About Basic Coding Concepts

A free educational resource teaching the fundamentals of programming. Two authors, named below. No editorial team, no ghostwriters, no AI churn.

Why This Site Exists

In 2024, Mark was teaching an intro programming class at a community college. His students kept asking the same question: "Is this thing I'm reading JavaScript or is it programming?" Most beginner resources don't separate the two. So you learn Python and feel lost the first time someone shows you JavaScript — even though the underlying ideas are identical. We built this site to fix that. Every example is shown in JavaScript, Python, and Java, side by side. The point: the idea is the thing. Syntax is dialect.

Who Writes This

Mark Sullivan

Lead writer · 8 yrs full-stack · Lead writer

Mark started coding in 2017 after switching from financial analysis. She's built production systems in Python (Django) and JavaScript (Node + React) at two startups, and has taught intro programming at his local community college since 2022. He owns the curriculum for variables, functions, conditionals, and loops on this site.

Owns: what-is-coding, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, debugging, the homepage, the complete guide, the blog.

Tom Reyes

Reviewer · 12 yrs Java/JVM · Reviewer

Tom spent eight years as a backend engineer in fintech (Java + Kotlin) and four as a lead at an enterprise SaaS company. He reviews every Java example on this site and writes the data-structure deep dives. He cares deeply that beginners aren't taught bad habits they'll have to unlearn.

Owns: comments, data types, operators, arrays, objects, I/O, all Java code samples, all interview questions.

Meet Bee 🐝

Bee is our resident debugging mascot. She shows up on tricky pages to flag the bugs and gotchas Mark and Tom have personally watched 100+ students hit. When you see her, slow down — she's pointing at something most beginners miss.

Editorial Philosophy

Concepts before code. Languages change. The shape underneath them does not.
Three syntaxes, always. If we can't express an idea cleanly in JS, Python, and Java, we don't ship the lesson.
Brevity beats completeness. A finished 1,500-word lesson teaches more than a never-finished 5,000-word one.
Show, don't just tell. Every concept has either a visualizer, a runnable playground example, or both.
No dark patterns. No paywalls, no email gates, no "course completion" theater. Forever free.

Our Editorial Process

Outline. Mark drafts an outline. Tom reviews against industry conventions. We agree before any prose is written.
First draft. Whoever owns the page writes a 1,500–3,000 word draft.
Code review. Every code sample runs in our playground before publication. Java samples specifically are reviewed by Tom.
Beginner review. A real beginner (rotating panel of three) reads the draft and flags anything confusing.
Date stamp. The page records who wrote it, who reviewed it, and the date — visible at the top of every lesson.
Annual review. Every page is re-read at least once a year. Anything stale is rewritten or deleted.

Trust Signals

All content is original. We don't paraphrase competitors. If a passage looks similar to another site, it's because both of us are referencing the official MDN / Python / Oracle docs (which we cite).
External claims are cited. 2026 salary numbers come from BLS + Levels.fyi + Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025–2026. Browser-API claims cite MDN. Java claims cite Oracle's official docs.
No AI-generated content. Mark and Tom write each page by hand. AI is used for proofreading only.
No ads. No sponsorships. No affiliates. The site is funded out of pocket as a passion project.

Get in Touch

Spotted a typo, found a bug in our code, want a topic covered? Email hello@basiccodingconcepts.org. Mark answers in his morning slot, Tom answers in his evening slot. No marketing autoresponders.