Beginnings at the Well

Thirty-five parables on how things get built

by Baisil Geevarghese

If you want to understand how systems actually work, not the code, the thing underneath it, this book teaches it through parables instead of manuals.

Nobody in the village was ever thirsty for water. They were thirsty for the morning it was costing them: the half day's walk, the barrels, the neighbour you had to ask and then remember asking. A Master sits beside a well and teaches four people who know nothing at all. A baker whose ordering system fails every Saturday. A student who has never written a line of code. A man whose job of eleven years no longer needs doing. A teacher whose school is going digital whether it is ready or not. Across thirty-five parables they learn why anything gets built, what happens when more people want it than it can serve, how two parties who have never met agree on how to speak, what a system remembers and what it costs to be certain, and why the slowest part of anything decides the speed of the whole. There is no code in this book. It names no tool, no company, no technology. What it teaches was true of aqueducts and post roads long before anyone thought to build these things out of electricity, and will still be true when today's tools are curiosities. Every chapter contains a moment where the four of them get the answer wrong before they get it right. Those are the parts worth reading twice.