Former computer programmer turned author Ellen Ullman, author of Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, joined Plutopia News Network’s Maggie Duval for a conversation about engineering as a tinkering profession, persistent productive failures to produce success, and the current state of the profession, where people are always working and never re-creating. And there’s much, much more. Ellen’s life and work makes us think of the title of Norbert Wiener’s seminal work, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science) – she focuses very much on the human side of technology, and the aesthetics of algorithms.