Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written books, articles, and essays that analyze the human side of the world of computer programming.
She has owned a consulting firm and worked as technology commentator for NPR's All Things Considered. Her breakthrough book was non-fiction: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents.
Life
Ullman's adoptive father's family included computer scientists and mathematicians who had a major impact on her decision to pursue software engineering, a field for which she did "not have native talent." Ullman earned a B.A. in English at Cornell University in the early 1970s. She began working professionally in 1978 as a programmer of electronic data interchange applications and graphical user interfaces.
She eventually began writing about her experiences as a programmer. From 1994 until 1996, she published articles in Harper's Magazine and in the collections Resisting the Virtual Life and Wired Women. She lives in San Francisco.
Bibliography
Books
- Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents San Francisco : City Lights Books, 1997.
- Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology New York: MCD, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Novels
- The Bug New York, N.Y. : Talese, 2003.
- By Blood: A Novel New York, N.Y. : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Selected articles and essays
- Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life (included in the 1995 collection Resisting the Virtual Life, )
- The Myth of Order. The real lesson of Y2K is that software operates just like any natural system: out of control
- The dumbing-down of programming
- How to Be a 'Woman Programmer
- Twilight of the crypto-geeks: Lone-wolf digital libertarians are beginning to abandon their faith in technology uber alles and espouse suspiciously socialist-sounding ideas.
- Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round
- The Orphans of Invention
- The Boss in the Machine
- Identity Stolen? Take a Number
- Dennis Ritchie
References
External links