#Empowering designers who code
Google “should designers code” and you'll get an abundance of articles - from people angered by the fact that there are still designers who design for the web and don't know HTML and CSS, to articles on how designers think differently and shouldn't code. I think designers should code if they want to.
While there are many books, workshops, and free online courses to help you learn to code, they don't teach you what it's like to contribute to a product with real users. The skills and knowledge required are a bit more complex than knowing how to write HTML and CSS.
When I started at Etsy I felt nervous and hesitant about whether I could write code good enough for production, and I'd never contributed to a web application at the scale of Etsy. Now I deploy to production regularly, and I help teach other designers and engineers how use our new style guide. Etsy's tooling and supportive engineering culture enables me, and the rest of the design team, to contribute code with confidence.
Perhaps more designers would code if we spent more time building an environment that empowers them.