Coding adventures and contributing to open source with CodeCombat
When I founded my first startup in 2008, I was a programming newbie. A degree in economics from Oberlin College hadn’t prepared me for a career writing production-ready code. Despite my best efforts at slapping together crude HTML and CSS Django templates, my ability to contribute to our codebase was limited at best. So I started slowly teaching myself to code with online tutorials and lessons. After many disheartening starts and stops, I realized why I was having problems sticking with it: code lessons and videos felt like school to me, and I had no interest in returning to the classroom.

What we built next was CodeCombat, a game that teaches kids and students to code. Players use spells (JavaScript) to control their forces in a battle against Ogre enemies. And, on January 8 this year, we open sourced the entire project: servers, art, and all. You can literally clone our repo and have a working version of the game on your local machine in minutes.

CodeCombat is a for-profit, YCombinator-backed startup that sees the future of code education as beginning with instruction and ending with contributions to open source projects. When we designed the product, we knew we wanted to open source all of the code. We envision players learning to code using tutorials on the site and once they have reached a certain level of proficiency, diving into the codebase to work with real live production code with a world class developer network to help them learn and work on a project that’s meaningful for them.

Last Edited By: tracyannef Feb 5 14 1:54 PM. Edited 1 time.