Book Review - You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 lines of Code Changed the World

I first encountered this book on a table display at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg and knew I wanted to read it solely based on the fact that the introduction was written by Ellen Ullman, a technologist and author whose work I respect deeply. I asked for the book for Christmas and started reading it almost immediately after unwrapping it.

This essay collection provides a diverse and accessible overview of software topics through time. The chapters, which range in topic from ubiquitous phenomena such as the 'like' button to more obscure concepts like the Monte Carlo algorithm, are short and engaging. This writing will appeal to all readers interested in contemporary retrospectives on technology, regardless of their particular level of technical proficiency. The compact essays are a fine starting point for any one particular topic. In my case, this collection has inspired me to seek further writing on the origin and history of Bitcoin, as well as the Google PageRank algorithm. The citations provide an excellent wealth of suggested further reading.

These essays sample the many systems, use cases, successes, and flaws of code creation from the history of computing. The code we use daily to browse the web and the code that once ran to land Apollo 11 and is still installed on forgotten computers forever floating in Earth's orbit have much in common. These essays implicitly confirm that the nature of coding will never change.

I believe there is an undeniable value in understanding how software works, at any level. I would recommend this book to anyone who regularly interacts with software, especially to those who write code and/or work with programmers.

buy the book

vocabulary words: sobriquet, inverate, escrow, prescient, malfeasance, hegemonic, incarnate, sociotechnical

favorite quotes:

"And yet. There is no such thing as the last bug." (p. 11) - Ellen Ullman

On the Facebook Like button:

"That set of assumptions - that tech startups were underdogs, that they were forces for good, and that their success in business would naturally coincide with bettering the world - was common in Silicon Valley at the time." (p. 135) - Will Oremus

On the success of the Roomba:

"What makes the Roomba’s success so hard to replicate is how well it satisfied the three biggest criteria for adoption: it performed a task that was unpleasant, it performed a task that had to be done relatively frequently, and it was affordable." (p. 123) - Lowen Liu

On mission critical bugs in open source code:

"But remembering to think that way - to think like someone who would be deliberately trying to subvert that code, to think about the computer’s memory and how it works, to do both of those things at the same time - is often the hard part." ( p. 143) - Josephine Wolff