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" My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did. "

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" Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested. "

Ellen Ullman

Writing

My Life

People

" When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety. "

" It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. "

" I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly. "

" Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. "

" The computer's there to serve the human being, not vice versa. "

" The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. "

" Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. "

" A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error. "

" Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new. "

" I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient. "

" Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. "

" After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well? "

" I'm in no way saying that women can't take a tough code review. I'm saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere. "

" The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it. "

" I'm pretty bad at crying. "

" Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation. "

" The human mind, as it turns out, is messy. "

" Writing is a very isolating occupation. "

" I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for. "

" Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug. "

" UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system. "

" What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up. "

" With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it. "

" All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind? "

" The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization. "

" Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity. "

" The ability to 'multitask,' to switch rapidly among many competing focuses of attention, has become the hallmark of a successful citizen of the 21st century. "

" Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know. "

" I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old. "