The cursor blinked back at me as I stared blankly at the screen. It was hour four and I still hadn’t found the bug in my code.
This wasn’t anything new. After studying Political Science in college before dropping out, tackling programming and Computer Science proved to be a new challenge. I watched videos, read books, and followed every tutorial I could find. Again and again I ended up frustrated by how difficult it was to build something and to find and fix the mistakes I had made.
My friend Ryan, seated across from me at the same desk, had been programming for years and never seemed to share my problems. I put my laptop to sleep and walked to my bedroom to do the same. In college, the two of us watched as our friends spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education centered around theory and liberal arts, only to graduate saddled with debt and lackluster job prospects. We had moved out to California to build something to solve this common hardship, but found ourselves mired in code and lacking a solution.
I woke up one morning and spoke with Ryan about how frustrated learning to program made me. It seemed ridiculous that anyone attempting to learn such a skill had to trudge through complex and confusing documentation, often on their own, and suffer through boring, repetitive lectures. The two of us quickly decided to cast aside some of the other projects we were building, and instead to build something focused on teaching people like me the skills they needed to find jobs — online, using fun and engaging methods, with the support of a global community.
Learning, as we had previously experienced, was not as exciting as the digital world around us . It was centered around one person transmitting knowledge to a classroom, with students expected to do little more than repeat lessons back on examinations. Why couldn’t learning be fun, engaging, and hands on?
We went to work immediately, writing the first lines of code of what would eventually become Codecademy. Excited, we shared our new mission with our friends. “It’ll change the way everyone learns!” we said. Their response left something to be desired—many laughed or found a way to change the subject. Our advisors told us the idea would never work — there were only 100,000 software developers employed in the United States, and the world didn’t need many more. Still, we soldiered on and decided to build a product for ourselves above all else.
As Ryan coded, I scoured the web for JavaScript tutorials, reading some and watching others, and built apps to hone my skills. I took my experiences and worked with Ryan to turn them not into traditional lessons, but an immersive, interactive learning experience. We took those normally daunting first steps and turned them into something more approachable by giving the computer a voice. Our starting prompt asks you to provide your name, and unwittingly teaches you some code in the process. It was through this method that we’d eventually introduce millions of newcomers to the world of code—by humanizing the traditionally formulaic process of programming.
Despite our enthusiasm for what we had built, we were terrified by the thought of releasing it to the world. We watched as countless other products launched with high hopes and ultimately ended in dashed dreams, and worried we were working on something similarly ill fated. Yet the only way to find out was to grit our teeth and show the world what we’d built.
On a sunny Friday afternoon, we posted a link to Codecademy to the link-sharing site Hacker News and stepped out for lunch. We hoped a few people might stumble across the link and find Codecademy useful in solving a problem we’d encountered firsthand — learning the skills necessary to finding a job or build something in an increasingly digital world. Over lunch we discussed our dreams for Codecademy, and hoped to build something that might one day touch millions of people, and even influence global education curriculum.
Our daydreaming was interrupted by the ring of our phones. An alert from an analytics service arrived: more than 10,000 people had started taking courses on Codecademy since we left for lunch. Shocked, we jumped in our car raced home to continue working on the site.
Today, we’re still building Codecademy into a place where people from all walks of life and all around the world can come together to learn skills that are increasingly necessary in the digital age. And every day, we come a little closer to realizing our dream.
This article is part of GE’s Dare to Do collection that explores the imagination and curiosity of those who dare to do great things. At GE, we don’t just dream of a world that works better. We build it.
