Who The Heck Is Codango? Good Question!
Our “dress shirt and tie” answer to that is we are an Industry Review and Resource Guide to the web development community. If you catch us in our favorite jeans and sandals though, we’d just tell you that we love getting the inside scoop on all the latest web development resources, testing them and sharing them with you all.
What Does Codango Do?
Simply put, we provide a resource guide driven by user reviews and social favorites, we do formal lab reviews of web development resources based on hands-on testing, and we provide commentary on community news and events.
What Do You Hope to Accomplish?
We not only want to make it easier for web developers to find and evaluate resources, we want to make web development exciting again! Web development is not just a job or hobby for most people; it’s a creative outlet. There is nothing we love to do more than feed that passion. We hope to inspire web developers every day with new resources, reviews and buzz that gets their wheels turning and excited about all the possibilities.
The History Behind Codango
Codango was launched into Public Beta on June 11th 2007, but the story started almost 8 years earlier with the launch of Aspin.com, Jspin.com and 411asp.net. Codango evolved out of the success of these previous sites and our desire to expand on our passions and take the idea of web development resources to a whole new level.
The idea for our first web development resource site was conceived by Pedro Pequeno in November of 1998 on the Penn State University campus. At the time, Pedro was a senior in Electrical Engineering with a passion for Perl/CGI-based web development (the most popular server-side platform at the time).
In January 1999, Pedro and a group of his closest friends got together around the idea of creating a network of websites dedicated to helping developers find web development resources (read the full story, as told by Pedro himself). They named themselves InfoGenius, Inc. but don’t let the name fool you; the "Inc." part was much more of a formality than a state-of-mind. It’s hard to take yourselves seriously when you’re working out of a college dorm. Their hard work and dedication paid off with the launch of Aspin.com, Jspin.com and 411asp.net and a combined traffic growth to over 6 million page-views monthly.
In mid 2005, Pedro and the rest of the crew here decided we could do better… much better! With this in mind, we set out with the goal of making our previous websites obsolete. We wanted to revolutionize the whole concept of a web development resource site and make this new website so compelling that nothing else would do. In our tradition of naming projects after notable geniuses in history, we code-named the project “Magritte” after the early 20th century surrealist artist René François Ghislain Magritte who pioneered the surrealist movement and produced such famous paintings as “The Son of Man”. Just like René Magritte who took ordinary scenes and made them extraordinary with surreal elements, we too were inspired to take the ordinary world of web development resources and pioneer an extraordinary new vision of the future.
The initial brainstorming sessions for the Magritte Project produced hundreds of ideas. Some of them were killer and some of them were… well… let’s just say that someone must have spiked our coffee with Jack Daniels because the next morning we realized we must have been under the influence. Anyone who’s ever brainstormed before knows this type of thing comes with the territory. After narrowing down the hundreds of ideas to the top 10 most powerful, we were off into the wonderful world of project requirements, Gantt charts and web development.
Included in the Magritte Project was a subproject slated to become the largest section of the Codango website. We kicked off this subproject in Mid 2006 and named it the "Lerdorf Project" after none other than "Rasmus Lerdorf"; the genius who invented PHP in 1994. You guessed it... our Lerdorf Project was the code name for the creation of our enormous PHP section.
With our early beginnings in CGI and a team full of people who were big PHP fans, creating the PHP section for Codango was a no-brainer and a big source of pride for the project. The PHP section’s content was a huge undertaking. As anyone in the PHP community can attest to, PHP resources have a habit of multiplying faster than rabbits. It took a crew of several developers focused exclusively on researching and gathering PHP resources over a half-year to build the content for our PHP section.
Finally, after almost two years in the works, we were proud to launch Codango into its first Public Beta on June 11th, 2007. Only the future can tell what it holds for Codango, but we are excited about the possibilities and look forward to the community’s support and feedback.
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