Wikipedia pages should get a lot quicker very soon as the foundation behind the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia have turned on Lua, a lightweight scripting engine, to speed up access to complex pages. And the site is asking its editors and contributors to learn the new programming language to help make the site quicker.

Those who have ever edited Wikipedia pages will know that the site, like many wikis, uses “Wikitext language” — a sort of a simplified HTML — to enable users to add content chunks, templates, and formatting to a page.

But there was a problem, as Wikimedia’s Sumana Harihareswara posted recently:

But because we’d never planned for wikitext to become a programming language, these templates were terribly inefficient and hacky — they didn’t even have recursion or loops — and were terrible for performance. When you edit a complex article like Tulsi Gabbard, with scores of citations, it can take up to 30 seconds to parse and display the page.

Lua is an embedded scripting language, built so that lightweight but powerful code can be embedded right into web pages. It’s often used as a scripting engine for games. And it’s much quicker than Wikipedia’s existing wikitext solution.

The big question is, of course, is how Wikipedians will take to the new language, which is unfamiliar and potentially more complex than wikitext. And will we start encountering bugs on Wikipedia pages as editors and maintainers now become programmers?

“Now is the first time that the Wikimedia site maintainers have enabled real coding that affects all readers. We’re letting people program Wikipedia unsupervised,” Harihareswara wrote. “Anyone can write a chunk of code to be included in an article that will be seen by millions of people, often without much review. We are taking our “anyone can edit” maxim one big step forward.”

And, she added, that if any Wikipedia user doesn’t look the load time of a page, they can now do something about and improve it themselves, in a very Wikipedian way:

“Just as we crowdsourced building Wikipedia, now we’re crowdsourcing bits of infrastructure improvement. And this kind of massively multiplayer, crowdsourced performance improvement is uniquely us.”

The read-write revolution continues.

photo credit: Stewart via photopin cc

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Here’s an absolutely awww-dorable clip featuring Mark Zuckerberg and a story about a kid getting started with the iPhone SDK.

The clip comes courtesy of Code.org, the advocacy group that’s trying to get more people — especially women, minorities, and the economically disenfranchised — into the developer world.

“Coding is the American Dream. If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even want a high paying job, those jobs are for programmers,” said Code.org founder Hadi Partovi in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

“And yet the opportunity to be exposed to that is going to the top 10 percent, and that is just morally wrong.”

Check it out:

Code.org’s original video, featuring a string of high-profile tech folks as well as non-technical celebrities, has already been viewed more than 12 million times, the organization tells us this morning via email.

“Also, we’ve seen interest from over 9,500 schools who want more computer programming courses, and have over 21,000 engineers who have volunteered to support the cause,” a rep said. “These are pretty incredible results.”

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Code.org has taken the web by storm with its message of computer science for all — and according to its founder, Hadi Partovi, racial and gender balance in the tech world is a major underlying principle of that message.

“Ninety percent of schools don’t even offer computer science, and those aren’t the schools with lots of white kids in great neighborhoods,” Partovi said in a phone call with VentureBeat today.

“Coding is the American Dream. If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even want a high paying job, those jobs are for programmers. … And yet the opportunity to be exposed to that is going to the top 10 percent, and that is just morally wrong.”

Code.org is an advocacy campaign focused at getting more kids interested in computer science. It’s also working to get more states, schools, and teachers on board with the program.

Related: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

The most visible aspect of its work so far has been a series of short films featuring the superstars of the digital age — Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey — talking about programming and how learning to write code can change lives for the better.

In those clips, Partovi told us, the Code.org team specifically attempted to get more women and people of underrepresented races front and center.

Here’s a short film that hasn’t been released elsewhere, given to VentureBeat by Code.org reps:

“For gender inequality, we care a lot about it, and we spent a lot of time in making these short films in paying attention to the right messages, making sure we had a balance of women and different races represented,” he said.

“The first female engineer at Facebook is the perfect example. She didn’t expect that this would even be her career. … The first part of moving the needle in the gender gap is giving them role models and dispelling misconceptions.”

Various studies have shown that by the time they’re in high school, girls steer clear of computer science because of preconceived — and largely inaccurate — ideas about what computer scientists do.

“With the montage we did of different workplaces, we wanted to get across that these are really great jobs, but also show that these people are working together in the sunlight rather than the typical media impression of what an engineer is — a geeky guy working alone in a basement,” said Partovi.

And as for the idea that girls are bad at math and therefore can’t code, a message that’s passed down in popular culture if not in tech culture, Partovi said, “Girls don’t get the idea they’re not good at math in third grade. At that point, building things on a computer is still like playing. … If you can start counting at zero, that’s all the math you need.”

Aside from getting kids away from intimidating media messages and encouraging them toward computer science careers, Code.org is also girding its loins for a battle royal with state governments and school boards. Getting more states to recognize computer science as a valid course and getting more schools to offer courses and clubs for computer science, Partovi said, “is the most important aspect of increasing diversity” in technology industries.

Related: Treehouse takes its coding education tools to Detroit

“Forty-one states don’t count computer science as part of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum],” he said. “That means the money that goes into STEM, none of it goes into getting more computer programming. The other issue is that for students in those states, studying computer science in high school does not count toward graduation. It’s just an elective.”

The end result: The only students who go into college with a decent understanding of code are those who can afford the time and money to study programming independently. Speaking generally, these kids aren’t at-risk economically, they’re not from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and they’re not girls.

“I have a 3-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, and I’m basically using iPad games to teach them basic computer programming,” Partovi said as we wrapped up our interview.

“I think everybody should get basic exposure so they can make an informed choice. Most people never even know about the choices they’re rejecting because computer science isn’t on the menu.”

Image credit: Blend Images/Shutterstock

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Kids these days, with their Ruby on Rails and their JavaScript. When your dad was coming up, programming was something you did with punchcards and a suit and tie. And when I was coming up, getting schooled by cranky goths on my first Linux box, programming was something you did from the command line.

Learn-to-code company Treehouse is getting back to basics with a command line course that will restore any amount of nerd cred you may have lost and school you to code from the console like a true neckbeard (or honorary neckbeard, for those without the hormones to grow a truly lush face-mane).

“You may come across a tool that has only a command line interface, or you may need to access a server using the console and SSH,” writes Treehouse instructor Jim Hoskins today on the company blog. “Console Foundations is here to familiarize you with the power of the console.”

The coursework will include high-quality, professional-grade video instruction (as is Treehouse’s specialty). But the gang also cooked up something unique to get devs comfortable with coding on Linux terminals.

