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The author William Vollmann comically wrote about doing this at a San Francisco (I think?) software shop when he was young and writing his first novel. Living off of vendor-machine candy bars, dodging the janitor, etc ... Probably my favorite parts were how he confessed having no bloody clue what he was doing when faced with the thing he was being paid to do: write code ...

As with any fiction author, the details are probably exaggerated, and he particularly tends toward a certain kind of luxuriant self-deprecation, so, pinch of salt and all ...

I believe the dueling meta-narrators of his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, were also programmers, or something like that. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember Electric Emily's origin story and the parts where the programmer-narrators fucked with the "source code" of the narrative being my favorite parts.




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