Author: Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine was part of the launch team for the first personal computer newsweekly, InfoWorld. He co-authored Fire in the Valley, the seminal computer history book on which the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was based. He was the long-time editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and of PragPub and has launched, written for, and edited numerous other magazines.

For Kids

Stealing Scenes and Making Cuts

Post author By Michael Swaine
Post date March 24, 2018

null

My partner Nancy is narrating audiobooks under the name Summer Jo Swaine. These are three excellent stories with young female protagonists:

Making the Cut

Making the Cut is the flagship show on the FoodieTV network, giving recent high school graduates a chance to win a scholarship to a prestigious culinary school. Midori is from San Francisco, and grew up in a family that owns a restaurant. All she ever wanted to do was cook, but in Japanese culture, women are relegated to hostess and management roles. Nicole is from Denver, the child of a broken home who’s been forced to grow up way too soon. She’s been poor her entire life, and that prize package is impossibly valuable to her. These two girls become friends despite their cultural differences, and together with six more challengers, will be competing in front of the cameras. With a $10,000 prize and that incredible scholarship at stake, can their friendship survive the rigors of reality television?

The Scene Stealers

Steal big.

The Crew: Olivia, the Director; Anjanae, the Artist; Pancho, the Techie; Kennedy, the Actress; Jerome, the Money Man; Vajra, the Thug.

The Target: A painting of Anjanae’s deceased mother, stolen from her and presented for sale by a professional artist.

The Job: Steal it back and don’t get caught, because high school is hard enough without facing hard time.

The Guitarist

High school reporter Sherri “Bax” Baxter is content being an outsider, with a reputation as a nosy busybody among the students of Jericho High. Instead of friendships, she focuses on objective journalistic integrity, because it will get her out of the dead-end Texas oil town and into a prestigious journalism school, and she’s pretty sure she’s found her big story.

A new girl, Molly, has come to town with a mysterious sideways grin, a bolero hat, a well-loved guitar case, and the musical talent of legendary blues man Stevie Ray Vaughan. Two of the school’s rival rock groups need her for the upcoming Battle of the Bands, but Molly has a plan to cherry-pick the best musicians out of each band to form her own super group. Both bands engage in an increasingly dangerous rivalry ranging from theft and vandalism to assault and kidnapping.

Who better to tag along with Molly and get every juicy tidbit than the intrepid school snoop? She might even make a few friends along the way.

Technology Writing

Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology

Post author By Michael Swaine
Post date April 26, 2017

“Reading Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology will get you ready to dig into functional programming, and give you enough understanding of these languages to pick the one you want to start with. Highly recommended!”

Ron Jeffries, Just Some Guy at XProgramming, Inc.

Wait, what?

What is this Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology of which you speak?

I’m glad you asked, imaginary questioner.

Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology is a new book soon to be published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf. It’s a collection of articles from PragPub on functional programming. But it’s also an introduction to how functional programming is addressed in five languages: Scala, Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, and Swift. We’re pretty excited about this project. Watch this space or the Pragmatic Bookshelf site for the announcement of its publication date.

Swaine’s Flames

Loveless and Baggage

From a proposed take-off on the burlesque British history 1066 and All That tentatively titled 6502 and All That:

Ada Loveless invented female programmers. Before her time, while there were no programmers, they were all male. This was a Good Thing, however, because during WWII all computers were female. In America, many of these computers were wax, while in Britain they were usually wrens found belching in the park.

Ada Loveless was the daughter of the famous author and entrepreneur H. P. Loveless. When he was not writing horror stories, H. P. Loveless was busy founding HP, a Packard dealership and garage just off Woz Way in Silicon Valley. HP was famous for getting its Way. Anyone who prevented HP from getting its Way was forced to donate several hours polishing the cars backwards. This was known as Reverse Polish Donation, and was a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless was British, and so of course was close friends with Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Charles Bronson (of the literary Bronson sisters, Charles, Emily, and Ann), and Charles Baggage, an engineer on the Jacquard–Turing Line.

Baggage was famous for not inventing the computer, which he didn’t do twice. He didn’t invent the computer so well that today he has a museum named after him, called the Computer History Museum. He also invented steampunk and talking about technology at cocktail parties, so not inventing the computer was perhaps a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless later joined the Navy and studied martial arts, at which time she was known as Grasshopper, or sometimes Admiral Grasshopper.