Fear of Coding

Why every new journalist should learn how to code, no matter how hard

Let me tell you what I did today at work. I wrote a few things. I edited a few things. I deleted a bunch of <span> tags that had inline styles that were messing up a template I was trying to work with. Huh?

Look, I’m going to come at this discussion from a peculiar place. From 1998 to 2006, I was a web developer and designer. I’ll bore you with a one-sentence description of the technologies I was working in. I used, mostly, PHP, VBScript (which is the code in all those .asp pages you used to see everywhere), a bunch of SQL flavors, all of the HTML, some of the CSS, and a smattering of Javascript. Even though I am thrilled I am now a journalist who has had the privilege of working with and for some of the best people and companies in media, I regret letting my coding skills atrophy.

At the time I “left” development to pursue “writing” (whatever that meant at the time), it seemed like the dominant new thing I would have to learn to stay relevant in tech was Flash. Yes, the thing that plays your browser videos. There was a once upon a time when people were trying to use Flash to build websites and menus and front-ends to databases, and, and. It was not the right tool. I didn’t want to learn it. So I didn’t. And I had another career on the brain, so I went…