Envy Labs

Code School is about to hit it’s 50,000th member, and it’s mostly because of Rails for Zombies, our first and only free course.  To this date 22,240 people have played Rails for Zombies and 5,277 people have finished the entire course, which is just a breathtaking number to us.

Many web developers would consider Rails for Zombies a simple beginner course.  However, when you take a moment to reflect upon the technologies needed to understand it, you begin to realize it’s just not that simple. In order to play through Rails for Zombies you need to know a little about HTML, CSS, relational databases, and even a little about object oriented programming.

If we can get 5,277 people to finish Rails for Zombies, imagine how many more people we could teach if we started from square one.  If we can make learning programming more fun and interactive using Code School technology, not only will we inspire the kid down the block to learn Rails, but we might inspire kids around the world to try programming.

“What’s stopping you?” I hear you ask

What stops most ideas?  Money.

Yes, at Code School we are charging for courses and we could charge for these introductory courses to fund them.  But you know what, I don’t want to.  I’ve seen how much free educational content can impact people. From my Scaling Rails Screencasts to the Rails 3 Screencasts and now Rails for Zombies, free quality educational content gets out to roughly 100 times more people than paid content.  The idea that we might be able to create a programming course that inspires a child on the other side of the world to take up programming as a profession, just thrills me.

“So where do we go from here?” I hear you ponder

Code School is not profitable enough to fund these projects (yet), but lately I’ve been wondering about seeking outside funding for something like this.  There has to be a foundation, grant, or big company that sees the benefit these courses could bring.

We have a proof of concept — Code School. It works. It’s already educating thousands.

We have a killer team. The Envy Labs crew knows their stuff and we love to educate.

Where should we go from here? Have any suggestions? Throw them at us.

Big thanks to Violette Calhoun and Jennifier Athey for helping write this post
Photo Credit: Wilson (Army Gal)

A few weeks ago, 11 of the Envy Labs team took a trip to Baltimore for Railsconf 2011. While we were there, we ran the Rails for Zombies and the Rails Best Practices tutorials, and we gave away six Ruby Hero Awards. Below is a video of the award ceremony. We also talked about the release of the Code School Screencasting Framework (starting at 14:47 if you want to skip the awards).
View on YouTube

As I state in the video, recently I created a screencast which shows how I do screencasting (how meta!). My hope is that it inspires people to create more screencasts for our community, and perhaps inspires a few to join me in creating a screencasting network (the CodeTV part of Code School).

11 of the Envy Labs Team at Railsconf 2011

Aside from the team photos from the trip, two other videos you might be interested in from Baltimore include my Ignite Railsconf talk on How to create awesome Screencasts and an interview I did with HashRocketTV talking about Code School.

Lastly, if you dig Code School, be sure you subscribe to the Code School Blog. We’ve been posting more updates about the site over there.

A couple of weeks ago in one of our Coding Dojo sessions here in Orlando, our language of choice happened to be JavaScript.

(In case you are not familiar with the Coding Dojo, you can watch this video from one of our sessions and join our Google Group or Meetup Group.)

Even though JavaScript has no such thing as private or protected access modifiers, it still supports encapsulation. We are going to look at how constructors work in JavaScript, and then see how we can use that to create a clean design.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Code School announced two big things.  First off, we have a new prize when you finish the Rails Best Practices course, a free PeepCode screencast (worth $12).  The course is still at the low price of $45 and if you’ve finished Rails for Zombies you can get it for just $40 (with the $5 in Code School cash you received for completing the course).

You may have noticed that we initially launched with just Visa/Mastercard/Discover credit card support.  Shortly after launch we received a large push to support PayPal.  I’m happy to say that we’ve added PayPal support, sorry for not having it in the first place.

Yesterday I sent out the first Code School Newsletter, which contains some of this information plus more details about what we’ve been up to.  If you want to receive these once a month emails on what we’re working on, you can enter your email below:

BarCamp Orlando (which we help organize) was the big buzz last weekend, with over 300 turning up to share and learn at Wall Street Plaza in the middle of Downtown Orlando. Almost our whole team was there, and the Orlando Sentinel gave it a nice write up in the Sunday paper.

