Code School transition woes

July 1, 2018 · 2 min read

In this blog post on January 26 2015, Code School became part of Pluralsight. The website codeschool.com continued to operate normally until earlier this year when a banner showed the site would shut down and transition to Pluralsight June 1st. The banner pointed to this url, which gives a great overview of the changes but was sparse on what would take place during the transition.

It wasn't until June 1st that I finally understood the full breadth of the transition and stumbled upon the integration faqs. The important bit of information is this snippet:

Will I be able to access my Code School invoices or course history?

No. Your invoices and course history will not carry over or be accessible as of 6/1.

Code School customers were instructed to generate a PDF of their profile before the migration. Due to finding the integration FAQs after June 1st, sadly I wasn't able to do that in time.

What particularly impacts me the most is a belief that pointing potential employers to a reputable website as a source of truth carries far more weight than a PDF that can be altered. As a web developer in an industry where employers seem to assume a resume is partially or wholly embellished, this seems like a step backwards.

In spite of the transition pains, I do find Pluralsight's Skill IQ to be a fresh way to measure competency with multiple choice questions that cover broad aspects of a given topic. You're shown what is marked wrong so you can learn from your mistake and the equivalent of the old Code School subscription I believe allows unlimited retests. The integration with Stack Overflow's developer story is compelling enough to use it and I did gain quite a sense of accomplishment when I scored in the very low expert level range.

As I finished typing this up I noticed Pluralsight seems to have a fair number of the Code School courses by searching for the keyword "Code School". There are newer interactive courses like the one titled HTML 5 and CSS 3: Overview of Tag, Attribute and Selector Additions but the introductory video includes the Front End Formations title that it was called on Code School. It appears that some of the content is migrating over but things aren't 1:1 so we may never get credit for courses we've essentially completed. I plan on going through the course shortly as I hope at least the challenges have been updated but it would be a terrible experience to go through all of this realizing I've accomplished it recently.

I don't quite know how I feel about the transition a month in and now after noticing at least some of the content was moved over. It's hard to lose the accomplishments but the outcome would've been no different if Code School closed completely. It does have me pause to make sure the course accomplishments I share are worth the investment and that's likely an important thing to remember whenever similar services catch my attention.