Seconding Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers and adding Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and The Gods Themselves by Asimov. enginnering novels, The only thing by Lem that I've read is The Cyberiad, but it was hilarious and definitely recommended. But The Man Who Bridged The Mist is very much about that sense of wonder, of sweat, of politicsall the things that must come together to create the impossible. Or, you might be better equipped to recognize such tendencies in yourself and snuff them out before they cause trouble for yourself and others. Great list. 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. To quote Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge. 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. So what novel best feels like building long-term projects? To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. Full disclosure: I wrote this book, so, you know, take my recommendation with the mandated grain of salt. Some days you feel like youre programming a dreamthat youre wrestling with more of an idea than an outcome. On the other hand, Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, said that poets lie the least. What Happens When Your Technology Takes New Root: Technology is like memes; the greatest sign of success is that people start messing with it. No individual part is all that difficult. Jane Austens novels are some of the most insightful reflections on human nature. 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. One heuristic is to let time be your filter. Every line of code you write is a hope. Is Nexus good? 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? And like all ancient thingsincluding cars, plumbing, and peoplelegacy code has quirks you have to work around lest you encounter its ire. 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. And you will walk in to stammer, Thatno. He is true. Thats like two hours. 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. Your acts of friendship might not save the world from unspeakable evil, but each one reaches for those lofty heights. This is not a unique take. More specifically, the bang that ends the Earth. I know this is a terrible solution. What if youre spinning up a web server that needs to handle 50,000 users connecting all at once? One aspect I particularly like is that the main character is a computer programmer. 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.. 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. 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. entertainment for developers, But the flourishing tech start-up economy of Bennetts steampunk city of Tevanne is fueled by scrivingsmagical instructions that alter reality. But of course its not quite that simplethe meteorite that hit us in this alt-history 1950s story has destroyed our ecosystem, but its a slow burn. How to get words in a browser to render in bold, italic, or superscript? Isaac Asimov: Foundation series, Nightfall, Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Larry Niven: Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers, Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle. And particularly, great poets. Still. That sounds weirdyoud rather have a manager who could stop you from rolling out terrible solutions, right? Sometimes they succeed regardless. Again, Im not saying nobodys written this book, Im merely saying that I havent found it. But if you develop software for an office, the people at that office will often assume that this is all management will allow them to have. On a jogger. Take skill tests from 60+ topics and showcase your prowress to employers. But personally, Id love to read some behemoth of a novel detailing an oppressed civilization rebelling against a malicious AI, and at the end of it some dude from QA comes in and says, Oh, yeah, we can patch that and fixes it in a weekend. This is opposed to much of the news today, which can lie with the right facts, either by omitting some or through misinterpretation. Better Accelerando link. Youre gonna trawl forums, check Stack Overflow, drop into Slacks and Discords to ask the experts. 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. Ferrett Steinmetz is a graduate of both the Clarion Writers Workshop and Viable Paradise, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2012, for his novelette Sauerkraut Station. Neutral? 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. When you look at something like the Internet, its been both a force for unalloyed good and an enabler of seething evils. These are usually not terribly exciting bugs. 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. Copyright Times Business Solutions (A Division of Times Internet Limited) 2022. And its amusing as all hell. If you are a programmer, you are a freaking poet. Your software will become the thing they have to work around, and theyll never tell you. 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. Our Privacy Notice has been updated to explain how we use cookies, which you accept by continuing to use this website. Yet he is real. 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. Press J to jump to the feed. 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. His short fiction has been featured in Asimovs Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Everyone knows the legacy code is bad. So what novel feels most like dealing with optimizing your computers? So if you want a little critique with your intrigue, well, here ygo. 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. The magic follows rules, and the rules are clear, but the ramifications are not fully thought through. His Masters Voice by Lem- It will stop you trusting your data too much. But what if you really need to fine-tune that server until it sings? And when you increase your vocabulary, you increase your ability to think clearly and precisely. Use it or lose it. Are they worth reading? I think Douglas Adams did a spot on job of representing actual computer engineers. Because it deals what happens when programmers perfect the Nexus OSan operating system that ties directly into your brain. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. Watch Live Webinars on a wide range of topics relevant to the IT industry. Matt has been working with Drupal since 2008. 