This is a follow up to my post about digital literacy and learning to code. I want to be clear that while I believe everyone should have the opportunity to learn to code and the basics should be taught in school, not everyone has to be a developer or even any good at coding or feel like they need to pour hours and hours into it when they hate it. People seem to get the idea that learn to code initiatives mean everyone! must! learn! to! code! which is not even slightly the case. We just want everyone to be able to make a choice about whether or not they’re interested instead of assuming they’re not welcome.

If you try out, say, a Ladies Learning Code workshop and you come out of it thinking you’d rather have spent the day digging a ditch, great! I started college with a few people who went to all the trouble of applying, getting into the program, and going to class for weeks or months before deciding it wasn’t for them. If you can skip all that hassle and find out in a single day and a measly $50 that code isn’t for you, that’s honestly fantastic. Now you can focus on something you actually like doing instead of something that makes you miserable.

Before you decide code is definitely not your thing, I do have some advice. First of all, learning to code is hard. You’re learning a whole different way of thinking, it takes time to get good at that. Don’t feel bad if you’re not good at it right away. People have different learning styles too. Plenty of my classmates disagreed about which teacher’s explanation of a given concept was clearer. If coding just doesn’t make sense to you, it could be because your teacher isn’t explaining things in a way that makes sense to you.

Or maybe you’re just not in a good headspace to learn a really intense new skill right now. Honestly, if you’re a new parent I don’t recommend trying to force yourself to learn to code. Looking after a tiny human is quite enough stress to put on yourself. If you’re excited about code by all means give it a shot, but if you feel stupid all the time it’s absolutely not because you are stupid, it’s because you’re brutally sleep deprived and stressed out and operating at a huge handicap. Code can wait until you start sleeping regularly again.

All that said, if you understand code just fine but you’d rather watch paint dry, or don’t understand code and would still rather watch paint dry, go do something you actually like! Code is not the only worthwhile thing you can do. Have you ever seen an interface a programmer designed? It was awful, wasn’t it. If you like tech but not programming, you could be a UI designer, an artist, a marketer, a community manager, a tester, a customer service rep, a graphic designer, a copy writer, an admin, a game designer (the easiest way to get to design games is to build your own but that’s not the only way), an animator, an office manager, a level designer, the list goes on and on and on.

If you want to code, great! If you would rather do anything else, great! Don’t ever feel like programming is something you have to do whether you like it or not.