samskivert: Coders at Work

22 December 2009

This is mostly biography with a dollop of computing history on top—a pantheon of old IBM mainframe model numbers are rolled out in response to “when did you write your first program?” The interviewees are varied and interesting and almost all of them were not annoying. Unlike Beautiful Code, I did not alternate between thinking “this is fascinating” and “if this is beauty, then just kill me now.” Perhaps it was some combination of Siebel’s carefully chosen questions and good editing, but the interviewees came across as far more conversational and adept at storytelling than I would have imagined for a random selection of nerdy programmers.

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