If you are interested in who is interested in tech, the report “10 punkter om teknikintresse” is really worth reading.
It is a study conducted by Teknikföretagen, (a Swedish interest organization) and it is written in Swedish, however easy to grasp with great graphics.
Written by Nina Månsson
A reflection after reading the “Wizards of the Web – an outsider’s journey into tech, programming and mathemagics”, by Jacob Svensson.
It is interesting to read about the people and companies behind the tech scene and the creators of the tech that provide us with todays daily digital life of algorithms and automated systems. The book is a research report and the author analyses a number of interviews with people (programmers and engineers in tech) and discusses what they are influenced by in their work.
The questions and answers about origin of companies and inspiration show the roots from the culture of hippie, hacker, entrepreneurial, startups, modern, masculinity, suburbian and middle class culture. And contradicting combinations of these cultures. Just by reading the table of content you see the hippie vs startup entrepreneur, prank dude vs quality assurance, asking for help vs self confident.
My reflection is that this book show a quite inclusive view of the programmers world and work. When I started to read the book I was fascinated by the broad range of influence there is in this culture and the explained contradiction between several of the major cultural themes.
I thought I would find more on the topic of female inclusion but as the title says this book has more focus on a discussion of imagination and wizardmaking in mathematics and programming. And that is also an interesting topic.
//written by Nina Månsson at WiTech
The book can be read and downloaded here.