Founder of Code Academy (now The Starter League) here. Thanks for clarifying this! It seems we'll never live it down. Happy to share more about our experience and how we dealt with the conflicting name.
We definitely have an affinity towards our original Code Academy brand, but unfortunately we had some confusing overlap with another awesome company - Codecademy. Zach Sims and his team are great and he and I have been good friends since we've discussed how to resolve our name confusion. I'm happy that we'll be able to support each other going forward. We encourage our students to use resources like theirs and Treehouse in order to prepare for some of our in-person courses.
As far as the name change not having the same semantic meaning, I completely agree, however "teaching people to code" was never our only purpose. We wanted to provide a path for people who wanted to start change -- in their industries, in their communities, in their lives. To us, being a Starter means so much more than just being able to write code; it's about being driven to do something meaningful with it. A Starter is an innovator, a disruptor; someone who is burning to solve problems and is willing to bust their ass to learn what they need in order to do so.
We are also not a place that you visit for three months to acquire a skill and then leave. You don't just attend, graduate, and then disconnect. To be a member of The Starter League means to have earned a permanent place in a team of people dedicated to supporting one another in ongoing efforts to learn and build, to solve meaningful problems for ourselves and others.
We are not simply an academy for coders. We are a League of Starters.
We're very supportive of Shereef and his team at DevBootcamp. Thankfully we've got the Ruby Dojo http://starterleague.com/dojo (which also sports an 8:1 student/instructor ratio) this quarter which serves a similar audience to DevBootcamp's cohort with training for people aspiring to become software engineers. And class/hours/ratio comparison is a bit different, since it's a full time commitment for our students as they often work in our space at http://1871.com 24/7 and practice around the clock with mentors, fellow students, and the many startups that are looking for development support. While we aren't explicitly jobs/placement focused, our outcomes have been similar to that of DevBootcamp for our students that have aspirations to become software engineers.
The application at http://starterleague.com/apply is the first step. As we review applications we choose people to interview either in person, via skype, or by phone. We are looking for passionate and persistent people that are willing to spend three intense, immersive months in Chicago.
It's also constant. Every single time someone tweets/blogs/talks about Codecademy they say Code Academy. It's inevitably followed by "actually it's Codecademy".
It's a distraction from what otherwise seems to be a great idea.
I seem to remember codeacademy being owned by someone else, a squatter or an entrepreneur who hadn't got around to doing tomething with it. If I do in fact remember this correctly, one explanation would be that they bought that domain after they'd received more investment money than they started out with.
"squatter" - although the term is commonly used in the way you used it (and always has been) the usage is an invention of the 90's media. Squatting actually involves occupying property of someone else that you don't have right to in any way (and you don't have permission) that isn't being used. The person who takes a chance and buys a name pays for it and at the time it wasn't in use by anyone else. The practice of using the derogatory word "squatting" to describe legitimate buying of a domain name with the hopes of reselling is something that should end.
Our top Code Academy student Geoff Massanek had 2-3 years industry experience (and had even been dabbling in rails for 9 months before) and got a ton out of the program. You can check out his perspective on the experience here http://refactoree.tumblr.com/
Getting hired isn't always the goal, and some people (people who didn't have the luxury of a CS degree and/or college) want a better place to seriously get started once they exhaust online tutorials and books.
It's all about what the needs and expectations of the individual is - and properly setting them. As one of the founders of http://codeacademy.org I can say first-hand that it is possible to get people to a point where they are happy with their progress. But rather than asserting - our students' own perspectives is the actual evidence: http://codeacademy.org/culture
If anyone would like to know more about our experience starting and running this program - I'd love to help you however I can. It's great that there are so many people getting passionate about the issue of educating more people on how to solve problems through software.
You have to be kidding me. How hard is it to distinguish Code Academy from codecademy in Neal's comment? Neal just referenced Code Academy multiple times in this comment, but you put codecademy?
Not only that, but the two companies couldn't be anymore different. If you truly love what Neal is doing, you would know that you have not completed the program, because that would mean that you are a student in Chicago who is currently 8 weeks through the Code Academy program.
We can disagree about what approach is the best to take when teaching people how to code, but we can at get the names of companies and what they do right.
Thought that your link was pointing at the OP's site until I followed it. The parent's link is to code<b>a</b>cademy.org, the OP's link is to codecademy.org (No 'a').