“So what if you don’t have a Linux computer to follow along on?” Hoskins continues. “Worry not. For you, we built the Treehouse Command Line, a console you can use right from your web browser that gives you access to your own Linux computer that you can safely learn and experiment with.”

And since Treehouse Command Line is an entirely separate computing entity, you don’t have to worry about accidentally wiping your hard drive or destroying files your computer needs to operate or what have you.

Here’s a peek at the Treehouse Command Line and other instructional materials from the course:

Treehouse also teaches a slew of other topics — such as HTML basics, PHP, WordPress programming, web design and business fundamentals for startups and mobile development for would-be app billionaires.

It also recently announced it was piloting a program to bring its unique tools into high schools in order to help underserved kids have a better shot at getting better jobs after graduation.

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Andrée Brazeau was a project manager with a degree in mechanical engineering. Eighteen months ago, she moved to San Francisco and started looking for work. A year into her job search, she had heard the same response time and time again: “We’re looking for someone with programming experience.”

So Brazeau learned how to code.

As the old women-in-tech debate fades out of the current hype cycle, a related trend is starting to gain momentum. In the the learn-to-code craze, online schools like Codecademy and in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp are springing up to meet a huge need for more developers across a wide range of industries.

Speaking volumes about both trends, Hackbright Academy is a women-only school in San Francisco that teaches its students everything they need to know to become entry-level programmers and get job offers right away — and does so in 10 weeks.

By putting her life and career on hold and signing up for a $7,500, full-time crash course, each student hopes to change her life, to jump from a salary of $30,000 or $40,000 to something that can sustain one person or even a family in an expensive city like San Francisco. But while this option is a quick fix for tech’s gender imbalance, some worry it’s not enough to fix the industry’s brogramming culture.

Girlschool

“For any person who wants to learn programming by themselves, San Francisco is the best place,” Brazeau said in an email to VentureBeat. “There are so many people in software here that it was easy for me to find group to help me learn.”

She started out with the usual suspects of online tutelage: W3Schools and Learn Python the Hard Way. Between these tools and a couple in-person groups, she was able to put together her first website.

“But you know, there is a big difference between building a static website and a web application,” she said. When she heard about the Hackbright program, she said, “I knew right away this was exactly what I needed.”

Ashley Lorden also had experimented with various online tools to learn to code. A nonprofit employee with an econ degree from Brown, Lorden was technically inclined and ended up doing web-related work wherever she went.

But to make the jump into a career as a software developer, Lorden said she only saw two options: returning to university for a computer science degree or doing nonprofit work at a tech company where she could eventually transition into a technical role. Neither route seemed particularly expeditious.

“I didn’t think it was possible to become a developer in a reasonable timeline until I found out about Hackbright,” said Lorden.

The most interesting part of Hackbright’s program is its gender split: 100 percent women students.

“I have always been surrounded by men,” Brazeau said, “at university in mechanical engineering and in my past jobs.” In spite of the radical change, Brazeau said she easily made friends and overcame her fears. In the end, she said, “I was not uncomfortable. I guess Christian and David were lot more uncomfortable than we were.”

By men, for women

“Christian and David” are Christian Fernandez and David Phillips, Hackbright’s cofounders. Fernandez is the veteran coder of the two; he’s worked at places like Fuzebox and Ask.com and has done a bit of developer instruction as well. In fact, Fernandez taught at the first-ever Dev Bootcamp.

Philips had been making apps with Fernandez for about a year, with Fernandez teaching him how to code, when the pair got the idea to offer a coding class. Eighteen guys and just three women showed up. As much as they wanted a 50/50 split between the genders, they realized it was unrealistic.

So why not offer a class only for women?

While that idea has been posited by many women’s groups in recent times, it seemed more audacious coming from a couple dudes. ”That was the biggest risk,” said Phillips in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’re two guys. We expected to be judged; it was kinda scary.”

Fernandez and Phillips started meeting with developer women’s organizations, “getting to know everybody and letting them know what our intentions were.” The duo was pleasantly surprised. “We really got a positive response from everybody,” Phillips said.

And with that, Hackbright was a go.

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In other words, it’ll help them do more than play with programming.

Codecademy‘s partners, which include YouTube, NPR, Stripe, and Bit.ly, are launching what cofounder Zach Sims calls “simple, digestible lessons on how to get up and running” with APIs. APIs, or application programming interfaces, are simply ways of talking to applications other people have built.

What does that look like?

The new lessons on Codecademy will help users build web apps that, for instance mash up news from NPR with YouTube videos on the same topic. Or, build a product highlighting hot social content being shared with Bit.ly, and charging for it with Stripe. New developers could even start interacting with mobile phones and sending text messages via Twilio’s API, Sims said.

“This is part of our continual belief that the best way to learn is by creating,” Sims said in an email.

And that’s precisely the core goal: helping new programmers get started with building online apps, even if they have almost no programming knowledge. Other launch partners who will also being including lessons on their APIs include Parse, Soundcloud, Sunlight Labs, Placekitten, and Sendgrid.

This is a big part of what the Codecademy turn-users-into-makers movement is focusing on in 2013: helping people create stuff. I talked to Sims about his plans last week.

“The future of programming is making a tool for people to demonstrate their creativity,” he told me. “In 2013 we want to extend Codecademy’s reach and help people move beyond beginners.”

2012 was an “explosive” year, he said. Codecademy grew from two people — Sims himself and co-founder Ryan Bubinski — to 13. From just a few users to millions, including hundreds of thousands who signed up for Code Year, a challenge to build something with technology. And the team added Ruby, Python, HTML, CSS, and jQuery to the initial launch with Javascript.

What’s next?

“There are definitely more languages coming in 2013,” Sims said. “We’re focusing on what will be popular in the future … people are asking for PHP and C++, Java, Objective-C, all of which are on our radar. But we’re still sort of prioritizing.”

The goal for 2013, beyond new API training, and beyond new languages, is continuing to bring programming knowledge to more people. That includes schools and teachers, who Codecademy is helping to build computer science courses and after-school programming clubs, and governments. Sims said the group was working with governments “pretty much everywhere” in both the developing and developed world to help integrate programming courses into core curriculum. Already, a “couple thousand schools” have created after-school programs to teach programming using Codecademy tools.

Another focus?

