Life in code

projectgus reviewed Life in Code by Ellen Ullman

Worthwhile collection

4 stars

This book has an emotional quality which is missing from a lot of critical tech writing. Really worthwhile collection, although the contents are quite varied I expect something here will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Close to the Machine.

The outsider-becomes-insider accounts of the tech world of 1990s San Francisco were probably the sections I enjoyed the most while reading them. The short section of essays on artificial life - including the role of the body in intelligence - are the ones that I'm still thinking about six months later.

gawwrgi reviewed Life in code by Ellen Ullman

Review of 'Life in code' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This is brilliant, I loved the MOOC chapter and the last chapter sooo much! <3 If there was mandatory reading for tech people, I would put this book somewhere at the top :)

Valentino reviewed Life in code by Ellen Ullman

Review of 'Life in code' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

This is more like a stream of consciousness rather than a book. Some nice anecdotes here and there from the good old days of the internet, although a bit boring overall.

EMR reviewed Life in code by Ellen Ullman

Review of 'Life in code' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Ullman gets it. There are tons of great writers who do a decent job, but most don't really have the feel for what it means to be a software engineer and are seduced by easy narratives or lurid details. Many engieneers would prefer stick to the purely technical, and when they do deign to write in a more narrative fashon, you get warm glowing nostalga or breathless pride. Ullman is a writer and an engineer but she falls into nither trap. She gets what it means to be an engineer but also what it means to live in the society that she has had a hand in changing. We get to see the forest and the trees, both in crisp relief. If there is one book every software engineer should read, this is it. More important than Pragmatic Programmer or Clean Code, more telling than Hackers.

Kathrin Passig reviewed Life in code by Ellen Ullman

Review of 'Life in code' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Schade, aber es ging nicht. Dabei stehen wirklich viele interessante Dinge drin, auch stilistisch mochte ich es sehr, aber es gibt wiederkehrende Themen, die mich schon bei "Close to the Machine" geärgert haben und die hier so aufdringlich sind, dass ich die Lust verloren habe. Das ist zum einen eine sehr unwohlwollende Behandlung aller vorkommenden Personen, vor allem der Männer in ihrem Leben, die attraktiv und klug und gut im Bett sind, aber doch irgendwie subtil ungenügend, unaufmerksam, unreif, unerwachsen. Überhaupt das wirklich in jedem Essay auftauchende Thema "Infantilisierung", alles am Computer wird immer kindischer, bunter, einfacher. Das halte ich für grob vereinfachten Unfug. Alle Texte scheinen mir von der Unzufriedenheit der Autorin mit Veränderungen zu handeln, und dass es sich um eine Unzufriedenheit mit Veränderungen auch nur handeln KÖNNTE, bleibt völlig unreflektiert, was umso ärgerlicher ist, als die Autorin eben eigentlich toll und schlau ist.

gimley reviewed Life in code by Ellen Ullman

Review of 'Life in code' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I wrote a review of this book, but took too long and it timed out and goodreads tossed it into the bit bucket. ("Bit bucket" is programmer slang for the mythical location of lost data.) This happened before so I'd learned to write less carefully and post less thoughtful prose. But, not being a computer, I forgot this time and tried to fix my typos and go beyond first draftiness. A better programmer (it's not the computer's fault) would have had the program save my earlier draft so I could recover. Ms. Ullman would understand.

A better programmer would also know that goodreads reviewers probably don't pay a lot of attention to making sure the correct "edition" is chosen and the stats thus generated are bogus. ("Bogus" is another word popular among programmers, or it at least it was long ago when I used to program.) I'm intentionally leaving the …

I wrote a review of this book, but took too long and it timed out and goodreads tossed it into the bit bucket. ("Bit bucket" is programmer slang for the mythical location of lost data.) This happened before so I'd learned to write less carefully and post less thoughtful prose. But, not being a computer, I forgot this time and tried to fix my typos and go beyond first draftiness. A better programmer (it's not the computer's fault) would have had the program save my earlier draft so I could recover. Ms. Ullman would understand.

A better programmer would also know that goodreads reviewers probably don't pay a lot of attention to making sure the correct "edition" is chosen and the stats thus generated are bogus. ("Bogus" is another word popular among programmers, or it at least it was long ago when I used to program.) I'm intentionally leaving the default edition (Hardcover) which is different from the one I actually read (Audio), out of spite for having to write a second review from scratch.

Ms Ullman writes in a way that is understandable by liberal arts majors but still keeps techies from becoming bored.

Subtitled "A Personal History of Technology," it often reads much like a non-personal history. All histories are personal, only some affect a style of writing that makes them look more like reporting and less like opinion. They still reflect opinion but aspire to objectivity which really means that they take the points of view that the dominant (I should add 'male') culture does.

This history is personal in that its points of view aren't those standard ones. It doesn't end with the geeky privileged boy culture of the TV shows like "Silicon Valley" but starting from the truth of that cliche is willing to venture way outside its bounds, often ending up in memoir territory. It also dares criticize the"better world through technology" point of view which pervades much tech literature.

She further takes on the dominant trope of people being no more than machines built out of meat. In my previous review, I went into some of the reasons the comparison of humans to computers is so pervasive but in this rewrite, I'll merely say that the Tao that can be stored as data is not the eternal Tao and save this before I lose it.