Code School

Learning to code was dry, abstract, and lonely, and most people quit before it ever clicked. The category treated developers like students grinding through documentation, and lost them before the skills had a chance to compound. The real problem was never the curriculum, it was momentum. How do you keep someone going long enough to get good? Solve that, and you change who gets to become a developer at all.

We started from a simple conviction: learning should feel like play, not penance. So courses became worlds — characters, levels, a story, a sense of progress you could actually feel. I led brand and the design of the learning experience itself, then helped shape the engine that let us make it at volume. Every decision started on the other side of the screen: what does it feel like to be a motivated developer, stuck on lesson four, and what would make them want to come back tomorrow?

A platform, a brand, and a library of courses that turned something hard and solitary into something people finished, and told their friends about. The craft wasn't in the lessons. It was in the thousand small details that made you want to keep going.

More than 500,000 developers learned on Code School. We bootstrapped it to real scale, until it was acquired by Pluralsight in 2015. My first exit, and the place I learned for good that brand, design, and product aren't three jobs. They're one craft.