Current obsession: the writings of Ellen Ullman

We build our computers the way we build our cities – over time, without a plan, on top of ruins

- Ellen Ullman

I’ve just recently finished reading both Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology and Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman. I thoroughly enjoyed both.

Life in Code is a collection of personal essays about technology and the experience of working in tech that spans over twenty years. The essays range from personal accounts of significant moments in time (the first dotcom crash, Y2K, the fibre optic boom) to more enduring concerns such as issues of consciousness and embodiment in A.I., encryption and privacy, and the monoculture of programming.

Close to the Machine is a memoir focussing on Ullman’s life in mid 90s when she was working as a consultant software engineer in San Francisco. Some chapters explore themes from her experience in an essayistic fashion. The result is that the two books complement each other very well: one focussing more on personal experiences in a specific era and the other providing an expanded view of time and scale.

One of the main reasons that I’ve been enjoying her writing is that she writes so well about things are important to me and are more relatable than many other books about coders.

Writings about the lives of software engineers are most often part of a grander narrative of heroic feats of engineering related to a significant product or company. Tracy Kidder’s excellent The Soul of a New Machine is a prime example of this. It chronicles the creation of Data General’s first 32 bit minicomputer in 1980, as led by Tom West. The lives of the engineers receive little attention. West’s daughter Jessamyn is only mentioned a single sentence of the book and his other daughter isn’t mentioned at all.

Most books about software engineers are about the work of engineering but far fewer are about the lives of software engineers¹. Ullman’s focus on the personal experience is what really resonated with me. Reading Close to the Machine I at times felt a pang of recognition of feeling across the decades. It is comforting to see that the things you experience are shared by others, aren’t specific to a time and place.

As one of Technophilia’s discontents Ullman provides a more critical view of the prevailing unquestioning techno-optimism of Silicon Valley where the answer to any problem is always more technology.