I don’t believe a person is born to be a programmer any more than someone is born to be a coal miner.

People learn new skills all the time, and can rise to the challenge of learning to code and to productively work as part of a software development team.

Through freeCodeCamp, our open source community, we’ve had truck drivers, carpenters, stay-at-home parents —and even homeless people — learn to code well enough to get their first developer job.

Natural talent may play some role in the upper bounds of one’s programming ability, but a large part of success seems to come down to how much personal initiative a learner is willing to take.

Some of us already have college degrees, strong math skills, or have been tinkering with computers for many years. We have a huge advantage when it comes to learning to code. But that’s all it is — an advantage.

Any sufficiently motivated individual can learn to code and get a developer job.