Thank you Codecademy for changing my life

When I was in 5th grade, me and my friend found CodeAcademy. We had zero knowledge of programming at the time. We were so shocked by how easy it was to code in general and spent a week just doing the web-development courses. I don’t remember much now but I believe we finished most the courses in a very short amount of time…

This original experience has shaped me to the person I am now (14 years old). After finishing those courses in 5th grade, all we focused on was websites. I did eventually get tired of just web-development and started learning Java and Python. It has been about 4 years (I think) since that original experience. I spent almost the whole of all my days just coding. My skills have greatly, greatly, improved ever since.

I have worked on tons of projects ever since. I’l just say a couple:

  • A full social network implementing both GPS location services as well as realtime data through web sockets.
  • A RESTful server in Node.js for cross-platform MySQL connections with ease across all my projects
  • A tool for fully anonymous chat by pinging clients with packets of data
  • Over 4 iOS apps

I know it’s not much, but programming has really changed my life. The story of how I started creating my own projects is a bit amusing to me. Originally as a beginner, I would just code on my computer and have a local server for my websites. However, I bought an AWS EC2 Ubuntu server as well as a domain (“scapter.org”) and hosted all my projects there. It astounded me at the time to know that anyone across the world could view my websites/projects.

After CodeAcademy, I immediately started working on my own projects. As of now I am 14 years old and have been hired by a startup company in the Bay Area. Programming has completely changed my life as well as my view on everything. For some reason, I now feel like I can make ANYTHING I want.

You can view my programming blog that has updates on what I’m currently working on at: http://parthsaxena.com

Although I know not many people will read this, but I just want to thank you CodeAcademy.
I can never repay you for how much you have changed me as a person.

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I read it and I’m very happy that you spent your time wisely honing your craft. Everything I’ve spent time learning I eventually dropped and I’m a decade older than you with very little to show for it.

So keep up the great practice and trouble-shooting!