best fiction books for software engineers

On the other hand, Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, said that poets lie the least. Thats a responsibility that every programmer needs to face up tothe same code that makes it easy to check in on your kids can become a way for an abusive partner to lock their spouse into misery. Theres a good chance that you will pour your best programming art into this project, only for it to fail for reasons that were by no means your own. They generally dont type in inscrutable commands we found on our servers in the hopes that this doesnt actually summon a demon (or, in our case, install a malicious daemon on our hard drive). Putting together a website that allows you to log in requires knowledge of how websites talk to each other, and storing passwords, and getting words to render the login formbut theres so much more you need on top of that to get it to function. Your imagination works like any muscle. I also recommend The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold. For variables, functions, and classes, the right name can bring clarity to code like a brisk summer breeze, while the wrong name brings pain accompanied by the wailing and gnashing of teeth. And theres a lot more horrible gargoyles and soul-sucking shadows and vampires than youre likely to encounter in troubleshooting your Apache stack. Thats like two hours. Elma York is a prodigy: a master mathematician, an experienced pilot, dedicated and competent. And maybe even secure, if youve found a Linux distro thats user-friendly. But programming involves the act of creation, of fine-tuning, of project managementnone of which traditionally lend itself to an captivating narrative. Every line of code you write is a hope. Not Charlie Stross The Atrocity Archives. But programming does require expertise, because while no individual portion tends to be indecipherable, its putting them all together that requires many overlapping knowledge bases. How many technical books will be outdated after two years? Its tech debt, and well regret it later. One of the hardest problems in programming is naming things. Charlie Stross does an excellent job capturing the detail of finely scientific explorations of gorgon stares, otherworldly dimensions, andgackunicorns. Still. What if youre spinning up a web server that needs to handle 50,000 users connecting all at once? Now, theres nothing wrong with hacking. What Happens When Youre Joining Things Together: Wanna know the trick about programming? So what novel feels most like dealing with having bad management as a programmer? Or you follow the documentation note-for-note, levelling up your baking skills until you understand this Bakewell tart so thoroughly that youre sure Paul Hollywood himself would give you a handshake over it, only to discover that theyve discontinued that brand of Bakewell tart and the new children 3.0 wont eat it. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), 2022 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors, 8 Science Fiction Books That Get Programming Right, Friends and Fans of Nichelle Nichols Celebrate Her Life After Her Passing, Daphne du Maurier and the Borders of the Uncanny, Gothic, and Weird, Beauties Which Pierce Like Swords: Peter S. Beagles, The End of All Stories: Bidding a Fond Farewell to The Great C.S. Why made-up stories about imaginary characters? There are people who are paid to do nothing but make computers run sleeker, harder, better, fasterand if you want to get there, youre going to have to have a fundamental understanding of the keepalive timeouts and the proxy caches. This is my favorite list so far. What Naam does in this book is astounding, in a science-fiction book: he doesnt really seem to have an opinion. So how do you find good fiction? Theyre never pretty sure they understood most of whats happening here, and what they understood fixed the code so far, so time to do the old cut-and-copy and call response code YOLO. Your acts of friendship might not save the world from unspeakable evil, but each one reaches for those lofty heights. The magic follows rules, and the rules are clear, but the ramifications are not fully thought through. I'd also throw in Frederik Pohl: Gateway (and sequels). Notice the qualifier good.Thats important. If youre not, youll be sitting there on Thursday at 10:13 pm, hoping you can see the bug so you can fix itwhich is known as the dreaded repro, short for Cannot reproduce the bug, which is programmer-speak for That doesnt happen when I do it, so who knows whats happening?. He is the author of the novels The Sol Majestic from Tor Books, as well as the Mancer trilogy and The Uploaded. Kij Johnsons prose is always dazzling and sparse, and her mastery has never been more on form than in this novella, which isnt so much about code as it is that sense of immensity you feel, looking straight on at something that is so monumentally difficult that you might never finish it. At which point, everything will come down to