They Should Learn to Code

The most widely-read thing I’ve ever written, and the one that impacted my life the most directly, was an online article I wrote more than seven years ago on Medium, with the somewhat click-baity title Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How To Code.

At the time I was heavily involved with an organization that was then known as Dames Making Games, now known as DMG (for Damage), where I co-hosted coding and game-making workshops for mostly young women. “Learn to code” was then a cheerful, optimistic, you-can-do-it exhortation, and similar groups were springing up all over the place (Ladies Learning Code, founded the same year and in the same city as DMG, has also since changed its name). Part of what we were trying to convey was that writing code — and using it to pursue creative aims — wasn’t some mysterious power granted only to linux-using, glasses-wearing, Star-Trek-obsessed geeks who had learned on a Commodore 64 at the age of seven. That, in fact, it was a skill that could be picked up with focus and practice, just like the violin or Italian or knitting. It was in this spirit that I wrote the piece.

I remember working with people who were just learning, and watching them getting frustrated. It seemed to me that the source of their frustration didn’t have anything to do with their actual aptitude, but that received ideas about the difficulty of coding were making them give up too fast. I also felt that a lot of “learn to code” programs aimed at beginners would dump them at the end of the step-by-step lessons without a lot of guidance about what to do next, or how to create something actually useful, something they could show their friends.

So I wrote the piece, with the genuine hope that it would be helpful.

I did pretty much nothing at all to promote it — didn’t flog it on twitter, didn’t beg people to share it, didn’t even really talk about it after. But some of my friends did, and it got noticed almost right away. The first week after hitting the “post” button was heady. My article made the front page of Hacker News, where it got hundreds of comments, a disturbing number of which were nitpicking about how I linked to an article about C++ pointers instead of C pointers. Various tech luminaries were sharing it, including Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly books) and Guido van Rossum (the creator of the Python programming language), sometimes accompanied by exaggerated praise like “the best thing about learning to code I’ve ever read.” My social media following tripled in a matter of days and I started getting emails inviting me to speak at conferences, and personal invitations to interview at cool companies. I’m pretty sure it was this article that got me invited twice to Foo Camp, the semi-structured “interesting people only” gathering of tech celebs run by O’Reilly Media. Later on, the article started popping up on college syllabi, and was translated into German. It even turned up in the citations list at the back of Coders (although they don’t quote any of the text).

I wasn’t savvy enough to try to leverage viral success into anything. I didn’t use it to wedge my way into an exciting job or paid speaking gigs or a more rarified social circle. Sometimes, when I hear about a writer getting a book deal out of a viral article, I think “I should have gotten a book deal! I bet lots of people would have bought that book!” Once in a rare while I think I should pitch the book anyway (with the extra cred of Google Engineer attached).

But only part of it was not being savvy. I also had a deep ambivalence about it, one that I still carry.

Now that telling someone to “learn to code” has descended to the level of a joke, empowerment-lite at best and cruel at worst, I’m not sure if it’s something I’d still write about. When old friends from the arts ask me about coding bootcamps, it makes me feel sad, like it’s just another sign the world is set up wrong. And when I think back on the chirpy you-can-do-it tone of my article and others, I reproach myself. Who was I to talk about this? I had a computer science degree; when I was learning I wasn’t teaching myself like my assumed audience was, I had all the institutional support in the world. And I feel like I sugar-coated how frustrating it can be, how many things outside your control can thwart your progress, how profoundly boring and repetitive the worst of it is.

And a lot of it is personal. Even though I’m good at coding, and even though it’s treated me well as a profession, it’s not part of me. My ambitions, my loves, my identity have never had much to do with for-loops or pointers.

I remember at that time in my life, people who tried to give me career guidance got frustrated because I kept shrugging off their big ideas. I don’t understand what you want, they’d say. That was fair; I didn’t understand either. I remember someone telling me that if I wrote a few more pieces like that article I could make a nice little niche for myself. But I didn’t write any more pieces like that. I felt I’d said as much as I wanted to say on the subject. As I’m sure innumerable self-help books would confirm, I couldn’t say what I wanted because what I wanted was something I didn’t then permit myself to speak of.

In the end, I’m still proud of it. And even now I suppose I’d give the same advice to would-be coders, although I’d put a lot more emphasis on getting good at whiteboard interviews. Nothing that I write for this newsletter gets even a microfraction of the readership that the learn-to-code article had, but it feels much closer to what I want to be doing, even if I never get an invitation to camp on the O’Reilly lawn again.