Title: Picks and Shovels

Author: Cory Doctorow

Completed: Sept 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This is the third book in the Martin Hench series and having read the first two earlier this summer, I moved onto this one. It took a minute to get into the first book, he really put a lot of “geek speak” into it seemingly to show his nerdy credentials, but after that, I really enjoyed it. This one jumps back to Marty’s going to college and getting his first couple of jobs building and working with computers. While telling his story, we learn about the real-world challenges things like non-compete agreements that impact more people today than in the fictional 1980’s when this takes place. Overall, it’s a fun bit of historical fiction that, more than anything else, has made me want to pull out the old Apple ][e, fire up the soldering iron, and see if I can get it working again.

Highlights:

• It was my first experience with shutting up and listening to women who weren’t afraid to show me they were smarter than me. I am embarrassed that it took me nearly eighteen years to try it, but in my defense, many of my contemporaries never tried it.
• Art washed, but otherwise, he looked like a homeless person (or a hacker)
• Looking at someone else’s code was like looking under the rug where they swept their dirty secrets, because every programmer has eventually hit a wall where they can’t be bothered to find an elegant solution so they go for the brute-force treatment. It could certainly feel like the person whose creation you were wrestling with had it in for you, but it was almost always the case that they were just being frail and foolish human beings.
• “What’s an array transformation?”
  Maria-Eva had been trying to explain this to her parents for weeks, to the point where they’d forbidden the subject at the dinner table, and so great was her relief at having a willing audience for this explanation that she forgot how angry she was at Sister Jean. The words poured out of her. Sister Jean’s curiosity turned briefly to skepticism, as if she was wondering if this was some kind of elaborate child’s fantasy, as though Maria-Eva had invented an imaginary zoo of mythological beasts and was now taking her through their care routines
• Father Marek had sent a letter quoting Cardinal Ratzinger to all the sales reps, railing against the “Marxist myths” of liberation theology and calling on everyone in the company to be on the alert for “subversive elements” who “seek to destroy the free enterprise system that Fidelity Computing depended on and stood for.” It wasn’t as if Julia Inez, Fatima, and Juana Concepción had kept their politics a secret—how could they, when the minute they went off the clock for Fidelity Computing they went to work with community poverty groups?
• that’s the interoperator’s advantage! You’ve got this Goliath that’s created an any-color-you-like-so-long-as-it’s-black policy on the whole nation, and that means that you can know exactly what’s out there and how you can plug into it. Every time the Bell System sells a standardized Western Digital phone, that’s another potential customer for a Carterfone
• “Whereas I only found computer people. Sure. Art’s definitely getting the better end of this deal, I get it. But my point still stands: I love this town.”
  “And my point still stands: it won’t love you back. San Francisco has had gold rush after gold rush, and each one was a disaster. Nearly everyone went broke. The city was mobbed and everything the locals loved about it was destroyed. Sometimes it even burned down. They chopped down all the fucking redwoods. This gold rush won’t be any different, mark my words.”