optimization. Austen has a lot to teach you about how one might maneuver around this type of personality. How many times will modern pundits get things wrong, or focus on things that wont matter in another month? It takes imagination to get beyond your own limited viewpoint. Nexus is the first in a trilogy, but trust me, youll want to read the whole thing. I second anything Neal Stephenson, he writes lots of hacker books. This allows us to improve and customize your browsing experience. What Its Like To Optimize Your Computers: If youve ever spun up a computer with Linux installed, you know theres an overwhelming amount of options that you can tweak. When that happens, good managers bite the bullet and acknowledge the troubles. His Masters Voice by Lem- It will stop you trusting your data too much. (can you be a programmer without reading it). Its not about programming in the physical sense; despite the title of software engineer, building a bridge isnt much like creating a program at all. (RIP, Rebecca Alison Meyer, forever embedded in the Internet as #rebeccapurple.). (Good solutions that usually turn out to be overwhelmingly white and cismale. Dont understand how one website calls another to get information? Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. And just like any other kind of training, it helps to have an experienced guide. Bad? Well, it didnt. And you get to hunt through code trying to find the error while the vice president of your company (salary $140k annually, plus three weeks vacation) calls up and screams in your ear. Tolkien, The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (Recommended by Hunter MacDermut), The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Recommended by Seth Brown), Pandoras Star by Peter Hamilton (Recommended by Seth Brown), Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Recommended by Seth Brown), Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Recommended by Seth Brown), The Sword of Truthseries by Terry Goodkind (Recommended by Jerad Bitner), Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Recommended by Megh Plunkett), A Strategy for Publishing Timely and Accurate Information During a Pandemic, A Redesigned Experience for Developers and QA Teams, The Forefront of Medicine Meets the Forefront of Publishing. So you have long threads devoted to What Not To Do, and then people argue about What Should Be Done, and its tedious and bureaucratic and yet somehow necessary. What Happens When Youre Maintaining A Project: Every day you arrive at work to look at a list of bugs that your customers have discovered, sorted by priority. Every time anytime mentions programming and speculative fiction, the words CHARLIE STROSS ATROCITY ARCHIVES erupts from their mouths like the Deep Ones crying out to their undersea master Cthulhu. This can make it easier to make connections and analogies between things that might not have seemed relatedwhich is a compelling definition of creativity itself. I know this is a terrible solution. Maybe management figures out halfway through that what you built isnt actually what they needed. To quote Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge. The latter is closer to the truth, even though it might betray a pessimistic view of humanity. The code is well known. The only thing by Lem that I've read is The Cyberiad, but it was hilarious and definitely recommended. Please, sound off. But thats not always possible; sometimes outside forces require sub-par hotfixes, and sometimes the solution you really want is too expensive (in terms of man-hours or hardware) to accomplish. This is related to the previous point but deserves its own section. For all of your attempts at improvement, however, you will be tempted to remain in the non-fiction section of your favorite bookstore. And despite all that, sometimes bad management gets it done. The novel starts out with the exciting kind of bugKos Everburning has been found dead by his priesthood for no reason that anyone can understand, and the junior partner and the new developer are sent in to investigate. Gonna be honest; I made this category just because I still love this story. One aspect I particularly like is that the main character is a computer programmer. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding whats going on. Because other people will work their asses off for love of the dream. (Non-programmers are astonishingly incoherent when it comes to explaining what they want, and often demand you to do the exact opposite of what they need.) The best writers can craft characters so real that they feel like flesh and blood, and many of those people can be similar to actual people you know. He is geeky, but normal-- not the Jurassic Park style programmer that only gets portrayed eating junk. Its about, what, 2,000 words max? What Happens When Your Technology Takes New Root: Technology is like memes; the greatest sign of success is that people start messing with it. Lewis Reread, Feed Me, Seymour: H.G. Flickr (a photo website sadly waning in influence now) started off as a way to share screenshots on a MMORPG. Want to know how a database stores your password safely? Many are worth your time and investment. