Ellen Ullman

Last updated
Ellen Ullman
Occupationprogrammer
NationalityAmerican
Genresnon-fiction, fiction

Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written books, articles, and essays that analyze the human side of the world of computer programming.

Contents

She has owned a consulting firm and worked as technology commentator for NPR's All Things Considered . Her breakthrough book was non-fiction: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents.

Life

Ullman's adoptive father's family included computer scientists and mathematicians who had a major impact on her decision to pursue software engineering, a field for which she did "not have native talent." [1] Ullman earned a B.A. in English at Cornell University in the early 1970s. [2] She began working professionally in 1978 as a programmer of electronic data interchange applications and graphical user interfaces. [3]

She eventually began writing about her experiences as a programmer. From 1994 until 1996, she published articles in Harper's Magazine and in the collections Resisting the Virtual Life and Wired Women. [3] She lives in San Francisco. [4]

Bibliography

Books

Novels

Selected articles and essays

Related Research Articles

Software Non-tangible executable component of a computer

Software is a collection of instructions that tell a computer how to work. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and actually performs the work.

Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation, usually by designing/building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms. The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.

Eric S. Raymond American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

<i>Microserfs</i>

Microserfs, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length. Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Programmer Person who writes computer software

A computer programmer, sometimes called a software developer, a programmer or more recently a coder, is a person who creates computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computers or to a generalist who writes computer programs.

Software bug Error, flaw, failure, or fault in a computer program or system

A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in computer software that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The process of finding and correcting bugs is termed "debugging" and often uses formal techniques or tools to pinpoint bugs. Since the 1950s some computer systems have been designed to deter, detect or auto-correct various computer bugs during operations.

John Walker is a computer programmer, author and co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk. He has more recently been recognized for his writing on his website Fourmilab.

Bob Wallace (computer scientist)

Bob Wallace was an American software developer, programmer and the ninth Microsoft employee. He was the first popular user of the term shareware, creator of the word processing program PC-Write, founder of the software company Quicksoft and an "online drug guru" who devoted much time and money into the research of psychedelic drugs. Bob ended his Usenet posts with the phrase, "Bob Wallace ."

Brian Fox (computer programmer) American computer programmer

Brian Jhan Fox is an American computer programmer and free software advocate. He is the original author of the GNU Bash shell, which he announced as a beta in June 1989. He continued as the primary maintainer of bash until at least early 1993. Fox also built the first interactive online banking software in the U.S. for Wells Fargo in 1995, and he created an open source election system in 2008.

Prentice Hall Publishing company

Prentice Hall is an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. Prentice Hall distributes its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service.

Scott Rosenberg (journalist) American journalist

Scott Rosenberg (born 1959 in Queens, New York is an American journalist, editor, blogger and non-fiction author. He was a co-founder of Salon Media Group and Salon.com and a relatively early participant in The WELL.

Jim Warren (computer specialist) American computer businessman

Jim Warren was an American mathematics and computing educator, computer professional, entrepreneur, editor, publisher and continuing sometime activist.

Lois Mitchell Haibt is an American computer scientist best known for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. She is known as an early pioneer in computer science.

Gary Wolf (journalist)

Gary Wolf is an American writer, contributing editor at Wired magazine, and co-founder of the Quantified Self. Wolf earned a BA from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexia Massalin is an American computer scientist and programmer. She pioneered the concept of superoptimization, and designed the Synthesis kernel, a small kernel with a Unix compatibility layer that makes heavy use of self-modifying code for efficiency.

Roberta Smith

Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.

In computer programming and software development, debugging is the process of finding and resolving bugs within computer programs, software, or systems.

Sarah Allen is an American software developer and entrepreneur. Allen attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where she majored in computer science and visual arts. Early in her career, she led the development of Adobe Shockwave Multiuser Server, Flash Media Server, and Flash video, and co-founded the company that created Adobe After Effects. In 2013, Allen was selected for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program working with the Smithsonian Institution.

History of software

Software is a set of programmed instructions stored in the memory of stored-program digital computers for execution by the processor. Software is a recent development in human history, and it is fundamental to the Information Age.

Francia Russell is the former Co-Artistic Director of Pacific Northwest Ballet and former Director of Pacific Northwest Ballet School from 1977-2005. She was a former soloist with New York City Ballet where she later became Ballet Master. In 1975, Russell became Co-Artistic Director of Frankfurt Ballet with husband, Kent Stowell, and in 1977, they accepted the position of Artistic Directors of Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, WA. With Kent Stowell, she built Pacific Northwest Ballet from a local organization to one of national and international prominence.

References

  1. Ellen Ullman (1 January 2009). "My Secret Life". The New York Times. San Francisco. p. A23. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 24 December 2011.
  2. "Women Who Inspire Us". GirlGeeks. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
  3. 1 2 "Interview with Ellen Ullman: Of Machines, Methods, and Madness". IEEE Software. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society. 15 (3): 42–45. May 1998. doi:10.1109/ms.1998.676733. ISSN   0740-7459. S2CID   916133.
  4. Scott Rosenberg (2003-05-16). "Bugged out". Salon Magazine. Retrieved 2017-10-05. (Interview about her novel The Bug.)
  5. "The Myth of Order. The real lesson of Y2K is that software operates just like any natural system: out of control". Wired. April 1999.
  6. "The dumbing-down of programming: Rebelling against Microsoft and its wizards, an engineer rediscovers the joys of difficult computing. First of two parts". Salon.com. 12 May 1998.
  7. "The dumbing-down of programming: Part Two: Returning to the source. Once knowledge disappears into code, how do we retrieve it?". Salon.com. 13 May 1998.
  8. "How to Be a 'Woman Programmer'". The New York Times . 18 May 2013.
  9. "Twilight of the crypto-geeks: Lone-wolf digital libertarians are beginning to abandon their faith in technology uber alles and espouse suspiciously socialist-sounding ideas". Salon.com. 13 May 2000.
  10. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review. 4 November 2001. p. BR18. ISSN   0362-4331.
  11. "The Orphans of Invention". The New York Times. San Francisco. 22 May 2003. p. A33. ISSN   0362-4331.
  12. "The Boss in the Machine". The New York Times. San Francisco. 19 February 2005. p. A15. ISSN   0362-4331.
  13. "Identity Stolen? Take a Number". The New York Times. San Francisco. 17 July 2006. p. A17. ISSN   0362-4331.
  14. "Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941". The New York Times Magazine. 25 December 2011: 24.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)