Clive Thompson

"Portions of this book first appeared The New York Times magazine and Wired"--Title page verso.

The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

Coders

"[An] anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers--where they come from, how they think, what makes for greatness in their world, and what should give us pause"--

Dora Tominic

The odds are high the "problem" they'll decide needs most urgently to be solved is the re-creation of the conveniences of dorm and home-life - where everyone prepared their meals, cleaned up after them, and ferried them around in vehicles. As my friend Clara Jeffrey, the editor in chief of Mother Jones noted in a tweet, "So mny Sillicon Valley startups are about dudes wanting to replicate mom."

Christian Bager Bach Houmann

I liked the chapter "The Cult of Efficiency".

Matteo

I enjoyed reading this book, it talks about the history of programming, and while I knew most of the stuff in the book, I still read it for the details I didn't know, very recommended!

Japes Fawcett

'Masterful . . . [Thompson] illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live.' - David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z. Facebook’s algorithms shaping the news. Uber’s cars flocking the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of computer code. Coders – software programmers – are the people who built it for us. And yet their worlds and minds are little known to outsiders. In Coders, Wired columnist Clive Thompson presents a brilliantly original anthropological reckoning with the most influential tribe in today’s world, interrogating who they are, how they think, what they value, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. One of the most prominent journalists writing on technology today, Clive Thompson takes us into the minds of coders, the most quietly influential people on the planet, in a journey into the heart of the machine – and the men and women who made it.

Who They Are, What They Think and How They Are Changing Our World

Henry Stromberg

Andrew Reeves

Ashley McFarland

Jannis M

Róbert Istók

Dennis Bor

Aaron Chan

Mikkel Malmberg

Brian Alderman

Adam Wilson

CLIVE. THOMPSON

You use software nearly every instant you're awake. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behaviour. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard to do something, we do less of it. If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly - what does it do to them? One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say, 'Hello, world!' Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's Coders is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably 'naturally' better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvellous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results. More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders.

Coders The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

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