“Your Code as a Crime Scene”

Adam Tornhill

This was an odd read. I think the core idea—version control systems are a layer of metadata on top of our code, which we seldom use for anything valuable but should—is a good one, but the actual implementation of the book just didn’t work for me. Part of the issue was that it made a terrible ebook—there’s a fair amount of charts, all of which rely on color-coding, and thus become entirely illegible on a grayscale e-ink screen.1

Past that, though, a whole lot of it felt like a veiled advertisement for the author’s company. A couple pages of introducing an analysis concept, and then, would you look at that, a tutorial of how you could, laboriously, do that analysis yourself… or a much shorter tutorial on how you could do it using their product! After a while it started to feel like I was getting a hard sell. And, c’mon man, this was a $35 ebook, you’re already charging like it’s a required textbook for a college course.

Visual accessibility, for colorblind folks, is a problem software has started to address. I guess the publishing industry just… didn’t notice that? ↩