Editor's note: This post is about our NYC Meetup. You can find a Codecademy meetup near you on our Meetup page! To get help hosting a meetup, reach out here.

Learning to code on your own can be tough.

That’s why each month we host meetups for people to come and learn together. This month we were lucky enough to have journalist and Code Year veteran David Bauer come and present.

David wanted to do something better with code than creating arrays of zoo animals; so he decided to create Instacurate to visualizes tweets using Twitter's API. (To learn how to use Twitter's API yourself, try out this course.)

After a brief Q&A we broke into groups to explore the questions the group most wondered about:

1. What language should I start with?
2. How do I get started coding on my own computer?
3. What should I make with what I’m learning?

If you can learn, you can teach, and this gave everyone an opportunity to help out. Bravo!

Until next time, happy coding!

Want to host a meetup in your town? Get in touch and we’ll help you out!

In the Scripting Made Easier with the Eclipse JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT) article, Rob Gravelle demonstrated how to utilize the Eclipse JSDT plugin to enhance the development of a Static Web Project. In today's follow-up, Rob explores a couple of strategies for integrating third party JS libraries into your project, such as jQuery and qooxdoo.

It’s that time of year again…congratulations to the nearly 1,700 undergraduate and graduate students who are officially becoming UMBC alumni this week!

A few Commencement-related items for all our newly-minted grads:

• Visit our New Grads Page to find out all about the perks of being a UMBC alum and to update your info so you can stay in touch with your friends at UMBC!
• Check out the Class of 2013 Page to read about some really cool students!
• And, be sure to share your Commencement experience with the community by tagging posts and tweets with #UMBCgrad

We wish you the most sincere congratulations — and a good dose of well-deserved rest! And we hope to see you around campus soon!

Dean John Jeffries retired at the end of June after forty years of service to UMBC. In recognition of his profound impact on UMBC, we are delighted to announce the establishment of the John Jeffries International Fellowship.

The Fellowship fund honors John’s commitment to building a strong and distinctive undergraduate curriculum and to educating students to become informed and engaged global citizens.  The Fellowship will provide faculty with resources to create, or redesign, and teach a course in their fields in order to add or enhance an explicit international or transnational focus. Our expectation is that the resulting courses will be taught regularly and will broaden the intellectual scope of the curriculum in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

In a matter of weeks, current and former Department Chairs, Program Directors, and Associate Deans in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences have contributed more than $25,000 to endow the John Jeffries Fellowship. Since then, others have contributed towards the goal of $200,000, which will enable the campus to support two Jeffries Fellows each year.

If you are interested in making a gift to the John Jeffries International Fellowship Program or have any questions, please contact Marjoleine Kars, Jason Loviglio, or Carole McCann.

“The lesson we’ve learned over these last 10, 15 years is no matter how good your [crisis management] plan is, it’s always going to fall short,” says Sunil Dasgupta in today’s Gazette.

Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) and non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, is co-teaching a crisis management class at USG. The point of the course, he explains, is not to prepare for specific disasters, but to get students thinking about how to build resilience and make decisions in catastrophic situations that they cannot fully plan for or predict. Although many students in the course have not yet selected majors, Dasgupta says he hopes some of them will explore careers in crisis management.