With a Cornell undergraduate degree in English and a long career in computer coding, Ellen Ullman has written frequently and earnestly about the intersection of digital technology with the social, political and philosophical fabric of contemporary life (the memoir Close to the Machine and novel The Bug). Life in Code collects nine previous magazine pieces and eight new reflections on the logical discipline behind writing the algorithms that more and more rule the world.
Covering the years of rapidly evolving technology between 1994 and today, Life in Code hits all the familiar touchstones of the digital juggernaut. It also clarifies some of the jargon, acronyms and programming language idiosyncrasies of the tech world. On a personal note, Ullman laments the gentrification of her once gritty SOMA (South of Market) San Francisco neighborhood as AT&T tears up streets to lay fiber-optic cable for the tech start-ups flooding in.
An activist, Ullman wraps up her chronicle of two decades in programming with a comment on the rise of President Trump through the now-ubiquitous disintermediation of the Internet. With Twitter blasts of this and that--either true or false--he bypassed the traditional news gatherers and arbiters of accuracy to send messages straight to his people. She concludes that this is where her years of coding have taken us: "The intermediaries were useless: you could trust only websites; go directly to the internet." It remains to be seen whether this is good or bad, but Ullman's reflections on how we got here are canny, personal, enlightening and pleasantly diverting. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.