First off, I'm going to thank Muz and Raken for giving me the opportunity to run the Shadow Academy. I spent a year and a half helping Anshar and Aabs as Praetor to the Headmaster, and this institution means a lot to me. It's great to be back, and I appreciate the trust that has been placed in me. I also want to thank Solari for doing a fantastic job of bringing the SA alive on the new website. Unfortunately, now my office smells like a dirty lightsider and I will have to spend extra time plotting and brooding to clear the air. :P

Second, who am I? I'm Dacien Victae di Plagia, most recently Aedile and then Proconsul of that Clan over there. Before that, I was lazy for a long time, kind of like a certain beer-guzzling-polar-Panda I know. But back even before that, in the long, long ago, I held all sorts of jobs from BTL to CON, RHoJ, and P:HM. Now, though, I'm the new Headmaster.

In the next few weeks I hope to launch some new courses that are very near completion and get to work on courses that currently look nice on paper. :P But the first thing I'm going to do is happening right now.

A few codemonkeys-in-training have pointed out that starting this month, Udacity, the source of the courses and certificates required to earn a Dark Maven or Savant in Programming, is shifting to a new business model that will elimiante the free certificates currently offered. Assuming that our members do not, in fact, want to pay to earn degrees (let me know if I'm wrong -- I will gladly take all your moneys), and after consulting with my good friends in the Seneschal's Office, I have identified a new provider of free online programming training: codecademy.

codecademy offers interactive courses in HTML & CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, and Python as well as a number of directed projects that build on skills acquired in their courses. Creating an account is free, quick, and best of all (for me) publically available account information allows the HM staff to quickly verify completion of a given course.

Effective immediately, the following changes are being made to the Shadow Academy's programming degrees:

Dark Maven - Programming (MVPR) is retired.

Two new Dark Mavens are created: Dark Maven - Web Design (MVWD): Complete the Prototyping Exercise and the HTML & CSS course. Dark Maven - Web Scripting (MVWS): Complete the JavaScript and jQuery courses.

Dark Savant - Programming (SVP) now requires completion of both new programming Mavens as well as the completion of the Ruby, PHP, or Python course (you only need one!).

No changes are being made to the Dark Sage - Programming requirement. You'll still need to toil for James to get that one. :P

So how do you pick up a degree after completing the requirements listed above? You send an email to me and Ood with a link to your codecademy profile. The profile will show us that you have actually completed the courses and we will manually award you the appropriate degree.

Very Important: Be sure that the name on your codecademy profile matches your DJB name as closely as possible (e.g., my profile).

The Wiki will be updated to reflect the changes shortly.

If anyone is currently working on completing one of the Udacity courses, get in touch with me and we will figure out how to handle your case (I promise to be nice).