Tech giant and philanthropist Bill Gates released his memoir, “Source Code,” last February, the first of three volumes he intends to publish about his life.

His biography is unabridged, filled with anecdotes including being raised by his tall but gentle and cool-headed father. Bill Gates Sr. stood at six feet seven inches.

He recalls his mother acting as a judge and an ambitious teacher who aspired for her family to have a clean-cut, Kennedy-like reputation, but a doting mother nonetheless.

In one section, Gates describes briefly crushing over Vicki, a popular and outgoing girl who was a part of his high school drama club. In another section, he loves talking politics with his childhood best friend, Kent.

Readers may easily find themselves overwhelmed with information, some of which may seem insignificant and could have been cut. However, Gates writes about the characters in his early life with such awestruckness that it is not hard to find yourself gushing over them alongside him.

From an innumerable number of card games played against his “gami” and days-long hikes on trails that snake around the mountains of Washington state in boyhood to countless hours of his adolescence spent in Lakeside School’s computer lab and dumpster diving with Paul Allen at Digital Equipment Corps, searching for the source code to program a PDP-10 mainframe computer, “Source Code: My Beginnings” is Gates’ honest reflection of his life leading up to the success of Microsoft.

Gates writes, “In time, there would be a big company. And in time, there would be software programs millions of lines long at the core of billions of computers around the world,” and “Before all that, there was a pack of cards and a single goal: beat my grandmother.”

One of the things that makes “Source Code” a worthy read is Gates’ willingness to share embarrassing stories that highlight his unfavorable traits, such as extreme arrogance, in his youth, earning the title “precocious brat” from his mother and once, in his freshman year at Harvard, interrupting his computer science professor’s lecture on queueing theory, which, in computer science, studies congestion in computer networks, blurting that he was incorrect (he wasn’t), before stalking out. “Even today, I cringe when I think about my rudeness,” Gates writes.

Though young Gates isn’t the most likable character, I couldn’t help but be astonished by his brilliance and passion, bordering on obsession, for coding, which began in 1968 at age thirteen after the Lakeside Mothers’ Club raised $3,000 for Lakeside School to rent a Teletype ASR-33 and connect to a time-shared computer. Using the BASIC programming language, which was only four years old at the time, Gates created his first computer program—a tic-tac-toe game—and was instantly hooked. His excessive computer use got the attention of Paul Allen, two years his senior, who cloaked his techiness with mutton chops and guitar playing and played the role of a big brother by simultaneously picking on and pushing Gates to become a better programmer.

Since he writes “Source Code” with sincerity and playfulness, I admittedly forgot about the controversies that have dominated the tech giant’s adult life.

Even in the prime of Microsoft, Gates never had a favorable reputation, between being charged with constituting a market monopoly in the late 1990s after the U.S. Justice System filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and several accusations from Microsoft employees throughout the years of Gates being antagonistic at work.

In recent years, Gates’ reputation has only continued to sour. A 2021 Wall Street Journal report unveiled Gates’ sexual misconduct in the workplace during the early 2000s. Gates divorced his wife, Melinda, after 27 years of marriage after new revelations of his ties with Jeffery Epstein.

It will be interesting to see how and to what extent Gates might address these controversies in his upcoming volumes, or if he even feels pressure to do so, because as of very recently, Gates has taken a backseat as newer generation tech-bros Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, and Jeff Bezos have come under fire since aligning themselves with the Trump Administration’s agenda.

The release dates of the upcoming “Source Code” volumes have not yet been announced.

“Source Code: My Beginnings” can be purchased at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com or at a local bookstore.