I haven’t posted any articles to my Extras section recently because I was testing out the idea of exclusively posting article links to my Twitter feed. After trying that for the past month and a half I’ve found that I don’t really like that plan as I don’t have enough room in 140 characters to post my thoughts on the articles I’m mentioning. As such I’m going to try and find a way to better use both systems. My thoughts are that I can continue to use Twitter to point out interesting articles people may enjoy, but post to this section of my website when I have something more thoughtful to say about an article. It’s a system in progress so we’ll see how things ultimately pan out.

With that all said I have a website to bring to everyone’s attention. The site is called Codecademy and their goal is to help people learn to write code over the year 2012. I’ve signed up for it and worked on the early lessons they have up so far and I think it’s a pretty good start. They present you with different concepts and place a coding window right beside the explanations so you can create example code as you learn. Currently they have a few basic learning modules up focused of JavaScript, but it looks like they plan to expand that as time goes on. The other nice thing is it tracks your progress in a visual way and gives you badges for completing certain tasks.

Coding may not be for everyone and some may find the early lessons pretty easy, but sign up and try it out. Each week they’ll email you something new to learn and who knows maybe by the summer you’ll be fluent in a whole new language.

Codecademy