About the book
Douglas Coupland's epistolary novel, published in 1995, began as a cover story for Wired magazine before he expanded it to full length. Daniel, the narrator, keeps the diary on a PowerBook; he and housemates Susan, Todd, Bug, Michael and Abe are coders at Microsoft's Redmond campus sharing a geek house, with Bill Gates ruling the campus like a feudal lord. When Michael leaves to start a company in Silicon Valley and offers them jobs, the group weighs trading its place as serfs for a chance to build something of its own. Set before Windows 95, it anticipates the dot-com bubble. Coupland returned to many of its ideas in his later novel JPod.
BlastPoint co-founder and CEO Alison Alvarez said that before reading it she had never thought of software development as a possible career for herself.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Alison Alvarez (Co-Founder & CEO/Blastpoint.io)
Prior to reading the book I had never considered that a career in software development would be an option for me. My parents both grew up poor and chose career paths that would get them to a middle-class salary with the least amount of training. I lived on the outer edge of the suburbs in Georgia and I don’t think I’d met a single computer programmer prior to college. We had an old Packard Bell computer capable of running the original Sim City that eventually caught on fire around the time I read this book. [...] I don’t think I would have picked computer science as my major without the familiarity that I’d had with my own laptop and from the familiarity of the lifestyle outlined in Microserfs.
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