Overview

When Ellen Ullman's memoir of her life as a software engineer was published in 1997, it was greeted as a revelatory meditation on the dawn of the digital era. Now, twenty-five years later, Close to the Machine is a true classic, a touchstone work that illuminates our time and our future life in technology. It is the story of a woman whose life is spinning out of control. Technology becomes her unlikely lifeline. As she navigates this socially flawed and male-dominated world, Ullman shows us the struggle of translating the messiness of human thought into algorithms, and also discovers unexpected beauty in the logic of code.

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9781250884121

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Reviews

Astonishing...Impossible to put down. --San Francisco Chronicle Close to the Machine may be the best---it's certainly the most human---book to have emerged thus far from the culture of Silicon Valley. Ullman is that rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language. --Laura Miller, Salon Part memoir, part techie mantra, part observation on the ever-changing world of computer science...[Ullman is] a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, 'obsolescence' in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds---modern technology and modern society. --The New York Times Book Review Fascinating...Chock-full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters. --Newsweek Ullman comes with her tech bona fides intact (she is, after all, a seasoned software engineer). But she also comes with novel material....We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind. --Wired This book is a little masterpiece....I have never read anything like it. --Andrei Codrescu For someone sitting so close to the machine, Ellen Ullman possesses a remarkably wide-angle perspective on the technology culture she inhabits. --The Village Voice

Author Information

Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of the novels By Blood, a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine, about her life as a software engineer during the internet's first rise, became a cult classic. She is based in San Francisco.

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