I know Bryan Cantrill was a fan - I bought her book because of his talks.
OK, but Tracy Kidder was a dude.
Tracy Kidder has died
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#32RIP Tracy.
I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.
It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#33I read the book when it first came out. In 1986 I took a job at a new company and Carl Alsing, who was the manager of the microkids (and had written every bit of microcode for machines that came before that) was in the office next to my cube. In fact, he was one of the people who interviewed me for the job.
So I reread the book and my esteem for Kidder's writing went up even more. In the parts of the book where he described Alsing's appearance and demeanor were spot on and captured essential things about Alsing without using a lot of words.
One of the things I recall is Kidder said something like, "Alsing is a tall man, but his mild demeanor and hunched posture presents a much less imposing figure." Sure enough, that is exactly the experience I had with Carl.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#34_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC. His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn managemen…
I think I read a condensed version of "Soul of a New Machine" in a Reader's Digest when I was 10 or 11, and I wanted to become a CPU developer afterwards. Well, I still read every article about CPU microarchitectures that I can find.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#35_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC. His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn managemen…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Applies both to software as well as hardware.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite was actually the one about the carpenters/house builders (forget the name of it, I need to dig it out of some box in the garage and read it again)
That book is just called House , although I always confuse the title with J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters .
Hah, I should have remembered that title. Just ordered the Truck Full of Money book. I hadn't really kept track of his later works.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#37[deleted]
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#38I love _The Soul Of A New Machine_. It was one of the books that got me started loving computer history (the other being Steven Levy's _Hackers,_ which I read afterward). A truly great writer.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#39When I read SoaNM, I quickly realized that it had been used as a style guide for several later books, and most long-form tech articles in Wired, the NYT, etc.
Re: Tracy Kidder has died
#40The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it. Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who…
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps. (Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
Virtually everybody I knew in the US Peace Corps had read and been inspired by Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's safe to say it'd been a strong nudge in that direction for many.