Unless you’ve been busy living under a rock or preparing inside your bunker for Armageddon, you’ve heard of Code.org and their goal to excite the public about the potential prospects for everyone in regards to programming. Codecademy even claims that it can empower the common layman with the skills to become an employable programmer…in only 3 months! However, despite all of their efforts to galvanize people, the impact has been nominal at best. What’s really needed is an effective campaign to convince people to join the world of developers. Some useful ideas that come to mind are:

• Spread the rumor that advanced coders are able to summon the power of hadouken when they reach a high enough level.
• Stress how developers gain an infinite amount of patience by dealing with the both complex systems and less-than-complex managers.
• Pitch how one can become enlightened and attain a higher level of philosophical understanding about Hobbes’ sentiment towards mankind, as you attempt to make one Web page consistent across dozens of browsers and platforms.
• Showcase the absolutely festive environment that one expects with the sausage party that is a programmer’s career.
• Demonstrate the power of software development by showing how one junior developer can commit several lines of code and cause the entire downfall of a project and/or system.
• Emphasize how programmers acquire skills that are essential assets in a modern technological society (but will become useless in the event of a great solar flare and its crushing blow to our global infrastructure).

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.