Posts from Programming

After School Programming

I remember when I was in high school. A friend of mine and I stayed after school and built a rudimentary football game on a TRS80 using Basic. It was the first actual coding I had ever done. I didn't get into more serious stuff until college.

I honestly can't remember if we had a teacher supervising us or not. I don't even remember the name of my friend who I did this with. The whole thing is fuzzy. It was almost 35 years ago.

But those fuzzy memories came back into focus for a second yesterday when I saw that our portfolio company Codecademy launched After School Programming Clubs. Like its Code Year initiative, After School Programming Clubs is a packaging innovation more than anything else. It takes the core Codecademy software learning tools and packages them up so that students and teachers can organize after school programming clubs.

Although Codecademy now supports a number of languages, they are using their Javascript and HTML stuff for After School Programming Clubs. Here's a snapshot of the idea:

After school
If you have students or teachers in your life that would want to create an After School Programming Club, send them here to get started.

#hacking education#Web/Tech

Building The Best Java Team In NYC

For the past two years, I have had the benefit of watching a team of serial founders build one of most exciting new companies in our portfolio. It is a company that not many people know about but they haven't been working in stealth mode. Just heads down mode.

This company is called Workmarket and they are building a marketplace for labor. They have been fully launched since the summer and they already have over 12,000 professionals working across a dozen industries in their marketplace. This kind of business scales and scales and scales. The amount of jobs, work, and payment that flows through this platform every month is already bigger than almost every one of our portfolio companies' payroll. And that is in just four or five months of being fully live.

But this post is really not about Workmarket, it is about the dev team they are building in NYC. They have a small but super strong engineering team. And they recently made a decision to "double down on java" and they are hell bent to build the best java team in NYC. If you like working in java and want to be part of such a team and build a platform that creates work and pay for people, then you should drop into their office smack in the middle of the Flatiron district and talk to them.

Best way to do that is drop me an email and I'll connect you with them.

#NYC#Web/Tech