Codecademy is letting you pop the hood on Twitter, Gilt, & other sites you actually use

The websites and mobile apps you use every day might seem like they run on pure magic, but there’s always a man behind the curtain, and he’s creating and managing processes that are surprisingly accessible, once you know how they work.

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Codecademy, the company that’s teaching everyone to code with free online tools, will now show you the gears and levers behind some of the more popular services on the web. The startup is today announcing partnerships with Twitter, Box, Gilt, GitHub, and a handful of other companies; the goal is to get very new developers up and running with APIs in minutes.

“We’re trying to get people from knowing nothing to having that ‘aha!’ moment much faster,” said Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims in an email to VentureBeat.

“We think that usually involves being able to mess around with and create things from technologies they use on an everyday basis. Twitter, obviously, is one of those.”

And for one of your first API tricks, Codecademy will show you how to send a tweet right from the command line. “Tweeting from Codecademy is a pretty cool experience,” Sims continued. “It helps you understand authentication, using APIs, and more, but it’s all very simple and not complex.”

Codecademy first added its API training last month, starting with courses on YouTube, Bit.ly, NPR, Twilio, Stripe, Parse, Soundcloud, Sunlight Labs, Placekitten, and Sendgrid.

Today’s new partnerships will bring in new coding lessons with APIs from WePay, Twitter, Box, Evernote, Microsoft SkyDrive, 23andme, Mashape, Gilt Groupe, Ordr.in, Firebase, Easypost, GitHub, Mandrill (MailChimp), and Dwolla. (Yes, that’s right — you saw two payment services in there, which means baby devs will now have a clear path to putting payment processing in their apps, as well.)

The new lessons will teach you how to:

• Tweet from the command line,
• Order food from a code editor,
• Explore your genes,
• Send money and invoices, and
• Pass files around like a bad cold.

“We think everyone should be able to make awesome things with code, and these API lessons are just the start,” siad Sims.

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Codecademy launched in the early fall of 2011 at Y Combinator and has been raising money and educating baby devs ever since. When the startup won a Crunchie last month, they sent one of their users to pick up the award, showing the techster audience exactly why their methods are so special.