Business

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More Codecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today. Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has “been focused on client-side languages and markup – javascript, HTML, and CSS.” Starting today, you’ll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, “This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy – Python is only the first server side language you’ll see.” He isn’t specifically identifying what other languages Codecademy plans to add, but you can see a list of other server...

Program or Be Programmed author, CNN columnist and Frontline documentary director Douglas Rushkoff announced on his blog today that he’s taken a job with Codecademy, a company that offer free online programming courses entirely through a web-based interface. Rushkoff writes that he is joining the company as an evangelist much in the same capacity as Vint Cerf’s role at Google as a “net evangelist.” Rushkoff won’t just be evangelizing Codecademy, but the concept of “code literacy” in general. Rushkoff was an early chronicler of cyberculture. His first book, Cyberia , is a collection of journalism published in the early 90s. He went on to write other books, such as Media Virus , and direct the Frontline documentaries including Mercants of Cool and digital_nation . Rushkoff helped kickstart the code literacy movement in 2010 with the publication of Program or be Programmed . Since then, companies like Codecademy, Code Academy, Programr have emerged to spread a greater understanding of...