Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished.
The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of innovation to deliver a product to market. While James Fallows makes that analogy explicit in his cover blurb, Dreaming in Code fell short for me.
Rosenberg chose Chander (an email/calendar/lifestream program…at least originally) because it was an open-source project with a different structure: more centralized, and funded generously by Mitch Kapor. But the team members changed throughout the three years plus that Rosenberg followed the project, and the software wasn’t delivered during this period, either. Because the cast of characters changes significantly, I lost interest in the people — and stories of this kind are really about the individuals melding (or not) into a team. Without software in people’s hands, there’s no sense of accomplishment, and no closure, either. Chandler continues, but simply with diminished ambitions and a disinterested audience.
The fits and starts in the development provide Rosenberg plenty of pages to delve into the research and writings about software development. These sidebars weren’t necessarily new to me, but more enjoyable than reading about Chandler’s failure to cohere.
Those in the technology realm will nod their heads at the tales of failure here, but I’m not certain about its appeal to a broader audience. Scott’s blog Wordyard is worth following, though. And I see his next book, about blogging, is due this summer. I admire his willingness to dive in again on a topic that is very much not finished.