It’s too late for me to be a coder. But what I do appreciate is that the coder represents the foundation of advertising in the digital age. She or he assembles the foundations. There’s good code and bad code, in both moral and functional terms. And there’s creatively sensitive code such as the closely guarded algorithms used by high-frequency traders and search engines. In advertising, the programmer now defines whether you are good or bad at creative technology. Code underpins the digital age, but it need not be as mysterious as it seems. Paul Ford's "What is Code?" is primer for anyone who wants to dig in to code themselves. What makes a great programmer that we would want at Ogilvy & Mather? There’s the obvious fluency with the main languages, technology stacks, architectures or infrastructure, but our needs go beyond that. We need an elegant coder, one who can write for mobile and desktop, for low bandwidth and high. We need one with the social skills to work with clients, data scientists, account people and creatives alike. We need one sensitive to the importance of user experience, who is as allergic to kludgy interface as he or she is to kludgy code. Alternatively, you could have the most ham-fisted service-side engineer the world has ever seen so long as he is working with