In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.
With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides.
You know what’s universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing assembly language code.
As Steve McConnell said back in 1994:
Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited
In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them.
I
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront
With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?
(Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much