The inspiration for my username is the Pixar film Ratatouille, a story about a rat named Remy with a passion for cooking. Being a rat, he has a rough go of it. All his fellow rats just see food as fuel, and every human Remy encounters sees nothing but a rat. Nonetheless, Remy persists, inspired by the motto of chef Auguste Gusteau: "Anyone can cook."

Becoming a software engineer has been much easier in comparison. Yes, a liberal arts background is less traditional than a comp-sci degree, but it's not that unusual, particularly on the web-dev end of things. A handful of my colleagues have had no college degree at all. (One of them has gone on to work at a very high level in one of the big tech companies.)

I suppose I could claim that I'm "self-taught," but that only feels true in a very narrow sense. Between all the A List Apart articles, Stack Overflow posts, tech meetups, books read, and colleagues I've worked with, it doesn't feel very accurate to call myself "self-taught." If anything, I've had an embarrassing richness of teachers.

So I'm inspired by Remy's story, but his story isn't mine. The welcome that I found in the web development community when I was first starting out is markedly different than the challenges faced by a rat who wants to be a chef.

And yet, is that entirely true? In many way, the software industry is remarkably open. Meritocratic, even. A computer and an internet connection is enough to get you started. Study, practice, catch a few breaks, and people will actually pay you to write code. Get decently good and they'll even pay you real money. In this era of shrinking opportunities for the middle class, software engineering stands out as having an unusually low barrier to entry.

Then again, if it's really that easy to get in the door, why is it that when I look around the office I mainly see people who look a lot like, well, me? As my job titles have evolved from "web developer" to "software engineer" to "senior software engineer," it's become increasingly rare to find myself working alongside colleagues who don't have a computer science degree. Bring gender and other metrics of diversity into the conversation, and the gulf between people who use software and people who write it grows even more notable.

Perhaps Remy's story isn't mine, not because cooking is so different from coding, but because while Remy doesn't look like a chef, I look like a "coder."

So, can anyone code? Yes. I firmly believe that and, what's more, a great many people who currently do not should. And many who already are coding are more talented and deserve more opportunity than they currently enjoy.

The open, welcoming culture I discovered when starting out might not be the full story of the tech industry, but it's not completely wrong either. At its best, tech culture is open and funny and welcoming and creative. The phrase "anyone can code" is a way to remind myself of that — of what this industry sometimes is, of what I hope it can more frequently be, and of my place in doing what I can to make the same openness I've benefited from the reality for more of my fellow devs.