It’s a great time to be a programmer right now, for many reasons — one of which is the wide variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that are available that allow developers to build applications with sophisticated features more quickly and easily than ever.
Codecademy, the startup that aims to teach people everywhere how to code, wants to help make those APIs even more accessible. Today Codecademy is announcing that it has partnered with a number of established web companies to offer a host of new lessons that concentrate on the basics of building with their specific APIs.
Codecademy first launched API lessons last month, but this release brings a number of new big name API providers to the mix. Codecademy now has lessons for building with APIs from Twitter, Evernote, Box, and Gilt. The full list of Codecademy’s new API partners is rounded out by WePay, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, Github, MailChimp, and Dwolla.
What can be done with these types of APIs is significant, Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims told me. “Within a few minutes of starting lessons on Codecademy, users can do a few really awesome things,” he says. The Twitter API lesson teaches users how to read twitter from the code editor and create their own tweets, while the WePay and Dwolla APIs let users send money from the code editor and create invoices, for just a couple examples.
It’s a nice update from Codecademy, which has steadily iterated on its platform since its August 2011 launch and now has 17 staffers and $12.5 million in VC funding. Updates such as these makes the Codecademy platform a more robust one not just for beginning programmers, but also for people with a bit more experience that are keen to learn new things.
Check out the full list of new API lessons here.
