Monthly Archives: August 2012

We announced Python in beta a month ago. The Python track is well loved, but there have been some problems with stability. We’ve been working on fixing these issues.

From a security perspective, running other people’s code (that means you!) on our servers is a nightmare! At this point you may have an understanding of just how powerful a skill programming can be — this is why we’ve set out to teach the world to code. Unfortunately, giving someone such power over your servers can be potentially dangerous.

Without proper precautions, malicious users could gain access to sensitive information or take down our services, denying other students the ability to learn at Codecademy. We take your security very seriously and, thus, place a premium on security over reliability. So, when it came time to approach our issues present in our platform, it was a no brainer — we opted to simplify the service in such a way that would guarantee security at the expense of slightly less stable service.

For the time being, the service is, for the most part, quite stable. From our monitoring we’ve observed around 95% uptime. Unfortunately, that 5% downtime means interrupted student sessions, and for that we are deeply sorry. We’ve been working hard to bring the service out of beta — a feat we hope to accomplish soon.

We appreciate all the help & reports we’ve received – you can let us know about any issues you run into with Python in this topic.

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Points on Codecademy are a great way to keep track of your progress as a learner. Currently, we keep track of the total points you have earned on the site — you can view that number in either your user badge in the header bar or on the right hand side of your profile.

In addition to tracking your long term learning goals through total points, we have added the ability to track how much material you have covered each day with daily points tracking. From now on you can see how many points you have earned today through your user badge, as well as in your profile. Your profile will also keep track of your ‘daily high score’ — the maximum number of points you have earned in a single day. There may even be some achievements lurking for your big days!

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