Today’s a special day for us at Codecademy for two reasons.

First, we’re excited to officially welcome Amjad Masad to the team. In a way, you could say that Amjad has always been a part of Codecademy. Ryan and I first got in touch with him after stumbling across his open source console project, jqConsole, this August. We were just beginning to hack together our first iteration of the site, and needed a console for people to interact with. As it turns out, jqConsole was just what we needed (it still powers the Codecademy console today).

But we soon realized that, while his project was great, Amjad was even better. So far, we’ve interviewed hundreds of engineers as part of our search to find the next awesome additions to the Codecademy team (if think you could be one of them, check out our jobs page, but none have stood out as much as Amjad. He is incredibly talented, experienced, and as dedicated as we are to advancing education online. Not to mention he’s just a cool guy (which we found out when we flew halfway across the world to Jordan, his home country, to spend a few days with him).

Second, we’re also excited to announce one of the first (of many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online. Now, after you learn with Codecademy courses, you can use Codecademy Labs to create your own programs, share them via Twitter and Facebook, and show your friends what you’ve learned. Another special thing about Labs is that it runs entirely on the client side, meaning you can use it when your computer is disconnected from the internet.

(You’ll probably notice, too, that we’ve included Ruby and Python in Codecademy Labs but we don’t have any courses for those topics yet. Know that it’s just as big of a priority for us as it is for you, and stay tuned for some news on that front soon)

This is the start of an awesome next few weeks for us at Codecademy, full of more courses, more features, and more learning. Check back soon for more and, as always, let us know what you think!