Close to the Machine

This was fun!

Ullman gives us glimpses into her life (work and personal) as a software engineer and software consultant. The stories are interlaced with her musings on the technology in our lives, the lure of money and success, the global network, its the underlying machinery and the simplicity and allure of code in comparison to the messiness of real life.

Her anecdotes are highly entertaining and feel very familiar. She talks about the sexiness of shared minds when programming towards a software release date the next morning. How software developments start with a beautiful crystal of simplicity and then go on to become overladen and dark as the irregularities of human thinking invade on it.

She talks of moments where programmers retreat into worlds “closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished.” Where you start to prefer machines over humans for their inherent logic and their clear-set goals.

In her job as consultant she sits in between the people and their very human needs and the programmers that translate that need into a piece of binary code. She details her struggles of having to abstract down human thinking, human meaning into variables and states. And talks about how sometimes you need to protect clients from the greediness of technology when they realize what other information and control they can gain from a piece of software that primarily set out to do good.

The book is from 1997, and even though there is lots of talk about technology and programming languages, it does not feel dated at all, and seems every bit as relevant today as it must have been then.