Continuing to empower the creator community to build and share lessons. ”There are tens of thousands of potential teachers … people who write a tutorial and put it on their blog and no-one reads it,” Sims told me. Sims wants to build the community and tools that make those creators want to contribute to Codecademy’s store of lessons, which are then improved for everyone else.

photo credit: mbeo via photopin cc

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The dearth of software engineering talent was a hot topic in the technology community in 2012. Pluralsight has raised $27.5 million to bolster this small but necessary population.

Pluralsight is an online education platform for software developers. It offers a selection of 400 training courses for individuals and businesses looking to boost their programming prowess. Categories include C#, jQuery, iOS and Android, Java, and Ruby as well as design, social media, NoSQL, business intelligence, and Salesforce.

Sharp programming skills are a huge asset to individuals and businesses alike. But the supply is smaller than the demand, and thus, startups and incumbent companies are perpetually competing to capture developers wherever they can. In response to the growing need for a large, trained talent pool, an array of training courses have cropped up ranging from cheap options found in large online education portals to pricier bootcamps.

Pluralsight costs $29 a month for subscription-based access to its extensive library of articles, videos, and other training materials. The company was founded in 2004 as a classroom-based education service and moved entirely online in 2008. Since then, it has more than 200,000 users around the world.

This is the first time Pluralsight has taken outside investment. The support from Insight Venture Partners will enable Pluralsight to meet the high demand for content and expand its library. Pluralsight is based in Utah. Read the press release. 

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At 12 years old, Nick D’Aloisio began his career as a mobile programmer when he downloaded the Apple Developer Kit. By 15, one of his hacks, an app known as “Trimit,” caught the eye of an investor in Asia offering to fund “the company’s” next project.

What company? D’Aloisio, a school boy from South London, admitted to this venture capitalist that it was merely an after-school creation.

A whizz at the programming language C, D’Aloisio had created the app to test his skills in machine-learning technology, a branch of artificial intelligence that yields trends and patterns in a mass of data, and makes smarter predictions over time.

Summly’s founder demoes the app in San Francisco

Less than a year later, the “Internet boy wonder,” as he was dubbed by the European tech media after an appearance at Le Web’s conference, had developed a keen interest in web summarization technology. It’s a simple enough problem, but the execution is tricky. How do we take a meaty piece of content and whittle it down to its bare bones?

Today, D’Aloisio is ready to take his iPhone app public. Summly, available to download for free, reduces full-blown articles into snippets, making it easier to skim the news on a mobile device.

From ESPN to VentureBeat, the app includes almost all of the major news outlets. You lightly tap the screen to browse news, and if a summarized story piques your interest, you can share it with your friends via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook, or click a link the bottom of the screen to access the original, full-length story.

The founder told me he hit on the idea for the novel way to scan the news while studying for his History “GCSE” (an exam that all British school kids sit before their junior year). He quickly became frustrated by thousands of web search results that were slow to load and sometimes impossible to access on mobile.

“There has to be a way to summarize this information into bite-size,” he said. Trimit, the app he developed, summarized content into 140, 500 or 1,000 character summaries. With a little finessing, he moved on to Summly, which can automatically break down full pages of text into bullet-points. 

Most summarization experts have yet to apply their knowledge to a mainstream market. In a highly strategic move, D’Aloisio is applying the technology to the news, since, as he said, “No one had figured out how to perfect the news-reading experience on mobile.” In many cases, it’s relatively simple: Most journalists still write in the Associated Press (AP) style, so the first paragraph contains the crux of the news.

It’s not nearly as straight-forward as cropping the first few sentences, however. In the background, the technology works by scraping content, pulling out the most important bits, categorizing each story by topic, and displaying the news in a highly visual way. The summarized stories fit comfortably on your screen (tailored to both the iPhone 4 and 5).

At a coffee shop in San Francisco, D’Aloisio led me through a demo of the app: It’s a highly intuitive with the algorithm working to recommend news stories to you based on your pre-existing set of interests. As you shift location (from the UK to the U.S., for instance), the stories will change as well.

In person, D’Aloisio is wise beyond his years. It’s hard to believe this media-savvy, sharp-talking business executive is a teenager taking a leave of absence from school. He is both a high-school student and an employer. No longer a solo coder, he now has a team of seven people working for him. In addition, half a dozen researchers at SRI, the non-profit technology research institute based in Silicon Valley, are working with D’Aloisio to perfect the algorithm.

Some major technical hurdles  remain: Magazine-style features are tougher to summarize, and are often thrown out by the algorithm. The team is currently working on auto-translation (notoriously problematic and obvious to anyone who has ever used Google Translate, BabelFish and the like), and they have plans to integrate French and Spanish into the app. If they get it right, it could be a neat language-learning tool.

The team will also butt heads with Pulse, Flipboard, and a host of other beautifully-designed news-reading apps, especially since it is in the process of designing an interface for tablet devices. To succeed, it will need to win over voracious news consumers who routinely use web-based aggregators like Google Reader. The competition for these users is heating up: Circa is experimenting with ways to re-frame the news on mobile, and NewsBlur, a Y Combinator alum, recently launched its iPad app.

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

Top image: Wired UK

A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next.

PHP was created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. In 1997, Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3. By 1999, they had built the Zend Engine, which is still the interpreter for PHP.

Update October 18: Andi Gutmans just gave us more details about where PHP is going in mobile.

Gutmans and Suraski continued their partnership with Zend Technologies, a commercial entity that creates add-on products and services for PHP developers, particularly developers in the enterprise.

Today, after multiple massive iterations to the codebase, 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP, says Gutmans. Wikipedia says 75 percent of websites use PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Photobucket are all built in PHP. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, runs on PHP and probably accounts for half of that 35 percent. Most of the other major content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, are also built in PHP.

No respect?

Still, the language can’t seem to get any respect and has been derided for years by programmers coding in C, Java, .NET, Python, or Ruby. In terms of trends, PHP as a search term has been dropping for years, and the mobile app revolution has led to the revival of Objective-C and Java.

So is the programming language that powers so much of the web disappearing gently into the night?

Not if Gutmans has anything to say about it. VentureBeat talked to him about PHP and the future, and he’s more bullish than ever, especially when it comes to the mobile-focused ace up his sleeve.

Riding the U.S.S. Enterprise

“All dynamic languages are gaining share from Java and .NET right now,” says Gutmans. “We’re getting a lot of benefit.”

Source: Wikipedia

Andi Gutmans

So the noise around trendier technologies like Ruby on Rails or Node.js doesn’t especially bother him. Mindshare is nice, of course, but market share is nicer. And market share is what Gutmans is focused on, especially in the enterprise.

