Programmers at Work, originally published to wide acclaim in 1986, is a “world of ideas” book that has renewed relevance today for software engineers and programmers working in the new software revolution shaped by AI, LLM, and robotics. This collection of candid, in-depth interviews probes the minds and life stories of 19 notable programmers such as Bill Gates, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Andy Hertzfeld, John Warnock, Jaron Lanier, Toru Iwatani and others who launched an industry. The interviews highlight the forces, the events, and the personalities that influenced their work and launched a revolution. How did these programmers approach program design? Is programming a talent or a learned skill? And how did these programmers envision the future of computing?

Each interview reveals an individual success story, and the collection taken as a whole is a colorful portrait of the birth of the PC industry. Today so many new things can be done with computers, but often great new ideas come from recombining old ideas in new ways. This book offers fertile ground for programmers who are reimagining what software can do and creating fresh solutions and products in the field of robotics, AI, and consumer software. Grounded in the track record of history, these programmers reveal their personal stories of pursuing out of the box thinking, building products through trial and error, the coding secrets to their historic breakthroughs, and the obstacles they overcame in their quests. The conversations offer an inspirational roadmap for software designers and programmers creating products today.

As Chief Information Officer of lululemon, Julie Averill led the technology transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue while building global teams capable of sustaining that growth. Prior to lululemon, she led omni-channel and digital transformations at Nordstrom and REI, navigating system failures, high-stakes crises, and the complicated work of integrating technology with business strategy at scale.

Julie spent her career navigating systems that weren’t designed for her—and helped change them along the way. A female leader in technology. A gay woman in rooms where difference still raises eyebrows. A mother who carried two and adopted one child while leading global technology organizations. And a Chief Information Officer who believes the future of AI depends less on machines and more on how human we’re willing to be.

Today, she advises boards, CEOs, and founders at the intersection of AI capability and organizational readiness—the place where most transformations stall. She speaks globally on leadership in the age of AI and helps organizations build what technology can’t deliver: teams that tell the truth, leaders who can turn pilots into real change, and cultures that sustain transformation instead of performing it.

After years in corporations proving herself, building teams, and transforming companies, Julie learned that what matters most is not the systems you build or the revenue you generate, but the people whose capabilities you unlock, the leaders who become more than they thought possible, and the ripple effects that continue long after you’re gone.

She lives in Bellevue, Washington, with her wife Cindy and their three children. When not speaking, advising, or writing, she’s on the pickleball court, traveling to visit family across continents, or learning from her global family that the most profound transformations happen when we expand who we’re willing to become.

Leading with Imperfect Feet is a revelation in modern leadership thinking, told through the lived experience of someone who has navigated change his entire life. Born with cerebral palsy, David Dame learned early that progress comes not from waiting for perfect conditions, but from taking imperfect steps, adapting continuously, and welcoming discomfort as the price of growth. 

Drawing from decades leading enterprise transformation, building inclusive products, and coaching executives around the world, David offers a refreshing and deeply human approach to leadership. Through powerful storytelling—from learning to walk into the ocean for the first time to redesigning work systems from the bottom up—he illustrates how vulnerability, curiosity, grit, and openness are not soft skills, but the foundation of high-performing organizations.

The book blends personal narrative with actionable leadership insight, demonstrating how embracing flaws, failures, and experimentation enables teams to innovate faster and work with purpose. Using memorable stories like going three years without a washroom break at his first job, hiring his first personal support worker at eighteen, and reshaping product design at Microsoft, David shows why real change starts with seeing barriers as opportunities and people as whole humans.

Perfect for leaders, product makers, change agents, and anyone who wants to build more inclusive and adaptive organizations, Leading with Imperfect Feet challenges readers to rethink what strong leadership looks like—and to realize that their imperfections may be their greatest competitive advantage.

Showstopper! is the dramatic, inside story of the creation of Windows NT, told by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary. Driven by the legendary David Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business.

Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper! gets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Hyderabad Days is a tender, evocative memoir that journeys from colony lanes to corner offices—a world where barefoot cricket, bajjis, fan letters to TV goddesses, and jamun-stained summers quietly shaped a future engineer and executive.

In these richly drawn vignettes, Ravi invites readers into a childhood filled with warmth, wit, and wisdomand shows how even in the most high-powered situations, the lessons of a streetlamp study session, or a colony cricket match still echo.

Marcus Fontoura’s career, and indeed this book, has largely been about the ethos needed to build powerful platforms.

A tech platform is a reusable system that implements a core piece of functionality, such as identity. In this case, an identity platform provides a solution for users to log-in to multiple services. Developers gain agility when using platforms, as they don’t need to implement the whole system from scratch and can focus on the new, differentiating innovations.

A platform, however, is an external dependency. Thus, using a platform implies teams taking a dependency on other teams. This requires coordination and collaboration. It is impossible to build the large-scale, complex systems of today without relying on platforms and their multiplier effect to build a scalable identity solution once and reuse it many times in all the company’s services. This means that modern technology organizations need to be highly collaborative, with all their sub teams interacting in an open way, in which ideas are generated, developed, and propagated in an environment that empowers the developers to be themselves and let their creativity flourish.

Platforms are the seeds of innovation and require their daily dose of creativity and collaboration to blossom into the systems that impact our lives and society in a positive way. Fontoura truly believes we can create a better world through technology and a platform mindset is the foundation.