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3 books match the query 'Computer programmers'

cover of Black Tech Ecosystems: How Black Adult Learners Use Computer Code Bootcamps for Liberation

Black Tech Ecosystems

How Black Adult Learners Use Computer Code Bootcamps for Liberation

Antonio Byrd

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.

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cover of Coderspeak: The Language of Computer Programmers

Coderspeak

The Language of Computer Programmers

Guilherme Orlandini Heurich

University College London, 2024

Coderspeak delves into the hidden world of software development, offering a combined anthropological and technical approach that explores the coder community's impact on our digital landscape.

Software applications have taken over our lives. We use and are used by software many times a day. Nevertheless, we know very little about the invisibly ubiquitous workers who write software. Who are they and how do they perceive their practice? How does that shape how they collaborate to build the myriad of apps that we use every day? And how does that impact the users of apps?

Coderspeak provides a critical approach to the digital transformation of our world through an engaging and thoughtful analysis of the people who write software applications. It is a focused and in-depth look at one programming language and its community, Ruby, based on ethnographic research at a London company and conversations with members of the wider Ruby community in Europe, the Americas, and Japan.

This book shows that the place where people write code, the language they write it in, and the stories shared by that community are crucial in questioning and unpacking what it means to be a coder. Understanding this social group is essential if we are to grasp a future (and a present) in which computer programming increasingly dominates our lives.
 
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cover of Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin

Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Indian IT Workers in Berlin

Sareeta Amrute

Duke University Press, 2016

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.
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