I’m a sucker for a recollection of 8-bit computing, so Shahid Kamal Ahmad’s recollection of his beginnings as a programmer in the Commodore and Sinclair era was a quick purchase for me. I always like hearing tales from the early days of any creative industry and little mentions here and there made my heart swoon a little, such as Silica Shop on Tottenham Court Road. I can’t understand anyone wanting to buy an Atari 400 with its horrific touch sensitive keyboard, but I empathised with that sense of excitement about what it was possible to do with computers then. I never got into programming and some of the details about programming in Assembler went over my head, but there’s a lot in the book besides technical info. Ahmad discusses the racism he experienced in 1980s London and how that shaped both his perception of self and the people he worked with. There’s also a lot about his diabetes and these were the sections I struggled with the most, as he did not manage his condition well. Hearing about him gorging on sugary snacks and then going hypo was difficult to read and I found myself worrying about the young man, even though I know he survives to the present day.

The text was originally a series of Twitter threads, which hasn’t really been altered. A series of 280 character paragraphs flow with a digression here and there. There’s also a problem with the footnotes in that they’re not properly marked at the end of each section, so the coherent narrative feels like it goes on a series of odd tangents. The files are also pretty large, which made sending them to my Kindle a little tricky. That shouldn’t stop you having look, though, particularly as it’s available for pay-what-you-want on Patreon.

Buy ‘Code is Just - The Compiled Edition’ by Shahid Kamal Ahmad on Patreon