“From a maturity point of view,” Gutmans told me, “I don’t think any other dynamic language right now has the full tool set. Our competition is Java and .NET … never with other dynamic languages.”

While he likes what Ruby on Rails is doing, and thinks there are some things there that PHP can learn and grow from, Gutmans points to PHP’s massive support in packaged solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

“We’re better off than we were eight years ago … today we’re the only ones who have really hit the mainstream enterprise,” says Gutmans. “We do believe that the momentum and the size of PHP will continue. We don’t see it slowing down right now.”

Gutmans speaks with the enthusiasm of a founder; of course, there are other companies catering to the PHP-related needs of the enterprise. But Zend remains one of the biggest and best-known, especially due to its provenance.

And he’s got a point: Two-thirds of developers in a recent study reported spending half their time in PHP. And in a recent study by Rails developer Marc Gayle, half of all developer job postings on Craigslist call for PHP developers. When I talked to Gayle, he surmised the reason might be PHP’s super-popular content management systems.

“I think that is skewing the results,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”

And a mysterious mobile story, coming soon

When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks.

But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools.

Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

What that looks like and how it will be distributed is still mysterious. But a strong mobile story, says Gutmans, will only help PHP continue to grow.

It’s hard to argue with that.

photo credit: Red Bonzai

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Learning to code is overwhelming. As with any daunting task, it can be difficult to know where to start. Learning code is like dieting: Under all the gimmicks and claims is a core formula to success that requires hard work and determination. Once you get this simple principle, you can achieve sustainable, real progress in your goals. Code is similar to dieting in that you really can’t take any shortcuts.

That’s why we’ve put together comprehensive coding bootcamp bundle. Don’t let the title deter you. The “bootcamp” is as strenuous as the student desires. Keep in mind the bundle covers coding instruction for websites, iOS games, iOS apps, Ruby on Rails, PS6, and more, so your options are plentiful and completely up to you. Six different courses combine for hundreds of lectures and over 70 hours of curriculum. Don’t fret, though; each lecture is brief, with essential aspects to the courses respective coding language allowing you to move at your own speed, honing in specific skills. I know online education has its skeptics. I love traditional classrooms, too, but learning at your pace and convenience makes online courses extraordinary educational tools.

Each of the professors have impressive credentials, experiencing immense levels of success in their area of programming expertise. Computers have only been prevalent for two decades, making standards for teaching code nearly invisible in comparison to the liberal arts. Your coding professors were and are at the forefront of this new age art. Not only are these some of the first to learn code, but they’re also among the first to discover its nuances, making them ideal candidates to get you up and running. Don’t hesitate to learn more about them under the “read more” button on the Learn To Code Bootcamp sale page.

This is a serious bargain for anyone interested in learning to code. If one coding language is not working for you, feel free try another without the financial repercussions. For less than the price of one community college course, you can’t go wrong!

It’s Estonia!

We’re reading today that Estonia is implementing a new education program that will have 100 percent of publicly educated students learning to write code.

Called ProgeTiiger, the new initiative aims to turn children from avid consumers of technology (which they naturally are; try giving a 5-year-old an iPad sometime) into developers of technology (which they are not; see downward-spiraling computer science university degree program enrollment stats).

ProgreTiiger education will start with students in the first grade, which starts around the age of 7 or 8 for Estonians. The compsci education will continue through a student’s final years of public school, around age 16. Teachers are being trained on the new skills, and private sector IT companies are also getting involved, which makes sense, given that these entities will likely end up being the long-term beneficiaries of a technologically literate populace.

The ProgreTiiger program is launching at a few pilot schools and will soon be rolling out to all general education schools in Estonia.

By contrast, the U.S. public education system has been described as “running on empty” when it comes to tech literacy, leaving young adults unprepared to compete in a digitally driven economy.

In 2009 and 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) conducted a joint study and found that most public schools in the U.S. focus only on the consumer aspects of using computers.

Rather than truly teaching kids about computers, we’re teaching them to see the machines and programs as mysterious tools, offering little or no instruction about “the conceptual aspects of computer science that lay the foundation for innovation and deeper study in the field (for example, develop an understanding of an algorithm,” the report’s findings state.

Already, in hacking competitions around the world, Eastern European programmers are often leading the pack. Estonia’s new bid for comp-sci dominance has increased the odds of that occurrence and will likely help Estonia in the international competition for jobs, capital, and talent in a growing tech economy.

Top image courtesy of Kiselev Andrey Valerevich, Shutterstock

Hat tip: UbuntuLife

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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It’s a potential treasure trove for those who develop for Microsoft, or work in a Microsoft environment, and want to broaden their skills. I’ve included a few of the potentially most interesting below — but be sure to check out the full selection.

Web geeks who want to start building Windows 8 apps might want to check out Programming Windows 8 Apps, which will show you how to use your Javascript, HTML, and CSS skills to program for the desktop in Windows 8.

Or, if you’re a mobile developer and are thinking of possibly throwing an app on the Windows Phone platform, Ligman has listed a few books for you as well that will have you up and running with Silverlight, XAML, and sprites in no time.

IT administrators might find this set of books more helpful: a Microsoft Office 365 handbook for the more adventurous, and Office 2010 for the majority of you who are in corporate environments that stay just slightly off the bleeding edge.

Staying with IT theme, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions might be useful. Server room jockies will likely find something to learn in Windows Server 2012. And database administrators? There are a least eight different SQL e-books in Ligman’s list — all for free.

None these will be helpful, of course, if you’re not in a Microsoft shop.

But for those who are, take a look at both this list and a secondary list that Ligman posted that includes resources on developing for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud:

Image credit: Vladimir Melnikov/ShutterStock

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Sir Richard Branson: When he’s not figuring out commercial space travel, he’s making it rain on the kids from Codecademy. Gotta love the guy.

Branson is just one of a whole school of big fish who’ve chipped in on Codecademy’s newest round of funding. The team took home $10 million in toto, and the round also brought in Silicon Valley firms such as Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins as well as Russian entrepreneur/investor Yuri Milner.

Codecademy, the drop-dead simple site that teaches you how to code, also saw participation from all its previous investors (Tim O’Reilly, Mike Arrington, Ron Conway, and a few others), a good sign, to be sure.

Codecademy certainly deserves the new round. It’s used previous funding to aggressively deliver on its promise of teaching the world to code. When the startup launched at a Y Combinator demo day eleven short months ago, we were impressed by a) the team’s youth, and b) the elegant execution on a truly worthwhile mission.