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. I would of course second that. 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. 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. And when truly life-changing technology hits, it transforms society. Fortunately, he finds the right girl to help talk him out of his trauma. Which is good. Go figure.). 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.. And again, many are worthwhile. Most of the stuff published today will not last and will not be the least bit relevant twenty years from now. So what novel best feels like maintaining code? These are not easily placed in the silo of software engineering, but are inevitable requirements of the job. Secretaries will mail each other spreadsheets of invoice numbers that they looked up, painfully, one by one, when you could have literally added one control to the search bar. Remember, all software problems are really people problemsat their core. 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. Well now is time to jump into the book that can relax and refresh your mind. Do you know who else struggles with finding the right words? Not Charlie Stross The Atrocity Archives. Maybe management figures out halfway through that what you built isnt actually what they needed. Pick any Skill to Practice from a wide range of options available. 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. 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. That said, Id argue that the Atrocity Archives is more akin to hacking. Maybe some other company devises a better solution, and they abandon you to buy that. 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. Likewise, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, fairy tales are more than true not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. The stories we tell ourselves and repeat about ourselves shape our consciousness, and so we want to tell ourselves good ones. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our. And you do. As is usual with fantasy books that evoke programming, theres a lot more magical ninjas involved than youre likely to see scanning Stack Overflow. Software is written by people, and the requirements are determined by other people. Three Parts Dead is technically about magical lawbut it turns out that magically-enforced laws turn out to have a lot of overlap with programming, even if the protagonists think of themselves as contract negotiators. And theres a lot more horrible gargoyles and soul-sucking shadows and vampires than youre likely to encounter in troubleshooting your Apache stack. (RIP, Rebecca Alison Meyer, forever embedded in the Internet as #rebeccapurple.). Why made-up stories about imaginary characters? Who refuses to stop jogging while youre doing heart surgery on them. The Green Brain is a really interesting idea that was quite far ahead of it's time in terms of trends in Sci-fi, definitelly hackerish. 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. 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. 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? &news_url=https://content.techgig.com/4-sci-fi-books-to-get-programming-right/articleshow/81711223.cms&ppuserinfo=. In that spirit, here are some recommendations from myself and fellow Lullabots: Shakespeare. So what novel feels most like when the documentation sucks? I'ld like to add anything by Peter F. Hamilton. I would also recommend Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency. And Kij is very precise in describing the elements of building, the huge influx of resources it will take to accomplish this task. In one example from Jane Austens Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas is a father who puts too much faith in the proper appearances, and after sternly talking to his son about an ill-advised scheme, the narrator of the books says, He did not enter into any remonstrance with his other children: he was more willing to believe they felt their error than to run the risk of investigation.. Bad managers will tell you whatever upper management wants is an ideal solution, why would you argue, youre overreacting. Cat's Cradle By Vonnegut- It will stop you trusting your users too much The man int he high castle by Dick- probably not actually sci fi. Many are worth your time and investment. And despite all that, sometimes bad management gets it done. Its not a novel. So I asked: What are the core activities of programming, and which stories come closest to getting it right? 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. And a plucky kid is tasked with stealing an important artifact that, of course, is more than it appears. 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. Despite the job of a programmer often being couched in technical terms, you will certainly be working for and with other people, so you might also seek to improve in other ways. Poetry will just intensify the phenomenon. So what novel feels most like being dazzled by new interactions? Dont understand how one website calls another to get information? Why fiction? Not exactly high stakes stuff. 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. Elma York is a prodigy: a master mathematician, an experienced pilot, dedicated and competent. The problems are low-key. Twitter was originally seen as a glorified group chatnobody thought that itd become the main method for Black Lives Matter groups to propagate evidence of police brutality. 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? Are you bored while working on a single code for a long time? The external trappings and particulars will certainly be different, but the motivations and foibles will ring true. I second anything Neal Stephenson, he writes lots of hacker books. Good authors of fiction are ready to be your personal trainers. So what novel feels most like dealing with having bad management as a programmer? 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? The best words in the best order could also be a definition of good, clean code. And maybe even secure, if youve found a Linux distro thats user-friendly.
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