Books reviews, current events, and other musings

Ellen Ullman’s The Bug is the first book I’ve read that takes place at a software company. It’s kind of neat for a novel to portray the world where I spend my working hours. As one distancing factor, the narrative mainly takes place in 1984, and the protagonists are developing a product that was revolutionary then but is commonplace today: a mouse-driven GUI client integrated with a database server.

Roberta, a humanities Ph.D. turned software tester, discovers an erratic bug that crashes the system. Ethan, the programmer responsible for fixing the bug, cannot make headway on the subtle problem, which cannot be reproduced but keeps turning up at the worst possible times. As the bug persists, it plays an increasingly significant role in Roberta’s and Ethan’s lives.

Ullman captures the tempo and day-by-day life of software development fairly well, though things are a bit more dramatic than in real life. Programmers struggle to achieve deadlines, personality conflicts occur between coworkers, and VC’s make unreasonable demands. Ullman explains various programming basics, such as the C language and a debugger, but it’s not too monotonous for someone who already knows that stuff.

Roberta and Ethan both have less-than-ideal personal lives, adding to tension that they’re experiencing at work. Still, the struggle against the elusive bug frames the entire book, in a clever variant of the man vs. machine narrative form. Though the ending is rather depressing, The Bug is well worth reading.