I ordered the Project Aardvark movie as soon as Joel announced it. Still, it took me a few weeks to sit down and watch the 80-minute DVD before Christmas. Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks isn’t a video version of The Soul of a New Machine (read that if you have not). But Aardvark’d is a glance into a world that isn’t much visualized. There is a reason for that, of course: pictures of people typing, or visuals of computer code, don’t make for compelling film. The filmmaker avoids those cliches, smartly. The people are the story here, although I was more interested in the process and decision-making, which was less obvious in the film than in the blog. Only watch if you’re in the industry and want to recognize some personality types, or see Dan Bricklin and Paul Graham make their (effectively) cameos.
Joel mentions Code Rush and Startup.com as two other recent documentaries about software development. I haven’t seen them. Thoughts?