1. A little about CodeGym
CodeGym is a legendary company. 😎 It appeared in the fall of 2012 and quickly gained popularity. Learning at CodeGym was warm and cozy: adventures and conversations with characters from “Futurama,” a gamified learning format, and a very large community whose members actively helped each other.
The CodeGym project also stood out for its strong emphasis on practice. In 2015 the course included 1,200 practical tasks with auto-checking, requirements, and recommendations. You could solve tasks both through the WebIDE (a special widget on the site) and via a plugin for the professional development environment IntelliJ IDEA.
A particular point of pride was creating a super-effective Help department. Every time a user asked a question about a task, the following were automatically added to it: the task statement, the status of its requirements, and the user’s code, which was displayed in a very handy widget.
2. Expansion
In 2018 under the CodeGym brand, our CodeGym became available worldwide. Today the course has been translated into 30 languages and has a lot of students from the US, Mexico, Germany, India, and China.
One school in the US even put up a CodeGym thank-you plaque on the street next to the school’s name.
Beyond the plaque, we have plenty more to show.
For example, photos with thanks from Croatian school students. Or prizes from American college students, happy participants of a robotics contest in the US, photos of McDonough School students who, after completing CodeGym, took 1st place in Java at a Lockheed Martin contest, photos of people in India who came to our in-person programming lectures and then took the online course.
The photos show the scale—and it’s all real.
3. CodeGym University
In the fall of 2021 the CodeGym team launched a new learning format—CodeGym University. Our goal was not to graduate beginners, but people as close as possible to a Middle Developer. Such people can both handle any job with ease and find one.
The new learning format was based on the following key points:
- Training lasts 12 months.
- The curriculum is as close as possible to job openings on the labor market.
- Learning in small groups with a mentor.
- The ability to study fully online.
- The pace of learning is set by the mentor: there are timelines and deadlines.
- Lots of practice and large projects.
- A very large capstone project.
- Training in all the nuances of job search and interviewing.
The new approach to learning turned out to be very effective. First, mentors set the pace of learning, which helps most people avoid laziness or burnout. Each project has reasonable timelines and deadlines, and mentors are ready to adapt to students’ needs.
Second, the mentors are folks with extensive experience in development and teaching. They were given a lot of creative freedom, which strongly boosted students’ motivation. If a mentor’s eyes light up, over time their students’ eyes start to shine too.
Third, there’s a strong emphasis on practice. The Fullstack Software Engineer course contains up to 2,000 practical tasks that can be solved through the WebIDE or the IntelliJ IDEA plugin. There are also 10 projects and one truly gigantic capstone project.
Perhaps that’s why half of CodeGym University graduates get hired straight into mid-level roles. On the other hand—why not, if some mentors manage to explain Docker, the cloud, and even microservices to their students. If cloning were legal, we would have cloned such mentors long ago. 😅
4. Java Software Engineer Course
If you’re reading these lines, it means that in the summer of 2025 we launched our Java 25 course!
Over the past few years Java has been changing very actively, and we regularly received questions from students: are we planning to launch a course on modern Java—or better yet, a full-fledged Fullstack Java Developer program? After all, right now, with knowledge of all the new features, it’s easier for Java developers to find interesting and well-paid work.
Why not! CodeGym already has a Java course, but that doesn’t stop us from creating it again. In September 2025 a new Java version is expected—Java 25 LTS. A perfect reason to update the classic Java course.
We carefully studied all the innovations in Java 17–25 and compiled the most up-to-date learning plan for Java 25. Officially, Java 25 will be released only in the fall of 2025, so by the time you finish the course, you’ll know all the newest Java features. ✅
We named the course Java 25 Software Engineer. At the core of the program is an in-depth study of Java 17–25 syntax, modern OOP, collections, and the Stream API. Also included are working with files, serialization, multithreading, virtual threads, and asynchrony. Okay, no more spoilers—you’ll see everything for yourself. 😎
GO TO FULL VERSION