If you’ve never had the pleasure, or would like to enjoy it again, you can find this delightful, hacked-into-free-verse, ode to Real Programmers and their mysterious ways:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
Besides Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine”, this is the only work of art that I know of to capture a big piece of the joy, sorrow, transcendence and goofy humor of engineering as a profession. “The Cuckoo’s Egg” by Cliff Stoll touches on some of these, but its not about engineering, in the small sense. Not about hand-assembling machine language so that each instruction was physically located just a bit further along on the drum memory, (instruction skew, not simply sector skew…). Well, I’ll let Mr. Ed Nather tell the story: see above link.
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