“This is the first time programming has been truly democratized,” said co-founder Zach Sims at that time. “It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the future.”

Since the launch, the team has rolled out more coding instruction in new programming languages, an ambitious challenge for 2012 called Code Year, and a platform for those who want to teach others how to code.

In the near future, expect to see Codecademy continuing its growth by expanding into new geographies and new languages — and not just programming languages.

“The new money will be used to internationalize Codecademy and bring it to places it’s already,” Sims told VentureBeat in an email today. “More than 50 percent of our users are international, and we’re looking to use this capital and Index’s international expertise to further our international adoption.”

Sims said the team already has support from its userbase for this kind of expansion. “Our course creator community is vibrant, with tens of thousands of courses completed in English and other languages,” he said. “We’re starting to see courses in other languages, and scores of users have started translating our existing courses into other languages.”

The nine-person team has its headquarters in New York City. To date, more than 25,000 people have created courses, and millions of individuals have used the site to learn about computer programming. More than 50 million exercises have been completed, with more than 100 code snippets submitted for a curriculum of more than 400 separate courses.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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If you’ve ever done or wanted to build an iPhone app, you know you pretty much need a Mac to get the job done.

As of today, we’ve got a brilliant new workaround, and it’s super simple — nothing to install, nothing to download. It’s an iOS lab and iPhone simulator all running in the browser, courtesy of the guys at Programr.

Unlike other products for Windows- or Linux-running iOS devs, Programr’s IOS lab allows you to write and compile in Objective-C in the browser without the usual run-around of writing apps in Java and cross-compiling it to Objective-C or using products like Appcelerator, which leaves you with a native app that might be mostly HTML/JavaScript.

And once your code is written and compiled, you can take your shiny new app for a test drive — also directly within the browser.

There’s still no “official,” Apple-sanctioned way to build iOS apps on Windows or Linux, and there may never be. In fact, experts have suggested that even Programr’s clever solution might run afoul of the iOS ADK license agreement because of the simulator.

Even so, the Programr iOS lab is interesting and has merit. Check ‘er out:

Programr first pitched itself to us as a Codecademy competitor; however, what it’s doing is quite different from Codecademy’s pared-down, beginner-friendly fare. While you’ll be seeing some of the same languages on Programr and Codecademy, the former seems to be better suited to the intermediate developer.

Programr also has Android programming tools and will soon be launching a coding lab that will run within Facebook.

Programr was founded by Rajesh Moorjani, Santosh Surve, and Dileep Dharma, developers who have known each other for the past decade and who have worked on projects for some pretty big-name clients, including Microsoft, Symantec, and Doubleclick.

The team is actively seeking funding. The Fremont-based startup has been bootstrapped to date.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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This week, we told you about Etsy’s new grant program to get women into a summer school for hackers.

Marc Hedlund (pictured) is Etsy’s vice president in charge of all things engineering-related, and he’s actually the one who spearhearded the initiative. Hedlund first approached Hacker School co-founder Nick Bergson-Shilcock earlier this year with the idea of providing financial support to women who wanted to attend Hacker School’s intensive summer session.

“Marc’s idea was awesome: Etsy would host and sponsor the next batch of Hacker School and provide scholarships to get as many qualified women into the batch as possible,” Bergson-Shilcock wrote on the Hacker School blog.

The idea isn’t immune from controversy. On aggregation site Hacker News, commenters expressed concerns about the grant program, writing things like, ” I dislike the implicit message being sent by offering money specifically to women to go into engineering/computer science” and “How [is] giving money to women because they are women [not] sexism?”

So, to clarify the grant program’s premise and to get the information straight from the horse’s mouth, we went to Hedlund for a frank chat about why and how Etsy is singling out women for financial aid in their programming educations.

VentureBeat: Why does Etsy think it’s important to specifically reach out to women?

Marc Hedlund: While I’ve seen very small numbers of women in engineering departments elsewhere, it seems like Etsy has both a huge amount to gain from employing female developers who love and use the site, and a great platform with which to recruit women, whether engineers or otherwise. The company has historically had many very strong and talented women working with us, but not enough of them in Engineering and Operations. We felt that we had a better shot at making a meaningful difference on this issue than almost anyone out there, and that in some ways we stood to benefit more, too.

VB: What role to women play in the larger Etsy community?

MH: Women make up the majority of Etsy members, both as buyers and sellers. Hundreds of thousands of women run their businesses on Etsy. Within the company as a whole, we are fairly well balanced. Although the Engineering and Operations teams are mostly male, many of the other teams are heavily female. It’s safe to say that women play a vital part in everything that happens on the site.

I would say that this makes Etsy a great place to begin to address the larger problem across the industry.

VB: What will the summer program be like?

MH: Unlike most schools, there are no grades, teachers, or formal curricula. Instead, Hacker School is entirely project-based. Two of these rules are “No well-actuallys” and “no feigning surprise.” We don’t have these rules to make Hacker School “female-friendly.” We have these rules because we think they make Hacker School human-friendly. We have them because they help remove the ego and fear of embarrassment that so frequently get in the way of education.

Students have written Ruby gems, Python web frameworks, JavaScript libraries, and code in everything from Erlang to Haskell. Everyone writes free and open source software, because it would be antithetical to Hacker School to write code that couldn’t be read, used, and improved by others.

VB: What skill level do you need to apply? What languages do you need to know?

MH: Applicants should love programming. That’s most important. The Hacker School program spends time talking about technical problems and writing code, not working on startups and products.

They look for curiosity, passion, raw intelligence and a desire to build things. The best way to show this is to have a track record of writing code and learning new things.

Hacker School will be selecting female students the same way they’ll be selecting the men. They’re looking for people who are passionate about writing code, playing with technology, and learning in a collaborative, group environment. The Etsy grants will be given based on financial need, which will be determined on the honor code. It’s important to note that Hacker School is free. The scholarship money is meant to cover living expenses. New York City can be pricey!

Image courtesy of James Duncan Davidson, Flickr

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The original dot-com bubble was an empty canvas that quickly filled up with overnight, more-talk-than-substance sensations.

Corporate websites littered with hijacked stock photography made you seem big even though you were small. Programming teams were precariously assembled. Get them in a room together, rough out the specs, deploy some code to a set of clunky servers, and start selling scented toys for pet chihuahuas.

Back then, a team of programmers was typically relegated away from the front lines of clients and customers. Let the men and women in sharp suits with the grab-bag of buzzwords sell your product while the tech group toils away, carving out each line of code.

