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If you enjoyed this, you might check out "Hackers" by Steven Levy. I read it as a kid when I was first getting into programming, and revisited it recently. It really held up for me. The book traces hacker culture from the MIT AI Lab through the Homebrew Computer Club to the early game programmers, and what got me excited then and now is the pure joy of building things in collaboration with like-minded people. I've managed to spend a lot of my career in early stage startups where this is still possible under the right circumstances.


Thanks for posting this! Seriously great book.

This is one of those books that I read in the 80s that helped me change career directions to be a programmer in Silicon Valley and eventually get a PhD and teach programming at the university level.


[dead]


I haven't read "The Innovators" but I've heard good things about it. However, Isaacson's recent Musk biography was pretty widely acknowledged as being a hagiography, and the NY Times reporters who wrote "Character Limit" about the Twitter takeover revealed that Isaacson was giving Musk advice on Twitter UX and business decisions while supposedly writing an objective biography. I'd definitely recommend "Character Limit" if you're interested in that saga - it's thoroughly reported and includes some wild details about how chaotic and destructive the whole thing was. Reading "Hackers" as a kid, this wasn't quite the tech industry I thought I was signing up for.


That's unfortunate but I won't read anything about musk anyway so it's going to be a dead artist situation for me.




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