Life in Code: A personal history of technology by Ellen Ullman

Synopsis: 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.

Published: August 2017 | ISBN: 978-0374534516

Mini-bio: Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written novels as well as articles for various publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Wired, the New York Times and Salon. Wikipedia
Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ellenu

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Hardcover Edition: Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology