Behind all technology feats in the intricate and infinite world of information technology that engulfs every human activity or endeavor in the world, there is always way back behind the scene, within a digital realm, a primal bricklayer, a blue collar worker putting together the structures, the wiring and the circuits to make it all work. Speaking of bricks, think of millions, even billions of lines of code, assembled together in such a way that they become a functional skyscraper, that is, a program, better yet, an “application” (or app) like a Web application. That character, that builder, is called a coder (aka, previously, computer programmer) and this book is  sort of an anthropological and psychological portrait of the members of this new tribe of digital laborers (yes, there are digital sweatshops out there). This journalistic work reads like a brief history, though well documented, of programming or rather coding, the very human nature of its heroes and heroines (yes, there has always been women thriving behind well known digital enterprises, though many a time, in the midst of a brogrammer culture) and how humongous and successful creations, like Facebook, came to be. Just the section dedicated to the corresponding footnotes of each of the 11 chapters of the book is a very useful bibliographic compilation of famous quotes, happenings, eureka moments and milestones. “[…] unlike in every other type of engineering—mechanical, industrial, civil—the machines we make with software are woven from words. Code is speech; speech a human utters to silicon, which makes the machine come to life and do our will.”, explains the author referring to how coding is a special kind of engineering, one that indeed is remaking the world.

Coders : the making of a new tribe and the remaking of the world. Ryder Carroll. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.