Because other people will work their asses off for love of the dream. Charlie Stross does an excellent job capturing the detail of finely scientific explorations of gorgon stares, otherworldly dimensions, andgackunicorns. Maintenance is, generally, tedium. So what novel feels most like technology changing society? Why fiction? 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. If youre not careful, youll find entire cultures warped around a feature you could have knocked off in an afternoon. Has anyone read those new Dune books, by Frank Herbert's son? 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. He loves spending his time reading, writing, playing with his three kids, and eating lots of ice cream. 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. You might have dealt with a project manager like thiswho will limit communication rather than run the risk of investigation. No news is good news. Governments want to use it for both surveillance and control, obviously, but they see it as a threat to freedom. 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. And I mean, who doesnt like the idea of hackers working in a government bureaucracy, fighting Lovecraftian monsters? You also get the benefit of aspirational truths. So I asked: What are the core activities of programming, and which stories come closest to getting it right? 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. And just like any other kind of training, it helps to have an experienced guide. (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.) Navigating people is just as much a part of a programmers job as navigating an IDE. Its tech debt, and well regret it later. Dont understand how one website calls another to get information? Which is not to say theres not some attention paid to bad documentation in magic, but the books tend to be The wizard goofed up the spell, not This spellbook was written by disinterested wizards who just wanted to get the bare minimum down before they went off for some pipeweed.. 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. Your imagination works like any muscle. Do you know who else struggles with finding the right words? The CEO of Nazara Technologies- Manish Agrwal talks about the evolution of the gaming development industry, skills developers should hone, recruitment trends, new-edge technologies like metaverse, 5 Best books to learn Blockchain technology, 5 Non-programming books that every programmer should read, 5 highly-recommended Machine Learning books for absolute beginners, 8 Amazing books to help you grow your career, 5 Machine Learning books that every professional must read, 4 most recommended e-books for Data Science beginners, 8 Best books to learn Rust programming language, Top 3 books to learn Python programming from scratch. 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. This would be a mistake. The best words in the best order could also be a definition of good, clean code. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Good fiction can tell the truth with imaginary facts. 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. And let us not forget the astounding cruelty that can take place when an unthinking coder decides that User engagement is the same thing as Happiest post of the year! and decides to drag out a fathers dead daughter as the top post in their year in review. Austen has a lot to teach you about how one might maneuver around this type of personality. Better Accelerando link. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. And, look at how he describes anger (from the Robert Fagles translation): bitter gall, sweeter than dripping streams of honey, that swarms in people's chests and blinds like smoke. I second all those books, esp. Who refuses to stop jogging while youre doing heart surgery on them. Homer, in The Iliad, gives us a powerful portrait of the pride of men reflected in the capriciousness of his gods. That said, Id argue that the Atrocity Archives is more akin to hacking. Which is good. You can own a hammer, be really proficient with it, and even have years of experience using it, but it takes imagination to design a houseand know when to use that hammer for that house. Software is written by people, and the requirements are determined by other people. As is usual with fantasy books that evoke programming, theres a lot more magical ninjas involved than youre likely to see scanning Stack Overflow. More specifically, the bang that ends the Earth. Or, you might be better equipped to recognize such tendencies in yourself and snuff them out before they cause trouble for yourself and others. How many times will modern pundits get things wrong, or focus on things that wont matter in another month? And despite all that, sometimes bad management gets it done. Wells The Flowering of the Strange Orchid. Your acts of friendship are made a little bit noblerbecause you know that they do, in some way, push back the darkness. Some days you feel like youre programming a dreamthat youre wrestling with more of an idea than an outcome. Now, theres nothing wrong with hacking. Use it or lose it. If youre not a programmer, youll doubtlessly protest: Theres a lot of programming in speculative fiction! But there isnt, actually. Most of the stuff published today will not last and will not be the least bit relevant twenty years from now. Theres even a hidden wink to Unix timestamps in thereindicating that long after humanity has spread across to the stars, well still be marking our time (as many computers today) as the seconds elapsed since midnight on January 1st, 1970. There were over 200,000 new works of fiction published in 2015 alone. And maybe even secure, if youve found a Linux distro thats user-friendly. Elma York is a prodigy: a master mathematician, an experienced pilot, dedicated and competent. What Its Like To Have Bad Management As A Programmer: Want to know one of the nicest things a good manager can say to you? These are usually not terribly exciting bugs. What if you could talk toyour younger self? 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. 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. Now, this generally doesnt apply to customers; theyre an odd mix of continually demanding and dead-as-the-void silent. Books and classes on programming languages, design patterns, performance, testing, and algorithms are some obvious places to look. 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. So what novel feels most like being dazzled by new interactions? One meta-study suggests that reading fiction, even just a single story, can help improve someones social awareness and reactions to other people. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said: Prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order. Programming is as much a creative endeavor as it is technical mastery, and creativity requires a functioning imagination. Lewis, in defending the idea of fairy tales, wrote: He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. Jane Austens novels are some of the most insightful reflections on human nature. Matt has been working with Drupal since 2008. (Good solutions that usually turn out to be overwhelmingly white and cismale. (Quite often, that hope is that you will slay the dreaded Legacy Code.) But it's hard to know the jewels in advance, so let time do the work for you. Because once you remove the human element from warfare, well, whats that mean for programmers when your default settings were lax enough to accidentally fire upon an innocent child? Take skill tests from 60+ topics and showcase your prowess to employers. Fire Upon the Deep! 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. Shakespeares plays continue to last because they tap into something higher than facts. N.N. It takes imagination to get beyond your own limited viewpoint. There are at least four ways. If you are a programmer, you are a freaking poet. 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. (RIP, Rebecca Alison Meyer, forever embedded in the Internet as #rebeccapurple.). Is Nexus good? Shes trying hard to work past her panic attacks to get a working space program up and running But her upper management is undermining her at every opportunity, and actively working against the integration of Elmas friends and coworkers. Nexus would be exactly the same. So what novel best feels like building long-term projects? At worst, it can lie to you in ways that twist your expectations about reality by twisting what is good and beautiful. All the way to the heat death of the universe. I'ld like to add anything by Peter F. Hamilton. And particularly, great poets. Who doesnt want to be a faithful friend, like Samwise Gamgee, to help shoulder the heaviest burdens of those you love? 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. 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. I'd also throw in Frederik Pohl: Gateway (and sequels). 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. Ferrett lives in Cleveland with his wife. Are they worth reading? So what novel feels most like finding your users contorting themselves into pretzels over a UI bug you could have fixed in twenty minutes? What Happens When Your Technology Takes New Root: Technology is like memes; the greatest sign of success is that people start messing with it. 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. Life is too short to spend time reading bad books, especially when there are too many good ones to read for a single lifetime. But some of it will. He is true. Bad? Full disclosure: I wrote this book, so, you know, take my recommendation with the mandated grain of salt. 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, novels for programmers, What Happens When The Documentation Sucks: It feels like there should be a fantasy series that handles this, because you never feel more like a D&D Wizard learning a new spell than when youre poring over someone elses half-assed documentation. And when you increase your vocabulary, you increase your ability to think clearly and precisely. And when truly life-changing technology hits, it transforms society. Watch Live Webinars on a wide range of topics relevant to the IT industry. 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. 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%. Im not saying there isnt oneIm merely saying that I havent read it. On the other hand, Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, said that poets lie the least. There is a vast river of mist that separates an empire. But those books need to look a lot like this XKCD homage to DenverCoder9. 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. You could learn that in an afternoon. Pick any Skill to Practice from a wide range of options available. 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