One of the games for developers from Codingame. © DR
Codingame is a start-up from Montpellier that brings together online thousands of amateur developers or hackers, to play. Or rather to learn and improve themselves at coding, even find a job, via a fun interface in Scratch manner.
A start-up in Montpellier based on a serious game that manages to raise 1.5 million euros with the same investor as Blablacar is the nice story of Codingame. Originally, the desire of Frédéric Desmoulins, computer engineer who has a passion for Python, Ruby, Java, to be able to code all the time, for pleasure, to progress. In 2012, he surrounds himself with two fellow students he met at Oxford University in Great Britain, Nicolas Antoniazzi for technical issues and Aude Barral for marketing, to begin the Codingame adventure, the platform of which is online since September 2014.
“Codingame steps in to take over from code learning platforms for beginners. The idea is to offer developers who have already acquired the basics a panel of fun diversified contents to train themselves and gain new skills.”
Aude Barral, co-founder of Codingame
The principle is simple: Codingame sets the scene in a video game manner and it’s up to you to move forward by writing code. Among the 26 languages available, choose between several levels of difficulty applied to different options: from individual play, to multi-player challenge, including five minute battles or a small brain-teaser to solve during a coffee break. All the coding takes places directly through the browser, with a visualization window of actions in real-time, that spares you from having to compile.
“It ranges from the basic exercise consisting of emerging from a maze to the coding of your own artificial intelligence where you can virtually create the behavior of your bot. Everything is possible and this is what makes the game so enthralling!”
Aude Barral, co-founder of Codingame
Presentation of Codingame:
The platform, launched a year and a half ago, asserts it has a community of 300,000 coders in more than 165 countries (and is contemplating reaching one million users within the space of a year). 60% of players are advanced developers, the rest are students, graduates, self-taught geeks and even curious high school students. A network of partnerships is also in place with code learning schools and short courses.
An Employment Office for coders
And since Codingame brings together a large number of developers, it organizes online programming competitions (the last competition brought together 6,000 contestants on the theme Code vs Zombies), sponsored by companies from the Frenchtech scene. Nintendo, Ubisoft, Dassault Systèmes or still Blablacar have already taken part in the events in order to spot their future recruits, judged on their actual skills.
“There are more job offers than developers and it is sometimes difficult to recruit candidates with the appropriate profiles. We allow companies to get in touch with challengers whose anonymous code is their CV.”
Aude Barral, co-founder of Codingame
Buoyed by its second fundraising at the end of 2015, the Start-up from Montpellier is nurturing an American dream, the first stage of which will take place in February in San Francisco. The threesome will present exclusively at Developerweek, the coders’ great event, a new artificial intelligence game.
Next online challenge on February 27th with a “Star Wars” background