Programmers were also specialists. You put out casting calls for a Java developer, a PHP programmer, or an Oracle DBA. Their merit was simply defined by how well they could program.

Today, small web shops — I mean really small web shops — are building apps that reach well beyond the underground cult of web geeks. And it’s often the programming team running the show.

Take Threadless, an online T-shirt-design-competition-turned-$30-million-a-year business. Or 37signals, makers of web-based productivity apps that are used by your mom-and-pop shop as much as by a company like Adidas or Kellogg’s. Or Campaign Monitor, an email marketing software company that now boasts more than 100,000 customers.

These are the golden children of the web industry today: Web-based, programmer-driven businesses running on well fewer than 100 people. Their meteoric rise began, not with VC-funded, empty promises of business grandeur, but rather with a core group of developers building something real out of a few simple ideas. Peldi Guilizzoni left Adobe’s development team to launch Balsamiq as a one-man software company building mockup tools. Now, he runs a multi-million-dollar-a-year company, and it all started with the programmer at the helm.

Today, there are countless other small, hugely successful web shops running with fewer than a few dozen people on staff. And when you’re part of a company that small, your programmers are also your marketers, your business development people, and your customer support team. The new business programmer has to be capable of much more than simply programming.

Speak, write, support

For my company’s flagship product, DoneDone, a web-based issue tracking tool used by thousands of people in more than 60 countries, we make it clear that our developers are the customer service team. Our mugs are right there on the support page. There’s no 1-800 number, and we don’t reduce customer service to a printed manual. When a customer sends us a bug, it goes directly to one of the four of us. We try to fix problems fastidiously or offer sound short-term workarounds. It’s a very human process.

That is one of the advantages a small shop can claim over a larger one. We can afford to be personal and utterly transparent. This means that the new small business programmer has to communicate well.

Diversification over specialization

In just 15 years, we went from 56k modem connections to T1s to Wi-Fi. We went from desktops to laptops to tablets to mobile devices. We’ve gone from 800 x 600 standard resolutions to mobile screens and 1600-pixel-plus displays. We’ve evolved from static sites to Flash apps to jQuery and HTML5. Page-by-page development to MVC frameworks. Dedicated servers to spinning up servers in the Cloud.

If the first 15 years is any sign of what the next 15 will bring, the new business programmer has to maintain as much breadth as depth of expertise. When we hire new developers at my company, We Are Mammoth, we seek generalists over specialists. While we build our applications on a Microsoft technology stack, more than half of our developers came from other backgrounds (Flash/Flex, PHP, Ruby, and Python to name a few). Our front-end devs, primarily self-trained in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, are also learning how to code in C#.

What matters now isn’t which languages you’re comfortable in, but your ability to adapt to different ones. Regardless of which development stack you started on, the underlying best practices of programming are the same. The goals of a successful web app will always be fixed. Speed, features, and an intuitive UI are concepts that won’t be fading anytime soon.

The new tech buzzword of the day isn’t “cloud”, it’s “DevOps.” While the name might end up sharing space with “Information Superhighway” in our modern-day vernacular trash bin, the idea behind the DevOps movement has more staying power.

The DevOps engineer is a new breed of technical thinker, specially geared toward impacting a small-in-size business with big ideas. This kind of engineer possesses a technical mind that can look at technology in two broad vectors.

First, she’s technology agnostic. A DevOps engineer is multi-disciplinary, as comfortable with hardware infrastructure, as with database tuning, or application testing. Everything “tech” is just part of a toolset to get a solid web app off the ground.

A DevOps engineer also understands business goals. No longer are we relegating programmers to one room and the business team to the other. Today, a programmer can be equally concerned about why he’s building something as he is with what he’s building. Moving from a dedicated server environment into the cloud? Today’s programmer should be able to gather technical feasibility alongside monetary impact and business benefits. In today’s small web businesses, the hard gap between programmer mind and the business mind is quickly eroding.

So, who is the new business programmer? For starters, it’s someone whose reach goes well beyond just writing code.

Ka Wai Cheung is a programmer, designer, author, and partner at We Are Mammoth in Chicago, makers of the DoneDone issue tracker. His new book on the modern-day programmer, The Developer’s Code, is available in eBook and print.

Top image courtesy of Diego Cervo, Shutterstock

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But is Node just as good a fit for web agencies and developers that build dozens, scores, or even hundreds of sites a year?

Making the switch away from tried-and-tested platforms such as Ruby, PHP, Python or .NET for a fresh technology barely out of its infancy, especially when it’s not your product and when you’re working for global brands that simply can’t fail, is a risky proposition.

So why would you want to use Node.js? As a high-volume web agency, here are the reasons we chose to go with Node and the tips and tricks we learned along the way.

Why we chose Node.js

» It’s JavaScript!

Every developer also knows at least some JavaScript. Introducing Node.js, then, is relatively easy.

Everyone in a given web shop knows the basics and just has to learn about the event loop, callbacks and to how to use async flow control.

At our own agency, as people got to know Node, we actually saw that our browser-side JavaScript code improved in quality and structure.

» Code re-use at every level: browser, back end & database

JavaScript is the language of the browser, but JavaScript also powers many of the new NoSQL databases. We tried a couple of them for building content management system and quick fell in love with MongoDB.

MongoDB uses JavaScript for querying data, which means at the very worst that we can copy and paste code and use it in different layers of the system. What might be written as a parser for the browser might be used to format a report executed on the database.

Taking this one step further, we are standardising the include mechanism to actually reuse code and modules across the layers. This means all layers can include the same file, massively reducing the maintenance needed of code and cutting down the time required to write tests.

» Strong, responsive and enthusiastic community

IRC, meetups, bloggers, Twitter and Github are all alive with the chatter and support of Node.js. But not only are they alive; there is an excitement which you don’t normally see on this scale.

So for our developers and many others, this is an invaluable resource when bugs, issues and obstacles do occur.

» Large productivity gains in HTML & CSS using Jade & Stylus

HTML and CSS guys love working on Node because using Node means we’ll be using Jade and Stylus by TJ Holowaychuck. We loved HAML and SASS before Node.js, and now we can’t imagine using anything  other than Jade and Stylus.

» Performance and scalability

We have found that Node.js scales really well. The non-blocking event loop allows for a phenomenal amount of traffic compared to our old, highly-optimized PHP stack running through Apache.

On our first project for a national newspaper, we used a front-end nginx proxy for load balancing to the various node instances and were ready to add extra instances during the peaks caused by TV and national newspaper advertising. The peaks came but the load on the first instance stayed low.

