you’re logged into your account, you’ll now see a completed state on each of the individual nodes (now colored assuming you’ve completed that course). Here’s what mine looks like:
If you hover over a node you’ll see a tooltip with the title of the course. You can now click the node to go directly to the course page.
This provides you with a better way of visualizing your progress across all of the Paths. We hope you like it.
At Code School, we’re always challenging ourselves to find better ways of teaching programming and design. We work to make the learning experience of each new course more intuitive and more fun. As our course library has grown, we’ve realized that we don’t have an effective way of organizing courses.
Two questions grabbed our attention early last year. We heard our users asking these questions on a regular basis:
We needed to find a way to effectively answer those two questions through the design and organization of our course library. It was no small task, but we worked through several iterations and concepts throughout the course of 2012. Today, I’m thrilled to announce the first step in answering those two questions. Today, we are shipping Paths.
We’ve organized all our courses into five unique Paths: Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, iOS, and Electives. We’ve placed our courses along each Path in an intuitive, descending order—starting at the top with our Orientation courses (free and introductory), and traveling down the Path toward more advanced courses.
If you’re a Code School Member, you’ll be able to track your progress along each Path, and of course, earn badges as you go. If you aren’t a Member, you can try out over 20 levels of free content—just look for the Orientation (free course) labels, or try the first level of any course.
Additionally, we’ve added recommended Elective courses to each Path. These are courses that don’t traditionally fit into one of our four main content Paths, but are still essential to your growth as a designer or developer. Look for these courses at the bottom of each Path, or click into the Electives Path.
We’ve tried to make our Code TV screencasts more accessible and easier to navigate as well. You’ll find all screencasts grouped by Path, and we’ve added relevant screencasts to the bottom of each Path for easy reference. These screencasts offer quick lessons for practical improvement along the way.
A couple more features to note: you can navigate to any Path by clicking on the ‘Change Path’ button at the top of each Path page. As a Code School Member, you will have access to all courses across all Paths. We encourage you to master the Path of your choice, but feel free to jump around Paths for well-rounded learning. If you want to quickly navigate to specific topics within a Path, click on the topic tags at the top, which will highlight specific courses that cover that content.
We’ve worked hard on Paths, all the while growing more and more excited. We’re excited because we believe this new layout will help you better navigate our content, and optimize your learning strategy. We hope Paths are an effective and fun way to keep learning by doing.
P.S.—I suppose I should also mention that we aren’t done yet. This is just the first of many steps to enhance your learning experience. I won’t give away all the details of what’s to come, but we look forward to helping you Master your Path of choice and enjoy new perks of learning.
Stay tuned.
If you’ve ever been on an Agile project gone wrong, then you’re probably familiar with the most common pitfalls. Standup meetings take so long that you forget what you’re working on. The team attempts to demo a feature, only to discover it’s really only half-complete. Participants become uncertain about their roles.
Scrum and other Agile frameworks offer strategic tools for delivering relevant software more quickly, but it’s important to get the details right. If you’re trying to get your development team back on track, our latest screencast will help. Agile Best Practices will walk you through some pitfalls that Agile teams face, and give you the guidance you need to restore sanity and productivity.
No Code School subscription? No worries! We’ve partnered with Atlassian, purveyors of fine tools for Agile teams, to make this episode free to everyone! Go watch today, and get started down the road to a happier, more productive workplace!
