He had me at "Forget Codecademy". Right on!

Here’s why Codecademy doesn’t work in the long term:

• You’re coding in a browser which you literally never do outside of Codecademy. Learning the syntax of JavaScript, Python, or Ruby is good but that’s about all you get out of the program, in my opinion. You’ll learn these skills elsewhere.

• You don’t know how to set up a development environment. Any time you have the slightest inkling to build something for yourself leveraging what you’ve learned in Codecademy, you can’t and probably don’t know where to start.

• You’ll need to go through the process of setting up your dev environment which can be incredibly challenging for someone with very little coding experience.