Book Review: Dreaming In Code

I just finished reading Scott Rosenberg's book, Dreaming In Code. Rosenberg, who is one of the founders of Salon.com, a popular liberal web site. The book is about an open source project led by Mitch Kapor, the man behind Lotus. Yes, that Lotus.



At the beginning of the book, Kapor has dreams of creating a new personal information manager, code named Chandler. The project, like most major software projects, undergoes its share of trials and tribulations. What was expected to be a yearlong effort to reach its first release stretched itself out to three years. By the end of the book, 1.0 still had not yet been released. If you've worked in the software industry at all, you'll definitely identify with the pitfalls that Kapor's team encountered.

It's important to keep in mind that this book is written from a non-technical perspective. In fact, I highly recommend this book for this reason. Anyone who's been in earshot of my bitching during a project has heard me talk about stuff like Brook's Law, Joel Spolsky and "eating your own dogfood". This book can teach a non-techie all about the stuff that I talk about all the time in a non-boring fashion. It's a perfect primer (a cautionary tale, perhaps?) for anyone looking to get knee deep in the software industry, whether it be as a programmer, designer or project manager.

Tags: software, programming, chandler, mitch kapor