Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology Hardcover – August 8, 2017

Ms. Ullman was one of the early woman programmers and software engineers. Her career started in 1978 and lasted more than twenty years, when she finally abandoned the programmer's keyboard for the writer's one. She is eloquent, erudite, candid, often humorous but also with Cassandra-like premonitions of doom. She affords the reader a candid glimpse into the day-to-day drudgery of the life in code, the cyclical rise-and-fall of the hitech industry, the internet, and the start-up fever. All these liberally seasoned with stories and anecdotes of her own personal life. The book is actually a collection of short stories and essays on loosely connected themes, best described as "Computer and Internet Technology -Where it all started? Where is it now? Where is it going?". From time to time, especially towards the end of the book she gets into a tone of a bitter old timer abandoned by time itself, which detracts enough from the reading pleasure to cost Ms. Ullman a whole star in my book. Being older than Ms. Ullman, but still having witnessed all that she describes, I often identify. Me and my kids acquired and programmed the first Sinclair, then expanded it to the magnificent 8K memory (Wow!). I still wrote my first DNA sequence comparison program in Basic and used almost 750 pages to print out the results. My younger son has been in hitech for the last twenty years. All in all, it is all an emotional but pleasant deja vu for me, and hopefully for anybody even vaguely interested in the subject.

I read this because a family member is pursuing computer programming as a career. This book gave me some insight into what a career in that field entails. I found it useful and interesting.

Love the style of the writing and philosophical bent. Many points had me nodding and feeling like she's telling my story in large part (I, too, have a life in code, and Ellen is my spiritual mentor). I'm not finished with the book I may do a follow-up. But I wish I could give it 5 stars. I have to give it 4 because, well, its a view of programming that's from a bygone age where the ideal programmer resembles the electrical engineer. Even the term "Software Engineer" (as opposed to "Computer Scientist") is not really about engineering. Programming is more a liberal art, where survivorship of ideas expressed in code depends largely on a design ethos that puts amenability to change as paramount, not any "single best way" to solve a problem: programming being the first human-computer interaction. I was also saddened to see this myth of meritocracy perpetuated again. There are no meritocracies, only "mirrortocracies", programming being one of the best examples. The boys (and it's generally boys, yes) that get ahead mostly come from privilege already. Even Ellen's own observations point in this direction. But somehow she can't see it clearly or doesn't want to write THAT book. I still love her work.

Thanks.

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If you have some computer programming in your life, this is the book for you. I started in 1968 and Ellen's book describes much of my life. If you are not a programmer, her insight into how your programmer friends minds work and into how our world is changing and the machines are starting to win are also well worth the time to check this book out. All of that and she seems like somebody who would be fun to spend time with. Ellen, if you ever get to Sacramento, I'd love to buy you lunch or have you over for dinner.

Creative storytelling of her personal experiences in the very exciting silicon valley technology industry during fascinating times. Ellen is insightful, intelligent, introspective, funny, witty and really knows how to spin an interesting story. Loved this!

Silicon Valley brands itself as progressive, but really, it’s a less honest Wall Street: a small geographic location dedicated to generating mass amounts of wealth for a small, select group of primarily white men. This book intelligently dissects all the hypocritical intricacies of this world and offers a glimmer of hope in the messiness of humanity, civil society, even the corporeal.

As advertised

Really interesting look from the birth of modern computer technology to the present day by someone who was there from the early days. Tells the story of the dot com crash with forensic detail.