Back from the store

Ellen Ullman takes an unvarnished look at her ups and downs as a "woman programmer:"

...the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response.

I was hooked by her lede, which uses a musical simile to describe the sort of work I've done for most of my working life:

I was an ordinary computer programmer. I wrote code that ran at the levels between flashy human interfaces and the deep cores of operating systems, like the role of altos in a chorus, who provide the structure without your taking much notice of their melodic lines.

Tamara Shopsin provides a clever illustration, too.