while they do a good job of teaching people how to program in the bare sense of the term, they don't really have a good grasp of how to go from writing code to building something useful for them or other people.

The reason we get muddled, I think, is that those of us who are practising engineers don't often quite get what we're teaching when we teach people how to write code

Code literacy means being able to map symbols to the things that the symbols represent in the same way as you do in any language, being able to understand how those symbols relate to each other to convey meaning and being able to do this in a fluid, intuitive way. It's the ability to read a piece of code in the same way that you would an essay, understand what it's doing and the thrust of what it communicates, both to you and to the computer.

The second part of seeing the world through an engineer's eyes is teaching people how to analyse and break down a problem so that it can be solved with software.

Finally, you have the ability to understand what a computer-type device might be doing day-to-day.

Also the ethics of care behind it.

So the author proposes HTML as a teaching tool, because HTML websites are great. Using CSS classes and ids are similar to references. Importing stylesheets is like importing modules. It has to be carefully thought about the design, and because deploying a website is relatively easy: You have to ship something from the start

Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck

We need to show them what the things we work with can do, we need to show them how they can use our tools to make the world better, and we need to give them a reason to care about what we do. And perhaps that could start with some personal websites.