A debate in the design/UX world has been, not raging, jostling? about in regards to whether design folks should learn to code. I’m pretty much of the mind that companies get more value from developers who can code well and designers who can design well vs trying to hire a person who does one thing well and the other well enough to get by.

The reason? Both professions require a lot of thought into how whatever is being created fits into an ecosystem, whether that’s an ecosystem of other applications and code structures or an ecosystem of users and scenarios. I was reminded of this recently after taking an HTML/CSS class which required hand-coding a 5-page website without the use of templates to include at least one jquery widget.

Before this class I could not code my way out of a box. Now, I might be able to code my way out before dying of dehydration. Maybe. What I really learned, though, was how interconnected even the simplest code could be. One small tweak to a line of non-image-related code and suddenly all images grew as large as Alice in the Wonderland house. And then the hunt for the string that connected them.

But more than that, I thought of the developers whose work is compounded when dealing with 10-year-old code connected to multiple modules built by different people over the years. Try to find your way back through THAT tangle of strings. Another lesson in empathy…

However, a recent article discussing the merits of learning to code got me wondering a) if it might be a good thing for non-technical people to learn to code and b) finding a better way to teach it, a la the Makers Movement. I don’t yet have a conclusion for this post but, since I’m not a professional blogger and no-one’s reading this anyway, posting it for now.