This is cool. Twilio is one of the first API's I fell in love with strictly because of their docs and how easy it was to learn everything, there are some other API's that took me longer to get used to working with (Google Maps comes to mind) but with something like this my progress would have come along so much faster.
I feel more and more like now is one of the best times to want to learn anything, programming included. But you guys really are making it so easy for the next generations of programmers to learn the right way.
Thanks for this. I hope it makes the kind of impact it is capable of.
All of these examples further solidify my hapiness in switching from C# to Ruby as my primary language. It's so beautiful!
The project I'm working on wants to send SMS messages to clients, but we postponed that for v2. But after seeing the example for Twilio I'll heavily recommend we implement this feature now, as it seems very straightforward and will be a major upsell for our startup.
My brother is studying Comp Sci (well in Bolivia it's called Ingenieria de Sistemas - less b-tress more ASP.Net), and I really want him to learn Ruby and become happier with his work.
Hey Sergio,
That's so awesome to hear (I worked on the Twilio Codecademy lessons) - if you have any more questions feel free to drop me an e-mail at jonmarkgo@twilio.com and I'll be happy to help.
It seems like you really enjoy Ruby, that’s great to hear. I just started CS169.1x on edx, which will be using ruby as the language of choice, and have never touched ruby. (Except in the stripe ctf where I did not fully understand the code, just enough to progress to the next levels.) Now I'm even more excited to learn ruby!
I've done quite a bit of work in both C# and ruby and I haven't had any more or less difficulty in developing against APIs with either of them. Development speed is about the same either way. Working against a well built API helps. In a previous project at work I developed a mobile web services back-end in java and integrated Twilio into it in less than a day. Twilio is super easy to work with, so implement it now! :)
I live in Argentina and most of people are doing Ingenieria de Sistemas, although it seems to be a Computer Science degree in Bs. Aires, let's hope it's a good one.
Codeacademy is a great site... it makes it fun to brush up on the basics or try out a new language. It helped me learn some Javascript recently, and I really enjoyed the course.
I'd love to see them do something on OAuth / Twitter. I find that stuff very confusing.
Started Codecademy recently and really like the lessons. In terms of gamification, the badges do nothing for me, but the points and day streak are great. I had a 15 day streak and it really gave me the extra incentive to do just 10 minutes a day even when I was particularly busy. I forgot one day and now I have to start the clock over again, haha.
Will dig into API stuff once I actually finish the other basics.
I'm a fairly fanatical Codecademy user, so this is not news to me: I've been testing these courses since at least two weeks :)
Unfortunately this means I'm having all sorts of data integrity issues: for example, I can't access the third lesson in the Parse track, which is showing 9/4 exercises done. I'm also having trouble finishing several exercises in these courses, due to puzzling errors and, possibly, flawed tests.
But, wrinkles aside, I think these lectures are a brilliant way to generate leads: I subscribed to pretty much every service that has course on its API (Parse, Twilio, NPR...).
I can report that the Parse course is now correctly working. Thank you!
I'll check tomorrow if I'm still having issues with Twilio. I also got my provision rejected from Sendgrid, but I'm trying to solve this on my own. EDIT: Solved!
I also wish they would fix their current classes. A couple of bugs are keeping me from finishing their Jquery and web(original) tracks. I emailed them about it, but still doesn't work.
It seems for beginners in code but really nice initiative!... UI . I've stumbled upon webshelll.io recently on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728671. Quite a good tool for learning fastly how to use and script apis. Seems to be made for developer bored with finding , learning and scripting API.
It took me a while to figure out what this was. At first I thought Codecademy was providing lessons VIA API. I thought, "wow, they've essentially built a framework for education...pretty cool". Then I went to the actual website and saw that it just teaches you how to program OTHER APIs. Maybe their title should more accurately be "Learn How to Program APIs" instead.
This got me thinking - anyone know of an API or open source project that implements a browser-based IDE where you can make your own programming challenges or tutorials? Perhaps Codeacademy is working on something like that?
This is going to be super helpful for one of the projects I'm working on...researching APIs is always a bit time consuming due to the huge discrepancy in documentation quality/location/formatting/examples/etc.
I'm curious as to why they wouldn't include lessons on the Facebook and Twitter APIs. I would think that would be a primary example of APIs to be familiar with.
The fastest way to annoy someone is for the docs/examples to be out of date.
Previously Facebook has introduced API breaking changes pretty regularly, so it would be challenging at best. They've made a commitment for 2013 that breaks will only happen quarterly so it should be safer for Codecademy to commit soon.
The Facebook API is hugely varied and wide, so I'm guessing they want to try it with simpler APIs first before going after something huge like FB or Twitter (which is complicated by OAuth).
I feel more and more like now is one of the best times to want to learn anything, programming included. But you guys really are making it so easy for the next generations of programmers to learn the right way.
Thanks for this. I hope it makes the kind of impact it is capable of.