Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software: Rosenberg, Scott: 9781400082476: Amazon.com: Books

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Scott Rosenberg

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software Paperback – February 26, 2008

by Scott Rosenberg (Author)

3.9 220 ratings

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Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt
dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.

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Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown Currency
Publication date

February 26, 2008
Dimensions

5.18 x 0.86 x 7.98 inches
ISBN-10

1400082471
ISBN-13

978-1400082476
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Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

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Customer reviews

220 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book well-written and interesting. However, some feel the book loses focus and rambles on. Opinions are mixed on the enlightened content, with some finding it helpful and interesting, while others say it's underwhelming.

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Readability Enlightened content Focus Pacing

26 customers mention "Readability"22 positive4 negative

Customers find the book well-written, interesting, and fun. They say it's a good read for anyone studying computer engineering or open-source software development. Readers also mention the prose is very relaxed and easy-going.

"...by schools (which is dry and boring), this was a well-written, interesting book which described every software developers encounter with "Software..." Read more

"...All in all, the book was well written. I enjoyed the Chandler parts a lot (4 stars) and felt the explorations were just ok (3 stars)...." Read more

"...The book is a good read, but I'd love to see a book about some more hardcore start-ups and more hardcore bugs..." Read more

"...It is an easy read, but has some real insights on the real world and coding...." Read more

21 customers mention "Enlightened content"10 positive11 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the enlightened content. Some mention it's full of helpful insights into the history and philosophical strands of software. They also say the book provides a unique perspective. However, others say it's utterly underwhelming, unfocused, and boring.

"...The Chandler project is fascinating as they aim to do things different... and end up making all the mistakes of traditional software projects...." Read more

"...A number of reviewers of this book have noted that the book is just as unfocused and wandering as the software project, and that is true...." Read more

"...It is an easy read, but has some real insights on the real world and coding...." Read more

"...Frankly, the book wasn't very intense, and I think the other reviewers nail the reason on the head: The author picked a poor start-up to follow,..." Read more

3 customers mention "Focus"0 positive3 negative

Customers find the book loses focus and rambles on.

"...but I could not care less about their terrible mismanagement and lack of focus. So much naval gazing..." Read more

"...I agree with others that the book loses focus and meanders around." Read more

"Interesting, but like the project it covers, the book rambles on with little focus..." Read more

3 customers mention "Pacing"0 positive3 negative

Customers find the pacing of the book to be slow. They mention that the last section tends to drag on.

"...not the fault of the author, but rather due to the delays in completing the Chandler project itself...." Read more

"...What is atypical about Chandler is that it took so long to peter out...." Read more

"...Unfortunately, the last section tend to drag on...." Read more

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Absolutely a great read!

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2010

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I had to read this book prior to my first class at Carnegie Mellon University (MS program). Unlike most reading material provided by schools (which is dry and boring), this was a well-written, interesting book which described every software developers encounter with "Software time". This book even goes back to the early days of computing along with the great minds which revolutionized the way software behaves to provide insight and background during the course of one particular software team's struggle for transcendalized code.

I have had the instances in this book happen to me (pitfalls, perils, mistakes, etc) and I thought it was so applicable to my career path going forward. Oddly enough, I thought "Dreaming In Code" was a clever title considering that I myself had coded school projects in my sleep and the book does provide an illustration near the end on what the statement actually means.

One person found this helpful

Enjoyable, Painful, Useful

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2011

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This book is likely to be of interest to developers and systems professionals, as well as a few others who are really interested in software development but don't participate in it actively. This latter group is the luckier one: for the rest of us, watching this train wreck in slow motion is painful and frequently exasperating.

There are two distinct matters to be discussed here: 1) the principle story of the book, and 2) how the subject matter is delivered.

The principle story of the book is Chandler, a Personal Information Manager(PIM)/Groupware-type software that was conceived and developed as an open-source project. The project was abandoned after several years' effort without having achieved its defining goals, and Dreaming is a narrative of the first few years.

The blame for the failure must be place squarely at feet of the project's founder and chief evangelist, Mitch Kapor. Mr. Kapor was the heroic developer of Lotus 1-2-3. For the growing number of you who have no idea what that was, it was the one app that made a PC worth having in the late 80s. It was the killer app for a long time.

Chandler was meant to be Kapor's extension of a PIM product that had once shown some promise at Lotus. He had the lofty idea of making this system capable of tying together all of the elements of PIM practice (calendar, task list, email, notes) into a seamless, ephemeral whole, without storage dictated by data type, and by the way, open source. Get it? Well, nobody else did either.

This project failed because its goal could not and cannot be articulated in a short sentence. It was consistently defined by its desired attributes, without the faintest idea of how it could be achieved. In fact, when examined more closely the defining attributes seemed to be in direct contradiction to each other.

If you will forgive me, the situation reminded me a lot of the health care bill of 2010. It was just forever before there ever was a bill. For at least two years, it existed as list of lofty attributes. For the few brief moments between the time it actually became a bill and the time it was passed into law, the Speaker of the House famously noted that we have to pass it to see what's in it. But when it was finally dissected, it contained a number of conflicting requirements that could not live together successfully.

