“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” ― Alice Munro, Selected Stories
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” ― Rudyard Kipling
This repository aggregates stories about (and how the nature of storytelling relates to) computers.
May we continue to share our stories with each other in order to better understand what we're doing.
| Title | Description | Author / Speaker | Year | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Soul of a New Machine |
Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book about the journey of a team at Data General Corporation bringing a computer to market in the late 1970s under incredible pressure. The book follows Tom West and his team of relatively young, ambitious engineers as they set out to build a microcomputer to compete with machines built by DEC. | Tracy Kidder | 1981 | Book |
| Oral Tradition in Software | From ‘Jingle Bells Batman Smells’ to ‘Real Programmers Write in FORTRAN,’ Bryan Cantrill dives into how we share our collective knowledge and how we pass wisdom to future generations. He advocates for writing software with future generations in mind. | Bryan Cantrill | 2016 | Monkoberfest |
| On Storytelling | "When someone says a word like 'types,' they're really picking out an experience they had." | Evan Czaplicki | 2017 | Deconstruct |
| Doug's Demo | Gary Bernhardt tells the story (and shows footage from) The Mother of All Demos, in which Doug Englebart demonstrates a computing system called NLS, the first computing system to use a mouse, screen windowing, hyperlinks, and more concepts in computing that have become ubiquitous | Gary Bernhardt | 2018 | Deconstruct |
| Event Sourcing Security | Starting at 20:20 in this video, Greg Young tells a story about the 2002 Breeder's Cup Betting Scandal, and how event-sourced systems and WORM drives can mitigate superuser attacks. | Greg Young | 2014 | GOTO |
| Software & Storytelling, One Nordic Childhood | Software & Storytelling, One Nordic Childhood | Linda Liukas | 2016 | Slush |
| The Wet Codebase | "I think one way to try to break this loop is just when we teach something to the next generation, we shouldn't just be two-dimensional and say here's best practices and anti-patterns. But we should try to explain what is it that you're actually trading away. What are the benefits and what are the costs of this idea." In this talk, Dan Abramov tells the story of the evolution of an abstraction over time. | Dan Abramov | 2019 | Deconstruct |
| Oral History of James Gosling | James Gosling telling stories. "So I went to work for IBM. That turned into a year and a half long teaching moment about how cool tech never wins out over stupid bureaucracy. And the whole time, Bill Joy was like actively twisting my arm and saying 'Come join Sun, come join Sun,' and eventually I sorta gave in." | James Gosling | 2019 | Computer History Museum |
| From UNIX to Linux, a time lapse of 45 years | Hendrik Jan Thomassen tells a story about the history of UNIX. "By the way, do you know where the dd command 'convert and copy' gets its name from? No? Well, according to good habits, it would have been called cc, but cc was already occupied here, so that's why they shifted the characters forward in the alphabet. If you ever come to a UNIX trivia quiz, this will be a sure question." |
Hendrik Jan Thomassen | 2016 | T-DOSE |
| Storytelling with Data | A good story changes our brain chemistry, increasing empathy, connectedness and attention. How can we tell great stories with data to educate, inspire and impact? | Multiple | 2015 | YouTube |
| The Phoenix Project | Tells the story of an IT manager named Bill at a fictional organization called Parts Unlimited. Bill and his team learn and apply DevOps principles to resolve ongoing crises in IT and transform their organization. | Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr | 2013 | Book |
| Why I use emacs (and can I stop?) | David Beazley tells the story of why he started using emacs. | David Beazley | 2021 | Blog Post |
| StaffEng - Stories | Will Larson Will Larson's blog StaffEng and book Staff Engineer provide an invaluable resource for "post-senior-level" software engineers and technical leaders. | Will Larson | 2021 | Blog, Book |
| Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019 | In this video, Brian Kernighan holds a very interesting conversation with Ken Thompson. | Ken Thompson | 2019 | YouTube |
Do you know about a great talk, book, or article that tells a story related to software development or relates the importance of storytelling in software development? Create a pull request with your link added to the table above.