Maybe because too few jobs, too high student debt, climate change, poor education, and poor infrastructure are real problems that his constituents (and presumably he) cares about.

And I have no idea how you can read that article and think he's belittling coding. The first quote is about applying problem solving learned while coding to bigger problems on the national scale. If you read past the first sentence in your second quote, he's just naming other under-represented groups he hopes to cater towards. In education, he talks about teaching computer science at a younger age.