The single Node.js instance hardly broke a sweat, despite seeing one of the highest requests per seconds we’d ever seen.

With PHP and PostgreSQL we could scale up, but it felt really hard and gave us many sleepless nights. Using Node.js with a MongoDB backend scaling up is quick and easy; but because Node can handle more traffic, you don’t need to as quickly.

» Wealth of hosting options: No.de, Joyent’s SmartMachine, Heroku, Nodejitsu

We host our production sites on our own private cloud, but for smaller companies there are many cost effective and easy to setup hosting providers. We’ve got a couple of new Node.js projects in development and will be deploying them on Joyent’s SmartMachines.

» Make your developers famous

I always try to ensure our developers work on open-source projects in contracted hours as much as possible. Encouraging them to start projects that benefit the community as well as the business.

When building projects for our clients, we look for modules that have common functionality which could be packaged up and made into open source projects:

For example, Gzippo is connect middle-ware developed by one of our staff to perform gzip compression of static assets.

We like to manage compression and expiry times of static assets in our Node.js layer because it gives us the freedom to either serve directly from Node or to stick a caching proxy in front.

This way it is served from the caching proxy for all other requests and keeps all the configuration in the Node app, meaning you only need node.js on your development machine to work on projects and do QA using Pagespeed or ySlow.

» Developer happiness

There is something intoxicating about coding JavaScript on the server side; throw in the event-loop and it’s heaven for developers. They just can’t get enough of it!

Maybe it’s because we’ve been coding PHP for such a long time, but Node.js has really inspired our developers. If you were to ask any one of them, “How do you find coding in Node.js?”, you can bet your bottom dollar you’d hear “I love it!” right back.

A sample Node development stack

This is a snapshot of our ever-evolving development stack. There are a couple of staples, but for the most part if we find something better we can just switch it out.

• Node.js

0.4.12 and 0.6.6

• Binary management: n

Point releases often break backwards compatibility. We manage our version using the excellent tool n, also by TJ Holowaychuk.

• Flow control: Async.js

Anyone wandering into the world of Node.js quickly make a choice how they are going to handle flow control. There are a number of methods out there. We’ve stuck with one of the most popular Async.js and depend on it in nearly all modules.

• HTTP, routing and view rendering: Express.js & Connect

The de facto standard Node.js web application framework is the Sinatra inspired Express.js which builds on top of the Connect middle-ware framework by Sencha Labs.

• Presentation: Jade & Stylus

We use Jade as our template engine in the view layer to generate the HTML, and we use Stylus for creating CSS. If you’ve not checked them out then you should, they are a compelling reason for using Node.js. Here is an example of the sort of thing that our designer are doing with Stylus.

• Homebrewed Node modules: Serby on Github
• We’ve built a number of Node modules which we reuse from project to project. Validation, data mapping, et cetera — Basic utility stuff that epitomizes our style of development.
• Logging: Winston

We use Winston writing to files and also pushing log data to the excellent Loggly cloud logging service, which consolidates the logs from each of our node.js instances.

• Testing: Mocha

There are a lot of testing frameworks for Node.js. Knowing which to chose it hard. We looked at a few and made the decision to go with something very simple, in this case Expresso and Should.js. New projects are now using Mocha, the successor to Expresso.

Conclusion

We are on our fifth large project with Node.js (for us, “large” is around 150 worker-days) and are continuing to support the previous projects whilst developing a handful of small and medium-size projects in between.

Less than a year has passed since we adopted Node.js, but the project stats are already looking really good. Initially, the projects we undertook did take longer as our developers learned the intricacies of Node and as we found our feet with the hosting, editors and tools needed to develop and deploy a large scale applications. However, our last project in node was actually under budget, something that rarely occurs at Clock.

Once you get used to event-based async programming, settle on a set of standard development patterns and an architectural style. You quickly start to reap the benefits of working solely in JavaScript. This makes Node.js not only fun but extremely effective to program in.

Paul Serby is CTO of Clock, a UK web agency, where he directs technology choices, architects software, manages large development projects, writes code, makes tea and preaches the virtues of good software design. Clock developed Sun Perks, one of Britian’s largest consumer facing Node.js implementations for News International. Followed shortly by another ground breaking service, the Eat Out Dining Card for The Times. Both leveraging Node.js and a whole host of young and exciting supplementary technology.<

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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If you’re a programmer, here’s an infographic of tips to help you get that job you’re looking for.

Silicon Valley has a number of resources for programmers looking to stretch their digital fingers into the startup world. These resources are cropping up now as startups multiply like that cellular reproduction video in biology class. From Apsalar to Zozi, the sheer number of startups may be intimidating to programmers on the job hunt.

So, where do you begin? First check out the type of startup you want work for. Do you want to get in on the ground floor, with a few computers in a shared workspace? Or do you want to hop on after the pieces are in place but need some tweaking to send it off to a fourth round of funding? After you’ve determined what stage of startup you’re looking for, it’s time to hone in on the right company.

Listings of startups are all over, if you look in the right places. As the infographic below shows, venture capital firms are a great place to find startups lists to help narrow down your search. You can find these on a portfolio page available on most VC websites. Some VC firms, such as First Round Capital, deal with early stage startups, while others, such as Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), focus on later stage investments. If you know what size startup you’d like to work for, discovering the kind of investments a VC firm administers will also help give your search focus.

Venture capitalists also sometimes divide themselves by type of startup. For example, if you are interested in green technology, Khosla Ventures focuses on the space.

Another place to look are startup accelerators, such as Y Combinator and 500 Startups. These companies take on startups and help them grow with both capital and advice. They provide “class” lists for each round of startups they take.

Once you’ve found a startup that appeals to you, it’s time to get the interview. Attending local hackathons will not only put your name out there, but your abilities. Hackathons attract more than just individual programmers. Startup employees also come to show their stuff, or support a cause. It’s a good arena for networking. Putting your work on GitHub acts as a digital resume, as well.

Check out the infographic below for more ways to get hired by that startup. Leave your advice/success stories in the comments.

Infographic via Monetate

At one point, Chance’s father, Jeff, found himself sitting in the principal’s office with the Spanish teacher when a wild idea struck him.

“I thought, he loves computers, why not let him pursue that instead? Why not let him take Java as a foreign language.”

In a conversation with VentureBeat, Williams, who runs a web security company, told us that he expected a negative response to the idea, but the educators were actually open to it. The school didn’t offer a Java class, so the father and son organized an independent study course, complete with a syllabus and textbook.

