Ellen Ullman is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 programmer

Programmer

A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. She has written novels as well as articles for various publications, including Harper's, Wired

Wired (magazine)

Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...

, the New York Times and Salon

Salon.com

Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...

. Her essays and novels analyze the human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 side of the world of computer programming.

Ullman earned a B.A.

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in the early 1970s. She then turned to business programming in the following years. She eventually began writing about her experiences as a programmer in 1995 when she wrote an essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 titled Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life. She lives in San Francisco.

Essays

• Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life (included in the 1995 collection Resisting the Virtual Life, ISBN 0-87286-299-2)
• The dumbing-down of programming (Salon.com, May 12, 1998)
• The dumbing-down of programming, Part 2 (Salon.com, May 13, 1998)

Non-fiction

• Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents (ISBN 0-87286-332-8, 1997)

Novels

• The Bug (ISBN 0-385-50860-3, 2003)
• By Blood: A Novel (ISBN 0-374-11755-1, 2012)

External links

• Interview with Salon magazine (October 9, 1997)
• Interview with Stay Free magazine (Fall 1998)
• Interview with frontwheeldrive.com (May 21, 1999)
• Interview with SF Gate (May 8, 2002)
• Interview and discussion of The Bug on The WELL (January, 2004)
• Audio interview with Jon Udell (October 6, 2006)
• "Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life"
• Disappearing into the code (Salon Magazine)
• Sliced off by the cutting edge (Salon Magazine)