I’m in love with this music video my friends Sumul and Neil made for their band, Wildlife Control. Incredibly, though, it’s not actually a video at all: the entire thing is an all-HTML5 pixel art masterpiece, driven off the SoundCloud API. Click through to the video of their single “Analog or Digital,” hit play, and prepare to be amazed.

I’m in love with this music video my friends Sumul and Neil made for their band, Wildlife Control. Incredibly, though, it’s not actually a video at all: the entire thing is an all-HTML5 pixel art masterpiece, driven off the SoundCloud API.

Click through to the video of their single “Analog or Digital,” hit play, and prepare to be amazed.

Every night, I record the story of my day and send it to Erik as a private track on SoundCloud. He listens later at night on the West Coast or early in the morning. This is one of the things we do to stay close while we’re far apart. (San Francisco and Boston, while I’m away at school.) So every night I record a new track, and every track has a number; last night’s was #87. But sometimes I miss a number, or use one twice. So to practice Ruby and to solve the problem in a satisfying way, I wrote this script to automatically increment tracks above or below a certain threshold. (The gist on GitHub.) Here’s the thing: much of my life online is stored on sites with great APIs—Twitter, SoundCloud, even Tumblr. To be able to play with that data programmatically is a powerful, mind-bending experience. I love sites like RubyMonk and Codecademy for learning programming, but there’s nothing like solving a real problem you really have with a few lines of code. APIs connect what I want to do with what I want to learn.

Every night, I record the story of my day and send it to Erik as a private track on SoundCloud. He listens later at night on the West Coast or early in the morning. This is one of the things we do to stay close while we’re far apart. (San Francisco and Boston, while I’m away at school.)

So every night I record a new track, and every track has a number; last night’s was #87. But sometimes I miss a number, or use one twice. So to practice Ruby and to solve the problem in a satisfying way, I wrote this script to automatically increment tracks above or below a certain threshold. (The gist on GitHub.)

Here’s the thing: much of my life online is stored on sites with great APIs—Twitter, SoundCloud, even Tumblr. To be able to play with that data programmatically is a powerful, mind-bending experience. I love sites like RubyMonk and Codecademy for learning programming, but there’s nothing like solving a real problem you really have with a few lines of code.

APIs connect what I want to do with what I want to learn.

As we did our diligence and talked to “real developers” about Codecademy nearly everyone of them was dismissive of the idea. “Real developers” would never actually learn to code by typing into a browser. “Real developers” needed classic training on foundational principles not some web based toy. Besides, they said, the lessons are so basic they only scratch the surface of what it takes to write real code. Oh, and a bunch of people have tried the “writing code in a browser” thing before and it’s never worked.

That feedback may have scared off others but it sounded like disruption to us.

BRYCE DOT VC: Our Investment in Codecademy

For me, setting up my development environment was the most formidable barrier to learning to code. Coding in the browser tears down that barrier. I’d encourage everyone to take Codecademy and RubyMonk for a spin. Quick wins build momentum, and momentum is what it takes to reach escape velocity.

For more background on disruptive technologies, check out this classic Clay Christensen talk recently unearthed by Horace Dediu at Asymco.