A distributed temperature sensor based on spontaneous Brillouin scattering and employing optical pulse coding has been implemented and characterized using a direct-detection receiver. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement provided by coding is analyzed, along with the influence of coding in stimulated Brillouin threshold. Simplex-coding using 127 bit codeword provides up to 7 dB SNR improvement, allowing for temperature sensing over 21 km of dispersion shifted fiber with 3.1 K resolution and 40 m spatial resolution, permitting to avoid the use of optical pulse amplification.