What? Another blog so soon? Yeah, we can’t publish this thing with just a single lame post, can we? As I’m writing this, my 11-yo son is playing Overwatch online, and there’s some other kid playing that’s squealing like a pig somewhere in the world, with his headset and mic. The graphics are insane, and I’m feeling like I’m an Overwatcher (whatever that means). Kinda funny, but really reminds me how far coding has come since I first started coding in middle school. I seem to remember a little bit of BASIC, an Atari 800, and coding my first pixel-based Paint app. MAN, I was proud of that app!
Anyway, I digress. Why are we blogging? Well, for SEO of course! You can’t say we’re not all about transparency here. SEO, for those who haven’t heard, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is basically the question of “how do I rank higher when someone searches for me?”. And so while we definitely hope to entertain and inform you, our main purpose is a little more self-serving (some may say nefarious!)!
We recently hooked up with some awesome folks at newmedia, an SEO consultancy, and just had our first meeting where they were going to tell us all the ways we could get our page ranking up in Google. After paying them a big chunk of money, I was expecting some sweet revelations about what we could edit and click here and there and presto, up goes our Google page rank! Well, turns out it doesn’t work that way. We were ranking decently well it turned out, and turns out lots of people are searching for learning to code, coding for kids, or kids coding schools. (see how I did that? I put in some sweet key words to this blog so Google can find me better!). But the biggest output after tossing them a few G’s? We need to write blogs!
“Wait! That takes WORK, doesn’t it?”, I asked. “Wait, don’t people usually just outsource this stuff?”, I continued. “Wait, engineers like me aren’t good at writing, are we?”, I complained. Rhetorical questions aside, we had a good logical-thinking contest between Wayne and I, and came up with the answer – we needed to suck it up and blog like a mother.
Part of the awesomeness of this business is that Wayne and I meet up once a week at some sunny outdoors place in the Bay Area, and catch up on status of our respective parts. Wayne talks coding curriculum and operations, and I talk school franchising and learning strategy. Yeah, there’s a lot of business involved. But you can bet two best friends who used to be in a punk-pop band together are talking other crazy (i.e., inappropriate!) stories too. Can you imagine having a fun low-stress weekly meeting with your best friend for work that you love? It’s the most kick-butt experience ever.
We decided this blog would be the PERFECT opportunity for us to document all the stupid ideas, funny stories, and lessons learned we’ve had while teaching thousands of kids to program a computer in some way. We can look back fondly when we’re on our death bed and go “Remember that time you farted at the IFA conference right before that VP came up to you and shook your hand?”. And while we’re at it, hopefully we’ll get some better SEO too! So you ready to find out more about starting a coding school? About how we teach kids to love computers and programming? Of course you are. Read on.