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Theres plenty of dressing-downs, of sidelining the most talented people for political reasons, of wasting resources to prioritize the good solutions they know of. What you dont tell them is that even if they approve the eighteen-month project, their fix will in fact probably never get implemented, because the legacy code has outlasted previous teams of management, and will outlast them, and will probably outlast the heat death of the universe. Seconding Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers and adding Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and The Gods Themselves by Asimov. So if you want a little critique with your intrigue, well, here ygo. Sometimes, how one system interfaces with another has more to do with the relationship between two managers than any technical considerations. The best words in the best order could also be a definition of good, clean code. And theres multiple times when the characters face down impossible uses of scriving that, when broken down, not only seem plausible, but almost downright inevitable in how they got used. But our CEO needs a fix this week, not in six months, so get to it.. Plus, you know, theres a whole criticism of the merchant houses that rule the city, and what that refined capitalism-as-cult does to the power structure. Is Nexus good? As such, hes become obsessed with fine-tuning, ensuring all the maintenance he does will never again harm a bystander no matter what firefights might erupt, and that mechanized PTSD is slowly killing him. I think Douglas Adams did a spot on job of representing actual computer engineers. There were over 200,000 new works of fiction published in 2015 alone. As is usual with fantasy books that evoke programming, theres a lot more magical ninjas involved than youre likely to see scanning Stack Overflow. What Happens When Youre Working On Legacy Code: This code has been around longer than youve been alive, and it will be around long after youre dead. If you are a programmer, you are a freaking poet. Better Accelerando link. But what makes Nexus so relentlessly unique is the way that the brain-hacking keeps spiraling into new hands, and those hands in turn change what the Nexus OS is for. So what novel feels most like technology changing society? There are at least four ways. Those Russian roulette odds means signing onto a long-term project is an act of faith. If you are a programmer looking to improve your professional craft, there are many resources toward which you will be tempted to turn. None of the people involved in this process are automatons. Programming is as much a creative endeavor as it is technical mastery, and creativity requires a functioning imagination. Not exactly high stakes stuff. I'ld like to add anything by Peter F. Hamilton. Thats where Mat, the hero of Automatic Reload, is right now: hes a hulking cyborg with prosthetic armaments, and he has emerged from a blink-of-an-eye combat to realize that his guns have killed the wrong person. Honestly, most of A Deepness In The Sky doesnt involve legacy codingits a sprawling space opera about first contact and a culture of Spiders in the throes of their own scientific revolution, and a great big juicy hatesink of a villain. And here, in the Nexus trilogy, technology is allowed to be a reflection of human growth, not the seed-bed for a moralizing author tract. So what novel best feels like building long-term projects? Fictional truths give the world new depth to the reader. Who refuses to stop jogging while youre doing heart surgery on them. Or, you might be better equipped to recognize such tendencies in yourself and snuff them out before they cause trouble for yourself and others. Matt has been working with Drupal since 2008. Half your job consists of facing teams of management who brightly say, Well, it should be easy to while you explainwithout looking like youre stonewalling themthat in fact, that this trivial fix will require eighteen months of resources minimum because some obscure limitation of the legacy code (the portion of code nicknamed the dream crusher) is the entire reason we cant have nice things. Which is good. As I said, bad management doesnt always destroy a project. Theres a lot of programming thought going into it, but even though Bob Howards bosses are notably bad (including some literally inhumanly awful management), I think theres a slightly better choice for this: The Calculating Starsthe first in the Lady Astronaut seriesstarts off with a bang. At worst, it can lie to you in ways that twist your expectations about reality by twisting what is good and beautiful. When you look at something like the Internet, its been both a force for unalloyed good and an enabler of seething evils. Pick any Skill to Practice from a wide range of options