“It turned out to be a really wonderful choice,” said Williams.

Chance dove into the project, going through the work at a much faster pace than was expected, and was very self-directed in his studies.

“He liked it, he really latched onto the puzzle,” said Williams. “In one semester, he worked through the book. Over the summer, he did some independent projects. He wanted to write apps for his Android phone.”

Already, 500 people have downloaded Chance’s first app, Droidbox — quite a vote of confidence for a kid who was just picking up programming. Williams hopes Chance will get his Java certification by the end of 9th grade.

“Tech has always been an option, but it’s not part of the mainstream curriculum,” Williams told us.

“It’s good for our country… We’ve staked a lot of our future on our ability to be innovators, so it’s a national priority. There are good effects in building tech literacy in kids today, because if you don’t start early, you end up falling behind.”

And falling behind we are.

In 2003, the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test, showed that 15-year-old students in the U.S. lagged behind students in other nations when it came to math and science. In 2006, the National Academies publicly raised concerns about a marked decline in U.S. students’ knowledge of science, technology, math and engineering. Currently, American students rank low for math and science skills, coming in 25th in math and 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries.

Williams said when he was his son’s age, he was put through several years of French instruction, which didn’t come naturally to him and required a lot of extra mental effort. “But the discipline of learning computer languages, learning to think that way, brings critical thinking skills you can only learn that way.”

While Williams noted that programming isn’t the right choice for every student, “For those who do fall in that bucket and have skill in this area, it just makes sense to develop them early on, to get them into programming.”

Williams also thinks that having programming as a more regular part of the curriculum early on could have beneficial effects on the gender balance in the tech industry.

“I dont know why more girls don’t get into technology. It could be cultural, it could be gender bias in how classes are offered. But it is really important to encourage girls to get into technology; plenty of them have skills in this area. It is unfortunate that we’re steering so few into the top of the funnel.”

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The money is going to be used to hire new team members, according to co-founder Zack Sims, who  told VentureBeat the company is going to be looking for coders and designers to help with the rollout of new coding languages.

To coincide with their funding announcement, Codecademy launched a new programming course today written by Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger. Joining USV in the funding round are O’Reilly AlphaTech, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Chamath Palihapitiya’s  Social + Capital Partnership, Founder Collective, Michael Arringcton’s CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund as well as a star-studded list of angel investors including Vivi Nevo, Dave Morin,  Naval Ravikant, and others.

Codecademy had more than 200,000 users who had completed 2.75 million exercises when Sims and co-founder Ryan Bubinski presented their company at Y Combinator Demo Day this Summer. ”We’re not talking about users now,” said Sims, but he added, “things have not really slowed down.

A new study from Gild, a service for creating and comparing developers’ skill profiles, asserts that Chinese developers outscore U.S. developers on math and logic by 20 percent.

“Software development remains a bright spot for the U.S., with American programmers the best in the world, but is it sustainable?” ask the Gild researchers.

“To ensure this leadership for more than a generation, we urgently need to improve the quality of math skills in our schools. In fact, America should embrace and support this leadership position and introduce programming into schools.”

Gild’s study took into consideration the skill sets and levels of almost half a million developers. Altogether, the group being studied was put through more than one million tests.

For most mainstream programming languages, the American developers tested better than did the Chinese developers.

Specifically, for C, U.S. developers scored an average of 22 percent better than did the Chinese developers. For C#, the American group scored 26 percent higher; for C++, 19 percent. In Java and Oracle programming tests, the U.S.-based developers did 24 percent better on the tests than the Chinese developers did.

While it’s good for those of us living in the States that our ladies and gentlemen of a coding persuasion are keeping ahead of China, perhaps the world’s largest national workforce, in programming language knowledge, it’s disturbing to know that we’re falling behind in math and logic, two of the fundamental foundations for truly beautiful code.

“With debate raging around the need for improved focus on math and science in American high schools — a comment most recently from President Obama in his press conference last week — this data seems to support the active challenge to America’s global technology leadership,” wrote a Gild spokesperson in an email to VentureBeat.

At an education level, Americans have long known that our science and math skills are not up to snuff.

In 2003, the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test, showed that 15-year-old students in the U.S. lagged behind students in other nations when it came to math and science. In 2006, the National Academies publicly raised concerns about a marked decline in U.S. students’ knowledge of science, technology, math and engineering. Currently, American students rank low for math and science skills, coming in 25th in math and 21st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries.

So after a decade of apparently ineffective education, it’s not too surprising that today’s workforce of American engineers still trails international counterparts in subjects like science, math and logic.

“America must invest in education to stay ahead,” said the Gild researchers in a statement. “Developing nations such as China are clearly putting an immense focus on core skills, particularly math. While nothing can replace creativity and ingenuity, the United States cannot afford to ignore the fundamentals.”

Image courtesy of hygienematters.

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Cloud9

Cloud9 is a web-based programming environment for developers to create and run both web and mobile applications written in JavaScript and HTML5. The service is hosted in the cloud and lets developers access, build, edit, test, debug and share projects.

Previously, Mozilla’s SkyWriter online development environment merged with the Cloud9 service, which was also recently used for the first cloud development environment for Google Chrome OS, as well as the integration with GitHub, BitBucket and other environments.

The company said it will use the funding to consolidate its leadership in the emerging cloud-based Development as a Service (DaaS) segment of the $8B app development market. Cloud9 also plans to expand
its Amsterdam-based development team with a new U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Ajax (the company that presented Cloud9) is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is opening up App Inventor, its web software for easily creating Android apps, to everyone, the company announced yesterday in a blog post.

App Inventor launched in July, and users previously had to request an invitation to gain access to it. Now the software will drop the need for invites and move to beta status, like many Google services. By doing so, Google has enabled anyone — from novice users, to more experienced programmers — to create Android mobile apps of their own.

Google says a wide variety of users have taken advantage of App Inventor so far, building things like a vocabulary app for their kids, an app that tracks public transportation routes and a Harry Potter-themed marriage proposal app. With the software, users can drag and drop blocks of code to build their app, so they don’t need programming knowledge to use the software.

DIY, or do-it-yourself, technology is a growing trend these days. As VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi previously wrote, “Microsoft has made similar efforts, offering tools to help any user create video games that can run on the Xbox 360. And Maker Faire has become a celebration of the whole movement.” App Inventor’s accessibility also sits in stark contrast to Apple’s app development environment, which requires annual fees and adherence to Apple’s rules.

You can see the software demonstrated in a video below.