Life in code : a personal history of technology /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review , GQ , Slate , San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum , and Kirkus

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine

The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.

When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.

Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology's loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn't. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years--and the next twenty.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• A Note About the Dates (p. ix)
• Part 1 The Programming Life
• Outside of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life (p. 3)
• Come in, CQ (p. 18)
• The Dumbing Down of Programming: Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of "Easy" (p. 39)
• What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K (p. 56)
• Part 2 The Rise and First Fall of the Internet
• The Museum of Me (p. 81)
• Fiber Optic Nights (p. 94)
• Off the High (p. 104)
• To Catch a Falling Knife (p. 115)
• Part 3 Life, Artificial
• Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines "Life" (p. 129)
• Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? (p. 160)
• Memory and Megabytes (p. 171)
• Dining with Robots (p. 181)
• Part 4 Three Stories About What We Owe the Past
• While I Was Away (p. 197)
• Close to the Mainframe (p. 208)
• The Party Line (p. 223)
• Part 5 The Hand that Writes the Code
• Programming for the Millions (p. 237)
• Boom Two: A Farewell (p. 272)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This well-written memoir, actually a collection of essays penned over roughly 25 years, presents an insider's view of the computer/Internet revolution. Programmer and software engineer Ullman (Close to the Machine) offers a female perspective on a field in which women are greatly underrepresented and frequently made to feel unwelcome. She uses her own experiences to illustrate how programming has evolved, how new programs are piggybacked onto existing ones, and how difficult that makes debugging. Ullman also covers the Y2K scare and its resolution, the monetization of applications, the impact of the smartphone, and the challenge of producing artificial intelligence. The book is at its best when the author addresses her personal history, sexuality, and social consciousness. She describes the role that the Internet has played in distorting social and political institutions (for instance, through the promulgation of fake news and the election of Donald Trump) and shares her misgivings about her part in advancing the new technology. In addition, Ullman is dismayed at how the arrival of tech companies such as Twitter and Yelp has affected her San Francisco neighborhood-particularly its residents' loss of idealism and innocence. Verdict Recommended for those who have worked in the tech fields or are interested in doing so and anyone intrigued by technology and its implications.-Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Emeritus, Baruch Coll. Lib., CUNY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Novelist and former computer programmer Ullman returns to the domain of her seminal memoir, Close to the Machine (1997), an unflinching insider's account of the digital revolution, with this equally eloquent collection of previously published essays from the past 20 years. Providing much-needed nuance to the binary world of code, the essays gracefully move between intimate anecdotes, frustrated rants about the unconscious bias and hypercompetitiveness that dominate much of venture-capitalist startup culture, philosophical meanderings about artificial intelligence and the nature of human thought, and big-picture analysis about the relationship between technical design and human desire. Not only is Ullman an astute observer of the changing culture but she proves prescient on a diverse range of issues including the siloing effect of the internet, the growing digital divide, and corporate-assisted government surveillance. Neither technophilic nor technophobic, this collection creates a time-lapse view of the rapid development of technology in recent years and provides general readers with much-needed grounding for the sweeping changes of the revolution underway. It's also simply a pleasure to read. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Entering the predominantly male profession of computer programming, Ullman armed herself with the understanding that I was not afraid of machines, and an honors thesis onMacbeth. As a woman in a field dominated by arrogant, young, white males, she withstood many insults and humiliations. Self-taught, she wrote code and learned to admire the elegance of well-written code. In the 20 years since her groundbreaking memoir, Close to the Machine, she has continued to write, including two novels and the essays gathered here, which span the last 25 years. Ullman chronicles tech developments, Y2K, the early promise and fears associated with the burgeoning Internet, and the boom, crash, and boom of tech stocks and start-up culture. Throughout it all, Ullman maintains a healthy skepticism regarding the notion that technology will cure all that ails us. In the section on intelligent machines and artificial intelligence, for example, she brilliantly questions the computer's capacity for sentience. The error in robotics, she writes, is mistaking the tool for its builder. Ullman also astutely observes, robots aren't becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them. --Segedin, Ben Copyright 2017 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A sharply written, politically charged memoir of life in the data trenches by computer pioneer Ullman (By Blood, 2012, etc.)."I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years," writes the author, who is known in computing circles for many things, not least her work on the graphical forerunner to Windows. As Ullman notes, programmers live in "mind-time" and not the ordinary time-space continuum the rest of us inhabit, and in any event they're poorly socialized; one early boss had intended to hire her simply to inflict a woman on an underling ("evidently, Peterson was some manager he wished ill, and I was the ill"), then was demoted to the underling's position and grudgingly had to supervise her himself. Early on, by her account, Ullman brought ethical considerations to bear on her work, reminding teammates on a project that veered into epidemiology that the best solution was not the Nazi one of killing off carriers of a particular disease, which earned her the sneer of a male colleague: "This is how I know you're not a real techie." More than a personal account, Ullman's narrative is a you-are-here chronicle of the evolution of things we take for granted, from the early AI research of the 1970s and the first flickerings of the personal computer to the founding of Googleand now, to a decidedly dystopian present that is the real thrust of a sometimes-rueful confession. As Ullman writes without hyperbole, all the liberatory promise of the personal computer has been swallowed up by corporations. Corporate leaders may promise that they're changing the world, but that proclamation is "but an advertisement, a branding that obscures the little devil, disruption, that hides within the mantra" and threatens to destroy what little civilization we have left. What Anthony Bourdain did for chefs, Ullman does for computer geeks. A fine rejoinder and update to Doug Coupland's Microserfs and of great interest to any computer user. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of two novels: By Blood , a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug , a runner-up for the Pen/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine , about her life as a software engineer during the internet's first rise, became a cult classic. Her new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology , tells a continuing story of the technical world as she experienced it while living in its midst for more than two decades. She is based in San Francisco.