The New York Times Book Review - Akash Kapur
Something about our digital life seems to inspire extremes: all that early enthusiasm, the utopian fervor over the internet, now collapsed into fear and recriminations. Bitwise: A Life in Code, David Auerbach's thoughtful meditation on technology and its place in society, is a welcome effort to reclaim the middle ground…The book is a hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history. It is perhaps best characterized as a survey not just of technology, but of our recent relationship to technology…[Auerbach] writes well about databases and servers, but what's really distinctive about this book is his ability to dissect Joyce and Wittgenstein as easily as C++ code…Our relationship to technology is still evolving, characterized by inevitable spats and rapprochements. Yet throughout these cycles, we are increasingly intimate, ever more intertwined and interdependent. The danger is that this relationship will, like so much else in our public lives, be captured by extremism: that we will be forced to choose camps, that we will divide ourselves into mutually antagonistic factions of technology lovers and technology haters. We need guides on this journey—judicious, balanced and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach.
Publishers Weekly
08/20/2018
With wit and technical insight, former Microsoft and Google engineer Auerbach explains how his knowledge of coding helped form him as a person, at the same time showing how coding has influenced aspects of culture such as personality tests and child-rearing. Auerbach is a natural teacher, translating complex computing concepts into understandable layman’s terms. The anecdotes from the engineering front lines are some of the most entertaining sections, especially when he recounts the rivalry between MSN Messenger Service (which he worked on) and AOL Instant Messenger, and considers Google’s evolution (“Everything was bigger at Google than it had been at Microsoft”). Connections to specific literary and philosophical works stretch a reader’s patience, and lengthy asides into coding parallels in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and early text-based video games will entertain gamers but require too much explanation for the uninitiated. That said, his observations on child-raising are written with such charm that they’ll resonate with readers (he would play “Flight of the Valkyries” when his daughter tried walking because “her struggle and determination reminded me of the triumph I felt on getting a particularly thorny piece of code to work correctly”). The coding details aside, this book is an enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
A hybrid of memoir, technical primer and social history . . . [Auerbach] suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e. understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise . . . We need guides on this journey—judicious, balanced and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach.” —The New York Times Book Review
"[A] fun and informative memoir of a life in coding explains what makes coding deeply fascinating, and is tamped full, like a scientist's experiment in sphere-packing, of history, fact, and anecdote." —Popular Mechanics, Best Sci/Tech Books of the Year
“A valuable resource for readers seeking to understand themselves in this new universe of algorithms, as data points and as human beings.” —The New Republic
“With wit and technical insight, former Microsoft and Google engineer Auerbach explains how his knowledge of coding helped form him as a person, at the same time showing how coding has influenced aspects of culture such as personality tests and child-rearing . . . An enjoyable look inside the point where computers and human life join.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A profound memoir, a manifesto, and a warning about the digital world. Auerbach spins out the secret history of the computational universe we all live in now, filtering insider technical know-how through a profoundly humanistic point of view like no book since Gödel, Escher, Bach.”
—Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong
“Auerbach artfully combines a personal and professional narrative with a philosophical examination of the way the real and digital worlds contrast and intertwine. It is a subject that will take on ever more importance as algorithms continue to gain dramatically more power and influence throughout our world.” —Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots
“Very attractive (in all senses). The sentences resemble something both plain and clear, like a Shaker desk—a kind of generous transparency, and about things that are not transparent at all.” —John Crowley, author of Little, Big
“A delightful journey through the history of personal computing. It succeeds brilliantly at conveying what it’s like to be a coder and at exploding common stereotypes. I couldn’t stop reading.” —Scott Aaronson, David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin
FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile
David Marantz's narration does not do justice to the mind of author and software engineer David Auerbach. Marantz's narration is too dry and feels automatic rather than playful, as Auerbach's prose suggests. His voice seems more concentrated on consistency than on instilling life into the scenes that Auerbach weaves together. Bringing together the life of the mind and the “mind” of a computer, Auerbach explores his life through a series of personal essays. The result includes discussions of software updates and raising a child, programming algorithms and labeling individuals according to psychiatric designations, and developing software and using literature as a lens for life. For such a fascinating meshing of ideas, Marantz proves too conservative a narrator to do justice to this experiment in memoir. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-23
"We don't think right for our world today," writes programmer and technology writer Auerbach—and putting computers to work solving that fundamental problem is not a panacea.Computers are tools, and while they may one day outthink us, inaugurating what futurists call the singularity, they're still tools that can reinforce our human limitations even as they help us to work around them: "if we feed them our prejudices, computers will happily recite those prejudices back to us in quantitative and seemingly objective form," even making our prejudices seem rational. An early employee at both Microsoft and Google, Auerbach is the rare engineer who is also conversant with literature and philosophy, both of which he brings to bear on interpreting his experiences as a builder of these thinking machines and the heuristics and languages that guide them. In that work, design is everything. One of the author's asides, which fuels a central theme, concerns the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, several editions on, has mutated from its initial goal of standardizing how psychiatrists diagnose disorders to a complex reference for "physician diagnosis, actuarial insurance practices, longitudinal research studies, drug regulation, and more." Just so, our machines are deficient in many ways, as with Google's effort to scan millions of books into a Library of Babel that is, in fact, a mess, so that the "heaps of code" thus amassed are best used as approximations rather than trustworthy models. In this matter, he adds, "Google is a dumb god." Interestingly, Auerbach brings his discussion to a close by counseling that we not worry too much about what, say, big technology companies are planning to do with our data. "At companies like Google or Facebook," writes the author, "programmers engage with people's personal information in such a way that they are indifferent to its implications." That should make the techno-anxious feel a little better—until the machines think better and take over.An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations.
