Code School

» see codeschool.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Envy Labs was a Rails consultancy in Orlando that grew to about sixteen people, and like every consultancy it had the problem of being paid only for the hours it worked. On 18 November 2010 its founder Gregg Pollack published a free tutorial called Rails for Zombies: five short videos, a browser-based exercise after each one, and a running joke about the undead holding the whole thing together. It was marketing. It worked far too well to stay marketing.

Code School came out of that the following year, and the format never really changed afterward. You watched a few minutes of someone explaining a concept, then you were dropped into a code editor in the page that ran your answer and told you whether it was right, with no local setup and nothing to install. The courses were built as themed worlds with their own artwork, which sounds like a gimmick and was the reason people finished them. Try Git, built with GitHub, taught a generation of developers their first commit.

Consulting revenue paid for the first years. By the time Pluralsight came to the table the business was doing around five million dollars a year on its own, with thirty-nine people in Orlando and a logo wall on the homepage that had NASA and IBM and the New York Times on it. The acquisition was announced on 26 January 2015 for $36 million, the sixth deal Pluralsight had done in eighteen months.

~ the record ~

~ the zombies ~

The thing worth remembering about Rails for Zombies is how unusual free was in 2010. Programming education at the time meant buying a book or buying a conference ticket. A five-part course with real production on it, given away with no email wall in front, was close to unheard of, and the reason it could exist is that the people making it had a consultancy paying their salaries while they did it.

I was already working as an engineer by the time any of this existed, which puts me on the wrong side of the product. Code School was for people entering, and I was not entering. What I can say honestly is that the browser-editor format it standardized is the one everybody teaching code now uses, including for things I have had to learn since.

~ what moved and what did not ~

Pluralsight ran Code School as its own brand for three years, publishing one Pluralsight course a week onto the Code School platform for a stretch and opening the free Code School courses to Pluralsight subscribers. Then on 1 June 2018 the site was retired and the accounts were moved across.

Some of the courses made the trip and some did not; the migration was never one for one. Invoices and completion history did not come across at all, which meant that if you had spent two years working through the badges, your proof of having done it stopped existing on the day of the move. The forum threads from that week are mostly people asking where their progress went.

~ the redirect ~

The Internet Archive has the complete working site on 31 May 2018 at 22 kilobytes. On 3 June the same address is a 301 into pluralsight.com/codeschool and never serves a page again. Nothing in between: no farewell, no countdown banner, no goodbye post on the homepage.

codeschool.com still redirects today, eight years later, into a Pluralsight landing page that now sits behind a bot wall. The logo on the final version of the site reads "Code School, a Pluralsight company" in small type under the wordmark, which is the only part of the ending the brand ever announced about itself.

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