Codecademy is fucking great. I've read too many criticisms of Codecademy, trying to explain why Codecademy isn't the most perfect tool for creating coding masterminds capable of leaping tall single-page web apps in a single bound. That's not what it is: it's a tool, a starting point, and a great one at that. Before Codecademy, I was just a lost non-technical co-founder astounded by the magic my technical co-founders for [thecityswig.com](http://thecityswig.com) were producing. Now, I understand the process behind what we're making and even contribute to debugging or logic problems. I can even write some decent code from time to time!
However, what I can't do is look at a problem on http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer and solve and implement it 100% on my own. I always need to ask at least one question to someone who knows better in order to get me over some barrier. Finishing the Codecademy courses on Javascript didn't, by itself, make me a functional Javascript hacker. OF COURSE NOT! It's not that easy! YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME???
I am functionally able to create and design web and mobile pages now, but only because after spending 2 weeks trying to write my first page on my own, I paid my technical co-founder in beer for an entire night to walk me through all the problems I was having. Then he had to answer my emails every day for a week. Then once a week. Now once a month. I'm not too proud (now) to say I needed that. I needed to be that kid that annoyed me in middle by constantly asking questions that seemed stupid to me: every question seems stupidly easy when you already know the answer. And when it comes to non-HTML/CSS coding, I still have those questions. A lot of them.
And this is where Codecademy, and in fact virtually all instructor-less education, will always "fall short": **there are too many variables involved in functionally learning how to do something to guess what the problems will be ahead of time**. I think this is where people get frustrated: I finished Codecademy, why am I not a sick programmer now? Sorry bro: there's a few more steps to go yet. Codecademy will ALWAYS be a supplemental or starter tool, one that necessitates interaction with other resources and, ideally, other mentors and teachers. **And this is a good thing:** because Codecademy is incredibly useful, and trying to be more than it is would diminish that usefulness.
I could have never started on this journey as frictionlessly as I did without Codecademy, and beyond that it's great for spending an hour every day learning or refreshing your knowledge when you otherwise have no reason to do so. Keep it up Codecademy, you guys are my everything!
HN discussion [here](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4645550)
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