Life in Code is a consummate insider’s take, rich with local color and anecdotes ... Ullman has a pure passion for computing that doesn’t stop her from recognizing all the ways it can isolate and intimidate — or how unconscious bias works like a sort of snow blindness on the striving (and yes, still overwhelmingly white and male) dreamers who would call themselves disrupters. Like all great writers, she finds the universal in the specific, mixing memoir with industry gossip (cameos by Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, a wry Microsoft dig) and ancillary tales of house cats, dairy farmers, and Julia Child. Code is illuminating and unfailingly clever, but above all it’s a deeply human book: urgent, eloquent, and heartfelt.
Don’t panic, non-nerds. In addition to writing code in multiple computer languages, Ullman has an Ivy League degree in English and knows how to decode her tech-world adventures into accessible narratives for word people ... The first three-fifths of Life in Code is primarily composed of essays published elsewhere between 1994 and 2004, while newer material from 2012 to early 2017 fills out the rest. The technology mentioned within those early chapters often recalls quaint discovery, like finding a chunky, clunky Nokia cellphone in the back of the junk drawer. The piece on preparing computers for the Year 2000 has a musty time-capsule feel, but the philosophical questions posed in other chapters — like those on robotics and artificial intelligence — still resonate.
Ullman is a rare breed, a writer and former software engineer, and she offers a vivid, gripping window into what it is to be shaped by keyboard characters and machine, in which a single wrong tap can bring entire systems crashing down ... But Life in Code isn't focused on what it is to be a female per se. Rather, it is a stream of staccatolike depictions from Ullman's 40-plus-year career. She describes turning down a job from Google's Larry Page and engaging in an e-mail relationship with a guy who could only express his feelings through the medium of code. She writes poignant passages about love, animals, and artificial intelligence. How do computers think? she wonders. To readers who may not know the lingo—abend (another word for 'crash'), Unix, COBOL—prepare for a learning curve. But there are also relatable observations: Those who can't 'do' become project managers, a common tech-world dis. Ullman relishes tech's beauty while fearing what it has created.
The essays in Life in Code, Ellen Ullman’s smart, civic-minded new book, were written over a period of almost 25 years. The newest entry, completed a few months ago, is as current as could be ... Not all of these essays are unadulterated gems. Ullman is a longtime San Francisco resident, but her brief piece about the changing complexion of SoMa never quite coheres. Most of the entries, however, are excellent ...her experience informs her clear-eyed assessments of the tech economy, artificial intelligence and the industry’s power dynamics ... This is a measured perspective, and like the rest of Life in Code, it figures to stand up over time.
In a poignant piece in her new essay collection, Life in Code, Ullman describes how she could hear his voice, and in the sine wave that pierced the on-screen static she could see him, too ...the pieces in Life in Code, which span 1994 to 2017, reflect this more wide-screen perspective ... The experience of being a woman who codes — we learn now that it was an acutely lonely path — remains central, but time and distance allow her to reframe a career’s worth of indignities in a couple of different ways ... Ullman’s prose, which often has the concision of clean code, is most seductive in this mode... Life in Code shares its predecessor’s emphasis on the fleshy politics that undergird the industry’s glib tech utopianism. Unfortunately, it often takes a turn for the pedantic, but while it lacks the thrill of Close to the Machine, the critiques it offers are more overtly political.
Ullman maintains a healthy skepticism regarding the notion that technology will cure all that ails us ... she brilliantly questions the computer’s capacity for sentience.
'To program,' she writes at the beginning of her new memoir, Life in Code, 'is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.' In the book’s forceful conclusion, Ullman raises the role of technology in President Donald Trump’s unexpected election, and what she describes as the 'unspooling of a thread' that led to disintermediation, the removal of gatekeepers and middlemen in economic and social relationships ...[an] often brilliant book.
The memoir, comprised of some of Ullman’s previous essays as well as several new ones, is arranged somewhat chronologically (from 1992 to January 2017) and thematically as Ullman describes what her title suggests: a lifetime spent in code ... Her perspective is hard-won and enduringly timely ... Her writing seamlessly merges with her subject matter, shifting from scientific investigation and programming primer to philosophical inquiry and journalistic account — and circling back again ... The stories she weaves throughout are not only interesting in themselves, but offer endless insights, as Ullman bends language to make her point ... She cares about her reader, and wants to offer us an important look into the techies’ ivory tower, to see what the world looks like from the Googleplex. To the final page, Life in Code depicts its world of sushiritos and nap corners as a perfectly wound dark comedy.
A sharply written, politically charged memoir of life in the data trenches ... More than a personal account, Ullman’s narrative is a you-are-here chronicle of the evolution of things we take for granted, from the early AI research of the 1970s and the first flickerings of the personal computer to the founding of Google—and now, to a decidedly dystopian present that is the real thrust of a sometimes-rueful confession ... What Anthony Bourdain did for chefs, Ullman does for computer geeks. A fine rejoinder and update to Doug Coupland’s Microserfs and of great interest to any computer user.
Providing much-needed nuance to the binary world of code, the essays gracefully move between intimate anecdotes, frustrated rants about the unconscious bias and hypercompetitiveness that dominate much of venture-capitalist startup culture, philosophical meanderings about artificial intelligence and the nature of human thought, and big-picture analysis about the relationship between technical design and human desire. Not only is Ullman an astute observer of the changing culture but she proves prescient on a diverse range of issues including the siloing effect of the internet, the growing digital divide, and corporate-assisted government surveillance. Neither technophilic nor technophobic, this collection creates a time-lapse view of the rapid development of technology in recent years and provides general readers with much-needed grounding for the sweeping changes of the revolution underway. It’s also simply a pleasure to read.
