by @CodyBrown
This past week, Kate and I demoed scroll kit to the NYTM. We’ve kept development of scroll kit pretty quiet so it was both frightening and thrilling to finally show the site to 1,000 + nerds at the same time. We had three minutes to pull off the demo and I was happy to see that much of the response was exactly what we hoped it would be and also surprised to see that some, who were particularly enthusiastic, cast us as a competitor to an entirely different product—codecademy.
I found these tweets amusing and RTed them, zach sims (the founder of codecademy) and chris dixon, did not as much.
I agree that the products are entirely different but I do see why others make the connection. Interest in coding has surged in the past few years but the concepts required to write even basic html/css are as alien as they’ve ever been. The difference between a div class and a div id or relative positioning vs. absolute positioning are the kind of brutal lessons that first timers slog through and few master (and that’s the simple stuff). It has become a lot easier to learn to code on the internet but it still takes a significant investment of time and patience. Many try, then get frustrated with it, then look for a way out.
So one way to help them is to make learning how to code accessible and another is to take coding out of the website building process. There are natural limitations to each approach and for that reason, they will never cancel each other out, but the technology that supports each will vastly improve over the next few years. So two predictions that may seem at odds with each other initially but actually are not:
In three years…
1.) More people will know advanced programming languages and the skill will be as rewarded as it is today.
2.) More people will build and maintain websites on their own without writing a line of the code that powers them.
At scroll kit, we’re focused on making the latter a reality. The web has had ‘website builder’ websites for most of its existence but they’ve always been template based and that often just doesn’t work for people who want a unique website. Developments in frontend technologies have made it possible to build a website builder in a new way. A central tenet of our design is that templates aren’t required. With scroll kit, you can start with a blank page then build the entire site in the browser.
Our beta is public and you can check out a live preview of the editing interface if you have chrome.
We’re also looking to bring on the third member of our team. Send me an email ( codyvbrown ‘at’ gmail.com )
Watch our 3 minute demo to NYTM here: http://bit.ly/zsHNWK
