I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.

Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!

Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.

Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode

!rant about Codecademy:

I decided to go a short, higher-level JavaScript course with Codecademy to help me nail down a few concepts and approaches to writing JavaScript code.

It turned out to be one of the best courses I've done. It didn't cover everything in detail. It is free so I wasn't expecting that.

Still, the topics it covered, it covered pretty well, and the hand-holding approach really helped give me a much better grasp of these concepts and models.

Well worth the time!

I'm so fed up with Codecademy. I payed for the pro, and I admit I haven't been able to consistently use it everyday as I would like. But every fucking time I would be on a lecture of some sort, I swear to fucking to christ it's the most buggy, uninformative piece of shit! And everytime you're in deep into subjects, the information is beyond unclear!

AND GOD FORBID YOU NEED A FUCKING HINT! they leave you to dry saying in the hint that "Look back at the previous sections" or "try to remember the steps you've learned"

No you stupid fucking bitch for a site. I clicked on the hint because I needed an answer as to what I'm doing wrong, and to something that can stir me in the right path. My god....I feel so stupid for giving PRO a chance. I thought maybe it would be nice to have some sort of professional site would be useful.

I swear this early afternoon I was spending fucking forever on the first few lectures of HTML trying to figure out what the actual fuck is wrong with the system fucking up not letting me change directories. And the community was no help whatsoever to the issues at hand.

Again, why the fuck is Codecademy so goddamn buggy!? Sure it may be a fun site to fuck around with to get your feet wet on the free version. But is it too much to ask for some good actual lessons that are being payed for!?

Idk anymore. I'm sticking to just YouTube and other free help. This is the last time I spend a fucking penny to any site that's supposed to teach something valuable.

I feel so upset because I feel like I wasted my money and time on something that I thought could've helped a lot.

If anyone was asking if PRO is worth it....definitely not! Please don't waste money with it! Don't make my mistakes, stick to YouTube and other free sources! The least I can do is warn people about spending money on this site. Trust me it's not worth it. It may not seem bad in the beginning, but once you go deeper it becomes clear the issues.

If anything stick to only free!!