Codecademy, one of the startups in a boomlet of sites offering to teach people to code, soon will allow anyone to submit lessons. The Wall Street Journal says more than one million people, including New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, signed up for Code Year, a year-long program of interactive lessons on JavaScript. Its site, however, puts the number at less than 400,000. But still ... The brainchild of Columbia University classmates Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski recently landed $2.5 million in venture financing to expand into languages such as Ruby and Python. Its peer-to-peer coding lessons began in private beta last week and are due to open to the public within weeks. The lessons, which can include text and video, initially will come from professors and programmers. The site will suggest certain ones based on popularity and completion rate, the Journal says. It quotes Sims saying:

A college professor at Harvard, for instance, may not be the best person to teach you Python. It might be someone who works in the industry who teaches Python day to day.

It's not only a way for the site to scale, but also to create a community of engaged users, says the article, which also points out that there might be legal issues with copyrighted code, something the site certainly will have to address. The site also has partnered with the White House on a condensed program for underprivileged and disconnected youth called Code Summer+. Partners Foursquare, Twilio and other companies will be contributing lessons to that, according to TechCrunch.