Envy Labs

There once was a developer named “why the lucky stiff” also known as  ”_why”.  He did many great things in the Ruby world, including the creation of an website called Try Ruby which allowed anybody to try their hand at programming ruby by coding in the browser.

Here at Envy Labs we’ve been inspired by _why’s work and you can see his influence with Rails for Zombies, where we teach people Rails by coding in the browser.  Rails for Zombies was such a huge success it led us to build Code School, where we build paid coding courses.

We’ve learned a great deal about how to do in-browser coding as we’ve built Code School, and a few months ago Eric Allam started to wonder if we should take our knowledge and contribute back to TryRuby.  After a call to Andrew McElroy who graciously maintained the project with David Miani (after _why disappeared), Eric dove in.

Flash forward two months later and today we’re happy to announce the release of TryRuby version 3!

This new version contains a bunch of new things we’re excited about:

1. New “Code School” Engine – Eric Allam worked many weekends to integrate Code School’s (Rails & Backbone.js) course engine and our code editor into the Try Ruby course.  With this integration you now have the ability to save your progress using your Code School account, so you can come back later and pickup where you left off.  Don’t worry, it’s completely optional.. you can still play through TryRuby without ever having a Code School account.
2. New Design – We enrolled Envy Labs designer Nick Walsh to do a new design as our own tribute to “_why”.  We’re really happy with the redesign which is not only more beautiful, but also has a better user experience (and it’s responsive!).
3. New Sandboxing – The big issue with running user written Ruby code server-side is it could be EVIL!  Yes, whatever you type in that Ruby console, we will run it on our precious little web server.. sounds dangerous right?  With the help of Dray Lacy, Eric has created a library we’ll be releasing shortly called RubyCop.  He’ll be doing a talk on Sandboxing this Saturday at Rubyconf if you happen to be here.
4. New Host – We are hosting TryRuby up on Heroku, which (in our minds) makes things even more secure.  Most of Code School is up on Heroku anyways, so it seemed like a great fit.

So… even if you’ve done it before or you’ve never programmed before in your life.. it may be time to dust off those chops and head over to TryRuby.org.  If you do choose to login to Code School as you’re doing the course, we’ll even give you a badge for completing the course.

If you really dig these in-browser coding courses I highly recommend you signup for the Code School Newsletter.  We have some additional free courses in the works (on top of the paid ones):