Interesting snapshot of software engineering 20 years ago, just before the internet became big. Plus ça change and all that — libertarian devs into crypto currencies have been a thing for a while, apparently.

Just excellent. ( )

A friend of mine linked me to Robin Sloan's fantastic interactive review of Close to the Machine and after reading it, I immediately placed a request for the book through the library where I work. And once it came, I couldn't wait to start reading it. And, well, it was fantastic, in every way.

I am not, nor will I ever be, any sort of computer programmer/engineer/etc. And you don't need to be in order to enjoy Close to the Machine. Ullman's writing is, among many wonderful things, completely accessible. If there's something that you don't understand, she usually explains it. And everything else is pretty easy to infer from the context. Ullman's book is both her biography as well as the story of what it was like to be a woman in the male-dominated computer programming/engineering world. Ullman's story is fascinating, from her relationship with lovers to that of her late father to those with her coworkers.

The world she describes, in many ways, seems unchanged today, which is why the book, written in 1997, is still completely relevant today. We get a rare glimpse (as someone said, perhaps in the intro to the book) into the closed off world of programming and a perspective of someone who is both deep inside that world (she's a programmer) and outside it (she's a woman) at the same time.

I love this book and I highly, highly recommend it to everyone, regardless of your interest in computers and/or computer programming. ( )

This is not a book about software or engineering or the economics of highly-portable information and fluid capital. This is a good storyteller telling stories which have to do with those things and some other stuff. Ullman doesn't have a case to make or a point to prove, but she does give you a lot to think about. She's also a pretty keen observer, both of people and technology. Her description of the amorous attentions of a cipherpunk is oddly affecting: "His lovemaking was tantric, algorithmic... This sex was formulaic, had steps and positions and durations, all tried and perfected, like a martial arts kata or a well-debugged program...I felt as if I'd come in on a private process, something that he had worked out all on his own and which, in some weird expression of trust, he had decided to show me. I should have felt dissatisfied. I should have called it off. But again, I betrayed myself: I gave in to curiosity and tenderness. He has been with himself too long, I thought."

This is not everyday good writing, it's a little better than that. But there is also plenty of stuff on computers, both low- and high-level. This is the woman who observed in 1997 that "the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer". A decade and a half have given her plenty of confirmation of that claim. ( )

Memoir by SW engineer, written at the height of the dotcom madness.