rcmnd

The Soul of a New MachineBook

by Tracy Kidder

Who uses, recommends or left The Soul of a New Machine, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company; creator of DTrace at Sun Microsystems and a long-time systems-software blogger.
recommended

Since reading it over two decades ago, I have recommended The Soul of a Machine at essentially every opportunity, believing that it is a part of computing's literary foundation – that it should be considered our Odyssey.

A post about re-reading Tracy Kidder’s book two decades after it set him on a career in computing systems.

2019-02-10·bcantrill.dtrace.org ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.