Codare humanum est.

Why coding is the best hard skill at teaching you soft skills...

Ok, full disclosure first, I'm the cofounder of Le Wagon in LatAm, a coding and data science bootcamp that has trained more than 10 000 students in one of our 40 campuses since 2013 worldwide. Having said that, I have never envisioned a future where everyone becomes a coder. I usually compare coding to a new alphabet and Gutenberg's press did not trigger a world where everyone makes a living as a writer. No, Internet won't make us all software developers.

But even if you don't want to become a coder, I still think that coding should be taught to everyone. Why? Because learning to code teaches you way more than just variables and conditionals. It is, in my view, one of the best hard skills to make you work on your soft skills. Learning how to write software teaches you extremely valuable lessons on creativity, collaboration, discipline, attention to details, critical thinking and handling complexity.

Bear with me as I give some examples below

"If you want to code fast, code alone, if you want to code well, code together..."

Writing code is (really) hard, and community is your Noah's ark in this chaos.

As anything difficult, and learning to code from scratch is extremely hard, doing it with friends is always way easier than doing it alone. That's actually why bootcamps work and MOOC don't (for 99% of participants if you look at exactly inverse dropout rates). Learning to code is a loooong journey. A journey without an end, actually since you need constant updating. And my years at Le Wagon proved me that the ability to interact and create meaningful relationships with other coders, being them experienced or beginners is the number one factor of one's ability to learn fast. The more students interact, the more they grow.

Learning to code, contrary to popular belief, does not turn you into an antisocial geek but connects you to vibrant communities, and consciously or not, that's how people learn. Mimicking others, just as the little brother learns to walk by imitating his older brother. And of course the olympic games of this collaboration spirit is the open source movement. "If this piece of code is useful to me, it might be to someone else, let's put it out there for free...". You quickly realize that your coder's life improves thanks to hours and hours of free work by other coders who built frameworks, languages and tools for fun. Impossible not to feel grateful if you ever use a Gem in Rails, or even just a browser to read this article actually.

So the first great lesson of learning to code is that no one becomes a good coder alone, coding is inherently linking you to a community, from a team's size to a global open source movement, and that's a profound and essential human skill to master.

"All complex code that work evolved from simpler code that worked"

Learning to code makes you understand Gall's law. Usually the hard way.

Gall’s Law?states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time. And coding does not escape that terrible law for a single second.

Eisenhower used to say that "plans are useless but planning is indispensable". Well, in coding don't plan farther than a week or two. Because there's nothing worst in software than the mentality that packs features into the product before launch in the hopes of covering all the users's possible needs. Software industry is a graveyard of "million dollars" products that "had all the features" but got shown to a user waaaay too late and died.

Empathy with users is probably the most important quality of a good programmer. Of course given that the code you write actually work and don't break too often. Complex software are built one feature at a time, with constant feedback loops where users complain about pains and misunderstandings and push coders to go back back to their laptop and code something simpler to use. "Lean startup" "KISS principle" "DRY"... all those concepts are taught in coding because no one wants to build toy that no kid is interested in playing.

If you want to become great at creating products, you need active users. Feeling empathy for them is the key for your app not getting deleted a week after they tried it. Coding also teaches you that complexity always starts simple. And this lesson is worth your weight in g?o?l?d? bitcoin.

"Coding?needs a wild mind and a?disciplined?eye”

"Only half of programming is coding, the other 90% is debugging". Coding teaches you humility and the importance of editing in creativity.

The one great thing about coding for the first time is that it is a "risk free" stress test of how you handle failure. Because there's no way on earth that the first thing you write will work out 100%. So you write, you test, you bug, you rewrite, you retest, you rebug... and iterate up until it works. And this is incredible, because sometimes you end up understanding the logic behind why it worked the last time after it actually (miraculously...) tested ok. And this teaches you a great lesson in creativity, that getting to create something great is more about perfecting it than creating it perfect on first attempt. Great creators are great editors, great critics of their own art and keep creating and correcting until they reach a high level of what they consider satisfactory. Creativity is like a muscle. It needs regular training AND increasing challenges. Great coders not only code regularly, they also debug their own code and refactor it with a sharp eye.

Coding is perfect at making you understand why they say that great work is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. And it's such a challenging and innovative field that only the humbles survive.

"Creativity is the child of Mastery".

You don't become a great coder by learning how to brainstorm and playing with post-its, you become a great coder by writing code (a lot...).

There are two pitfalls to your creative self, the fist one is "common sense" (quoting Picasso here...) and the proven fact that every child loses his/her creativity by turning into a rational adult worried about what peers might think about his/her ideas. But the other great pitfall is to be an unskilled artist, no masterpiece has ever been created by a lazy artist. And so mastering a skill, any skill, is your lottery ticket at becoming a great artist. It's not a guarantee, just a chance to have a go. And, of course, not all skilled people are creative, but I can guarantee that all creative minds are masters of their arts. Being it writing code, singing Bach or playing the tuba. That's why great startups are led by great coders and great designers, because the key skill of a startup is to build something people use. And no one ever used an idea from a powerpoint slide. Actually coding and building a website or an app, and one that works, is your lottery ticket at the startup game. No guarantee, just a chance to make it.

Creativity is a derivative function of your mastery, if you don't work on any hard skill, it's like trying to become a published author in a language you don't know, it's not hard, it's pure delusion.

And that, my friends, is why I think anyone should learn to code. Coding is a fantastic skill at helping you grow as a creative human being.

No robot will ever become a creative human being.

Change yourself, learn to code