available. Great authors. https://techgig.com/generateHttpWebService-v2.php?tgtype=SAVE_NEWS_READ_LOGS&news_id=81711223&news_title=4 Sci-Fi books to get programming right&news_sec=Books&tags=software developers, And its amusing as all hell. Your acts of friendship are made a little bit noblerbecause you know that they do, in some way, push back the darkness. Press J to jump to the feed. You can go blind staring at a thirty-page manual that documents the options for a single command let alone the options on the four hundred or so other commands. Note the free download link, given to you by the author. Take skill tests from 60+ topics and showcase your prowess to employers. Nexus would be exactly the same. Heck, in its early stages, the Internet was basically seen as a way to store documentation. That all strictly depends on whos using it, and even the characters change their opinions on Nexus as the world begins to shape and adapt to it. Good fiction provides good landmarks. Sometimes they succeed regardless. Or the documentation is about that pie you desperately need to bake, except that theyre not making the pie using an oven or a pie tin, no, these people have a kitchen that only uses an air fryer that youve never heard of and they bake their pies in a pile of natural coal, but you sort of hope its the same principles so its pie time, mofos. i can't stand it. The hackersor at least the Burning Man-flavored hackers presented heresee it as an opportunity, or a drug, or the possibility for unique forms of psychotherapy. Go figure.). I would of course second that. Good fiction can help you navigate real life. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said: Prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order. Use it or lose it. Sometimes, the difference between the right name and the wrong name is thin and small, but represents a vast distance, like the difference between lightning and lightning bug, or the difference between right and write.. If youre not a programmer, youll doubtlessly protest: Theres a lot of programming in speculative fiction! But there isnt, actually. Well, then youre gonna take such a deep dive into the documentation that you risk getting compression sickness. Homer will always be right and relevant. And again, many are worthwhile. How will that help you be better at your job? Bad management undermines you, because your very realistic complaints are an impediment to the fantasy view of reality theyre desperately trying to peddle to their superiors. And when truly life-changing technology hits, it transforms society. Maybe another manager takes over and doesnt believe in your project, so he starves it of resources until you dwindle to dust. I second all those books, esp. What if youve got a ton of complex data, and you need to make sure your data storehouse is optimized to return answers to any query under 15 milliseconds? But you dont write a lot of code; instead, you hold endless meetings with other programmers, debating weighty theories as to how this complex thing should function, getting bogged down in minutiae that actually do matter, but every moment spent in these necessary arguments is running out the clock. The trick to legacy code is that it is, by definition, the most vital code in your program. The Calculating Stars is a good example of what happens when a manager is devoted to the project, but not necessarily to you. Good fiction can tell the truth with imaginary facts. Now, this generally doesnt apply to customers; theyre an odd mix of continually demanding and dead-as-the-void silent. So what novel feels most like being dazzled by new interactions? All the way to the heat death of the universe. For these less-technical skills, you will also find a plethora of resources claiming to help you in your quest for improvement. What Its Like To Find Your Users Contorting Themselves Into Pretzels Over A UI Bug You Could Have Fixed In Twenty Minutes: Remember when I said that non-programmers are routinely very bad at knowing what they want, and ask for massive solutions that dont actually fix their problem? And maybe, just maybe, after you have witnessed example after vivid example of the phenomenon in The Iliad, you will be better equipped to stop your own anger from blinding you like smoke. How to get words in a browser to render in bold, italic, or superscript? The Dosadi Experment is really excellent but not really hackerish. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Yet he is real. And Kij is very precise in describing the elements of building, the huge influx of resources it will take to accomplish this task. You dont want the exciting bugs, which tend to be things like You know that salary information our program was supposed to keep confidential? C.S. Who doesnt want to be a faithful friend, like Samwise Gamgee, to help shoulder the heaviest burdens of those you love? You also get the benefit of aspirational truths. But when I talked to other programmers, what they remembered was Vinges profession of the programmer-archaeologist, whose whole job was sifting through aeons-old code to try to understand what all of this mysterious infrastructure does, hunting through the archives to extract and resettle useful programs. No individual part is all that difficult. So what novel feels most like dealing with optimizing your computers? The stories we tell ourselves and repeat about ourselves shape our consciousness, and so we want to tell ourselves good ones. Most of the stuff published today will not last and will not be the least bit relevant twenty years from now. Whats happening is that you are assembling a Justice League together from your own skillsets, piling on all the little aptitudes youve gained along the way until you can create something magnificent by fusing these modular skills into one project. enginnering novels, Bad managers will come down with mysterious cases of amnesia when, after youve told them time and time again that this duct-tape-and-glue fix is unstable, then they blame you for not warning them when that hotfix collapses. But some of it will. Great book. Three Parts Dead isnt about the mild kind of maintenancebut then again, slow bug-fixing would probably make a lousy book. (One of my favorite series, The Murderbot Diaries, features a cyborg killing machine who loves both soap operas and hacking into cameras, so Murderbot is certainly well-balanced.) Great list. So what novel best feels like working on legacy code? More specifically, the bang that ends the Earth. Unfortunately, shes also a genetically engineered killing machine. Clerks will enter in forty-digit gift certificates on a keypad because nobody thought to ask for a scanner. Neutral? Youre gonna trawl forums, check Stack Overflow, drop into Slacks and Discords to ask the experts. Some will rise to the top and become part of the lasting legacy of our culture, shining brighter and brighter as the years pass by and scrub away the dross. Why fiction? Good authors of fiction are ready to be your personal trainers. I would also recommend Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency. He loves spending his time reading, writing, playing with his three kids, and eating lots of ice cream. And you do. entertainment for developers, Creative thinking and learning how to ask proper questions are critical when honing requirements and rooting out bugs, and time can always be managed better. You could learn that in an afternoon. I don't understand how people can rank the Dune series so high. Wells The Flowering of the Strange Orchid. The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy. No, most bugs are mild, obscure things like User is logged out every Thursday at 10:13 pm. If youre lucky, you patch a widespread inconvenience with a two-line fix and look like a genius. Well now is time to jump into the book that can relax and refresh your mind. But often, your fellow programmers are the oppositionadding trivial bugs they should have caught, rewriting perfectly good code to fit their own pedantic standards, ignoring the big warning sign that says PLEASE DO NOT OPEN THE CAGE WITH THE FACE-EATING LEOPARDS shortly before filing a ticket that says Face eaten, pls help.. It turns out that whats happened to Kos Everburning is very much a bug in every (computerized) sense of the term, and much of the novel concerns itself with forms of data recoveryor, more accurately, retrieving the contracts that fuel a gods power. And when you increase your vocabulary, you increase your ability to think clearly and precisely. Poetry will just intensify the phenomenon. (You really dont want to know what perfidity can be wreaked with a Strossian unicorn.). What Happens When Youre Building Long-Term Projects: At one point, the projected failure rate of massive IT projects was around 50%; now, with much better management structures and development skills in place, that failure rate is down to around 15%. You dont have towe could And somewhere in the back of your mind you will be tallying all the hours lost to this worship of The Software, and wonder how soon you can rescue these poor, benighted souls from their own faith. There is a vast river of mist that separates an empire. Sure, the defaults are probably good. But Elma York is also a Jewish woman, in the 1950s, participating in a space program that only values her because shes a good photo op. I dont mean to be a snob, just realistic. It can warp the lens through which you view life. Im not saying there isnt oneIm merely saying that I havent read it. If youre not careful, youll find entire cultures warped around a feature you could have knocked off in an afternoon. sci-fi novels, Are they worth reading? That said, I wrote this book as a programmer who was very curious about what cybercombat would be like in the futurebecause eventually, when real-time computer image processing gets to be quick and reliable enough, there will come a day when the computer can outdraw and fire our slow, tired human reflexes.

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