If you are working in software development on any level, you are invariably part of a collective effort that is having an unprecedented impact on society today  — whether you realize it or not. It is sometimes easy to forget that the underlying infrastructure and code for the apps and software that play a role in so many facets of our life involved, at some point, a human somewhere in the world going through the toil and often pain of writing code — and enjoying those occasional “aha” moments that come with bursts of creativity and just building stuff.

The momentum of the open source movement, the resulting explosion of affordable and available platforms and tools  and the availability of new technologies, including but not limited to cloud-native, Kubernetes and microservices platforms have also played, of course, a major role.

As Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the “New York Times Magazine” and “Wired,” described in this The New Stack Makers podcast and in his book  “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World,” you, as a software engineer or coder, are taking part in something directly or indirectly that has a far-reaching impact on the world we live in today. Based on interviews with over 200 coders, he also discusses about how his book puts software development into its historical context and addresses some of the problems in today’s industry, such as gender, racial and sexual orientation biases — and what can be done about it.