This weekend our lead designer Jason VanLue will be flying to Chicago to attend WindyCityGo, a mobile developers conference.  There he’ll be doing a talk entitled “Order Up – Customized Content for the Mobile Web”, where he’ll be talking about how to optimize the web experience on mobile platforms.

In two weeks I’ll be off to Singapore for the Red Dot Ruby Conf, southeast Asia’s first ruby & rails conference. Never been to Singapore before, so it should be quite the adventure.

Up next will be RailsConf 2011 May 16-19th and 11 of our developers will be flying to Baltimore to attend.  It’s our biggest contingent ever!

While up there, we’ll be doing Rails for Zombies & Rails Best Practices live tutorials on Monday at the conference. Yes, it’s the same content as in our Code School courses, but nothing beats live instruction and help if you have any trouble with labs.

Also at Railsconf we will be announcing the Ruby Hero Awards, where we recognize six people in the Ruby community who deserve a little more recognition.  You can see the previous year’s heroes or perhaps cast your own vote over on the main website.

Lastly Caike Souza and I will be making our way to Berlin at the end of May for RailsWayCon 2011. We’ll be be presenting Rails Best Practices there (along with a few other talks). While in Berlin we’ll be dropping in for Euroku, but probably doing the hallway track (as we currently don’t have tickets).

We love to travel and speak at tech industry events, so if there’s a conference you’d like us to speak at, definitely get in touch.

Here’s a snap of a challenge page from our newly launched course, Rails Best Practices. A few months back, released Rails for Zombies, a free introductory Rails tutorial that allows all of the coding and evaluation to be done in the browser. Since then our course design has evolved. In this article I’m going to walk through a few of these new enhancements.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a few months in the works, but I’m happy to say that Code School is now live, with our Rails Best Practices Course. Code School is an online learning platform that takes the lead from Rails for Zombies and provides paid courses which combine screencasts with coding in the browser.

For now the only new course on Code School is Rails Best Practices, which contains 5 levels, 5 screencasts, and a bunch of in browser code challenges (just like Rails for Zombies). It’s available at the introductory price of just $45, and it’s chock full of edutainment. Here’s the intro video to learn more about it:

You can also see the new code school screencast on the website itself (in the top right). If you’d like to help spread the word (which I appreciate) here’s the public embeddable videos for the intro video, and the best practices video.

We’re on the lookout again for a web designer, and we could use your help. Do you know any designers who live and breathe web design the same way us Rails devs live and breathe code? Someone who loves beautiful design as much as they love beautiful code? Here’s a few reasons to work with Envy Labs:

• No hierarchy, we’re all independent thinkers and doers.
• We have a firm set of core values which shape all the work that we do.
• We pay for educational trips (ex. we recently took a killer road trip to Miami for superconf)
• We’re working on some highly visible websites for big brands.
• We like paying people well, and you get paid for ALL your time. In the long term we’re taking steps to attempt to scale our company so we can pay everyone double what they’re making now (this is my current long term goal).
• Free Coffee and Espresso.
• We invest in our own internal projects.
• Killer office in downtown Orlando.
• You get to work with developers who strive to be at the top of our game.
• You get to work with Jason VanLue, the man is a legend in my book*.

The next year is going to be a very exciting time for our company. Do you know any designers who’d like to join us for the ride? Here’s a video we put together to show you around a little more, and let ya know what we’re looking for.

Disclaimer: Please excuse Jason and ignore all the times he says “Awesome”, “Killer”, and “Mad skills”, I forced him to make this video. He normally does not speak like this and would never describe his own skills as “Awesome”, “Killer”, “Mad” or even “Totally Tubular”.

Please email jobs@envylabs.com with your information if interested. We definitely need someone in Orlando, but we’re willing to work with you if you’re willing to move (no relocation package though).

*Your book may vary.

The Envy Labs team had an awesome trip down to Miami for  SuperConf last weekend.  You can check out the team pictures here.

It wasn’t just a road-trip, however. We also unveiled our latest brainchild – Code School. Code School is an online learning platform that takes the lead from Rails for Zombies and provides paid courses which combine screencasts with coding in the browser.  We’re in private beta release right now, but if you’d like to get notified the moment it goes live, be sure to give us your email and maybe subscribe to the Code School blog.

We’ll be posting updates to the code school blog over the next few weeks, giving you snippets of some of the awesome things we’ve been working on.