This is less of a “Follow Friday” and more of a “Sign up for it Monday.” I have been looking to expand my technology skill set since working with some really useful JavaScript tools during my digital history seminar. The more invested in the digital humanities I become, the more I believe that I need to learn how to code. Some tenured professors can build sites without coding (because someone else will build it for them), but as a graduate student, if I want to have a digital project, I need to build it. I was pointed to Codecademy by a friend (not to be confused with Code Academy). Codecademy’s short exercises make jumping in and out of learning easy, which is great for fitting learning code into busy schedules. It also uses achievements, badges, and a point system. Though I am not really sure what any of these mean right now, I am excited to see a badge system for this type of open learning because it gives me concrete benchmarks that help show my acquisition of skills. Codecademy also has a Code Year initiative, during which they will send you a weekly exercise to complete. A weekly reminder should prove quite valuable as encouragement (or at least remind me what I am not doing and then guilt me into completing the exercises). There are plenty of other free online resources (including the Rubyist Historian), though for a beginning programmer, the step by step exercise of Codecademy provide a great starting point.