insights

Codecademy exercises have nicely packaged data prepared for us to use. However, there will be many occasions when we would like to explore a question that does not have a dataset ready for us to download. For example, based on their performance last year, which MLB players should I select in my fantasy baseball draft?…

Learning web development skills to switch careers made me feel empowered and excited to help others learn the same skills. As a Codecademy Coach, I help bridge the gap between learning and applying the skills needed to level-up in your current career, find a new hobby you love, or change careers completely (and everything in-between).…

Jackie Bavaro, Product Lead at Asana, describes product management as “the best job you’ve never heard of.” While that may be the case, the popularity of product management has grown in recent years. Larger technology companies recognize that the best product managers may just be the people who have not yet heard of the role,…

In hopes of pursuing a career in Public Policy, I’ve spent the past year reorienting my programming towards Data Science. Naturally, doing so required significant practice finding, reading, visualizing and analyzing data. This experience has impressed upon me the importance of having a framework in mind when tackling a big data project. To demonstrate this,…

I started studying computer science quite late into my college career. I took a class on the subject as a sophomore, and I soon found that I enjoyed writing code and solving computational problems. I decided to enroll in another computer science class the following semester, and more after that. Coming from a liberal arts…

College was everything to me. Until the day I got my first acceptance letter, every grade, project and passion was pursued with college in mind. I knew since I was 5 that I needed a scholarship—that my future rested on money that I didn’t have. My parents, teachers and counselors worked hard to make it…

I remember walking into my first technical interview for a software engineering internship. I didn’t know what to expect, for I did no preparation whatsoever and assumed whatever I learned in class up to that point would carry me through the interview. Oh, how I was wrong. I walked into a room containing one other…

Update: And the winner of our curriculum hackathon is... Alienbot: Build a Python Chatbot! Thanks to all who voted. Codecademy’s Curriculum Team recently held our bi-annual internal hackathon. From 8:30 am to 6:30 pm, we hacked, snacked on dim sum, and hacked some more! We’ve done internal hackathons before, but this time, we want to…

A lot of us, data fans, are trying to launch data science careers, and we do not initially have work experience. In fact, we are looking for a first data science role so we can check off the work experience requirement that is listed in most data science job postings. To get unstuck from this…

Learning to program tends to center around, well, programming. When I first got into computer science, writing small programs from scratch served as my primary way of reinforcing the concepts I learned, and this type of practice proved crucial to my skill development. However, when I started my first real job as a software developer,…