The Powered by Data Show

After eight years on WordPress, we tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it ourselves. This is the full tour of the new Data Literacy Learning Academy.

We retired the WordPress site we'd run on WP Engine since 2018 and replaced it with a Next.js and Tailwind application built with Claude Code: not just a marketing site, but the learning management system itself. It wasn't a one-weekend build. It took months.

Already had an account on the old site? Your badges, completed lessons, and quiz scores all carry over. Just sign up again with the same email address, since passwords don't transfer.

WHAT'S NEW
• Every course refreshed, and now on a quarterly update cadence. A two-year-old AI course is ancient history, and a one-time rewrite doesn't fix that, but a standing schedule does.
• An AI Tutor scoped to the lesson on your screen, an AI Coach that reads your learner profile, and inline definitions for any term you highlight. All in beta, all grounded in every book and course we've written using RAG (retrieval-augmented generation).
• Our first fully free course: 21 Key Traits of Data Literacy. Rate yourself on both proficiency and importance, then get a learning roadmap that points at free resources, not just ours.
• More coming! Right now, we're playing around with a live SQL sandbox running right in the browser, built on SQLite. I used it to cross-check every query in a client course before we shipped it, something I could never have done on the old site.
• New pricing tiers, including a course-only option for people who'd rather skip the AI features entirely.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Welcome back: a summer spent building
0:34 Why we retired the WordPress site after seven years
1:00 The new stack: Next.js, Tailwind, and Claude Code
1:53 Accounts, badges, and carrying your progress over
2:17 Refreshing every course — and a quarterly update cadence
3:12 AI in the lessons: inline definitions and the AI tutor
4:20 Vectorizing the books and courses with RAG
4:48 The AI coach and personalized learning paths
5:22 A free course for everyone: 21 Key Traits of Data Literacy
6:16 Under the hood: Claude Code, GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase
6:56 Demo: an in-browser SQL sandbox for hands-on courses
9:35 New pricing tiers and what each one unlocks
10:26 Cutting WP Engine and HubSpot out of the stack
11:34 Coming next: the Avoiding Data Pitfalls open-source package

LINKS
The new Data Literacy Learning Academy → https://dataliteracy.com
Episode page, show notes, and full transcript → https://poweredbydata.com/podcast/introducing-the-new-data-literacy-learning-academy
Data Pitfalls Detector → https://poweredbydata.com/tools/data-pitfalls
datapitfalls on GitHub → https://github.com/bjonesdataliteracy/datapitfalls
Ben Jones on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrjones/
Team training and workshops → https://poweredbydata.com/contact

The Powered by Data Show is hosted by Ben Jones, founder of Data Literacy. New episodes on data, AI, and the humans in the middle of it all. Subscribe so you don't miss one.

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Show notes: https://dataliteracy.com/pbd001/