![[sudo-code.png]] <span style="display: block; text-align: center; font-style: italic;">The Book of Tech</span> > _Company. (noun)._ > > _The fact or condition of being with others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment._ > > _e.g. "We kept each other company, so we wouldn't be alone."_ --- Hi there, This book is for developers. That's what we are too. --- We are developers. Our people have a culture, a language, and a history, but no home. We are a people in diaspora. And we are especially lost when it comes to education. --- Academia is dead, and it deserves no more than a sentence to acknowledge its demise. Our people have therefore migrated largely into industry. Since our field demands life-long learning, we all try to learn at work. This leads to a unique paradox for developers, one not faced by other cultures. --- We all try to learn at work. But ninety percent of startups fail. So ninety percent of the time, at ninety percent of our jobs, we may be absorbing precisely the lessons that lead to failure. --- Have you ever found yourself at a company full of brilliant people you respect, confused by a vague feeling that nine out of ten policies in the company handbook seem actively harmful to everyone involved? You're not alone. That's the paradox. --- This leads to a vacuum of non-bullshit forms of mentorship and education for younger developers at work. But work is all we have. The teams we spend our days with at those often-failing startups are the closest thing most of us have to a home. So if every company handbook is ninety percent poison, or if there's a ninety percent chance the entire thing is, then who or what should we look to for timeless wisdom about our field? This book is an attempt to resolve that paradox. The authors of this book are not immune. We are as flawed and fallible as anyone. But we are united in the belief that this paradox can be defeated, given the proper tools. --- After a long search for data structures and algorithms that offer a portable, distributed, persistent method of storing and transmitting acquired wisdom about a field, the authors of this book have been reluctantly forced to admit that the optimal data structure for this task is one that none of us expected to win. Much to our surprise, we eventually found that the only tool possessing all the properties we needed was an ancient, battle-hardened data structure, one optimized for storing timeless wisdom about a culture for arbitrary lengths of time, a data structure which, for lack of a better term, we'll call a bible. Goto: [[Root]]