Coder: a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi

Cross posted from the Google Developers Blog

I wrote my first two lines of BASIC as a five year old, and I’ve loved programming ever since. These days I’m teaching my own kids to code, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how they could have that same simple experience while learning to program for the web.

A quick sprint with my design friend +Jeff Baxter led to a little experiment called Coder. It’s an open source tool that turns Raspberry Pi into a simple, tiny, personal web server and web-based development environment – just what you need for crafting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while you’re learning to code. Here’s a quick video that helps explain how it all works (and a huge shout out to our friends +Claire Stapleton and +Minji Hong who helped us with it):

We thought about all the stuff we could do to make Coder a more complete package, but we have a hunch that the sooner this gets into the open source and maker communities, the more we’ll learn about how it might be used. Hopefully, a few more folks will pitch in and help us make this even more accessible and helpful for new coders.

To learn more, visit goo.gl/coder, get a Pi, download Coder, and make something awesome.

By Jason Striegel, Creative Technologist, Google Creative Lab