And so it was with Chandler. I marvel at the fact that in the august collection of software professionals, no one at any point pitched a fit that the project had no clearly articulated mission, that they had not a clear image of what they were building, and how such building would occur. I presume it is because that in this particular open-source project, the developers were getting paid.

The open source idea was intended to harness the executional capacity of the masses, but again, the project was too ethereal for the masses to work on. There was no unifying mantra, such as "Write a free Unix!" or "Replace IIS!", for the masses to recite in unison. A candidate cry might have been "Replace Outlook!", but Chandler was meant to be so much *more* than Outlook. Unfortunately, "Transcend Outlook!" just never caught on. So Kapor paid a number of available systems development heavy hitters to develop the open-source project. Most of them moved along to other pastures once they saw that the emperor was in fact naked.

And all of that is pity, but again, the greater pity is that the disaster could not have been averted by a well-placed person pulling the emergency brake. In my experience in software development, you have a problem on your hands if your programmers start out by designing the splash screen. Similarly, that the software was named after the dog, the dog after the author, and the releases after the setting of the author's stories just makes me want to puke. Perhaps we could get the cart and the horse in the right order.

***

A number of reviewers of this book have noted that the book is just as unfocused and wandering as the software project, and that is true. It isn't entirely clear to me how it could have been otherwise, and moreover, it does not render the book unuseful. The father Berenstein Bear made an industry of showing the little tyke bear what not to do. Well, same here. Plus, the wandering captures the spirit of the endeavor.

What I do not sufficiently hear in the review-o-sphere is the dramatic turn the book makes at chapter 9, into the history of software development methodologies and personalities. For 75 pages (a bit less than a quarter of the book), we get a fine tour of software craftsmanship over the decades. Along the way, every major title in software development (and not a few minor ones) is cataloged and discussed. This discussion and the attendant bibliography is easily worth the price of the book (and maybe worth the cost of reading the other 75% of the book),

One issue the author had was when to stop the book, as the software never came to any cohesive point. So it just stopped, just like the software project did a couple of years later.

I think the title was a poor choice. It has nothing whatever to do with the book except a tangential reference, and a great opportunity to say something conclusive about the project was lost. I suppose that the jury had not yet completely returned on the project when the book went to press, however, "The Road to Nowhere: Hazards of Following the Pied Piper" or "Good Money After Bad: How and Idea, a Bucket of Money, and a Dynamic Personality Weren't Enough," would have been a lot more on point.

13 people found this helpful

Highly annotated story of a failed project

Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2015

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"Dreaming on Code" are two books mixed together into one. One of the books is the observation of the author of a multi-year high-profile software development project. The project eventually failed, but that wasn't clear yet at the end of the book. The second book is the authors search for better ways of developing software. The book is structured as a few pages about the development project and a few pages of exploration.

For me, the book about the software project was the most interesting. The project is called Chandler done by a company called Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) by Mitch Kapor (the founder of Lotus). It's vision is to develop the next generation personal information manager (PIM), which is basically a calendar, email and note-maker integrated in one product. Chandler had a large investment and attracted some high-profile developers. Scott Rosenberg followed the Chandler project over a couple of years and the book describes his observations or narrative of the project.

The Chandler project is fascinating as they aim to do things different... and end up making all the mistakes of traditional software projects. They want to get something out quickly and facilitate an open source community to build up the product. They end-up over-designing, late delivering and over-complicating the whole project. It is really painful to follow the project (at least for me) as I could see them make the mistakes and would want to say "nooo!" but they did it anyways. Eventually the book ends without knowing the end of Chandler, but if you search online you'll discover that it unfortunately never delivered its vision.

The second book is the authors search for delivering better software. He basically picks a theme and describes that and explains some of the history. For example, at some point it explains what open source is and how open source was created. Similarly, it explains lots of aspects of software development. Most of these ought to be nothing new for nearly any software developer... and it suggests the book is actually targeted to people who aren't directly involved in software development but are curious about how it would work. The explorations were interesting but purposefully shallow, which made them a bit boring for me. Usually I ended up reading through them and wanting to go back to the Chandler project story to know what would happen there.

All in all, the book was well written. I enjoyed the Chandler parts a lot (4 stars) and felt the explorations were just ok (3 stars). I decided to average it out to 3 stars, especially for software developers who probably know all the explorations already. 4 stars for people who are interested in discovering more about software development. A pretty ok book.

11 people found this helpful

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Ransen Owen

Every programmer (and manager of programmers) should read this book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2019

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Despite it being dated every programmer (and manager of programmers) should read this book. The main truths about software development have not changed.

deviantintegral

Printing issues

Reviewed in Canada on May 3, 2017

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I'm only 3 chapters in, but there have been several printing issues. Letters misaligned, or half bold. The text is a good read, especially if you ever tried Chandler as a PIM in the 2000s.

Shailendra Paliwal

Delves into philosophy of making software; anatomy of a project that turned into vapourware

Reviewed in India on August 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

Scott Rosenberg follows an ambitious software development team of Chandler led by Mitch Kapor who was already a big name in the valley after making $200MM from Lotus and later co-founding Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor is largely fascinated by the success of Open Source with Linus Torvald's personal project that turned into the mammoth software project Linux. It broke down multiple stereotypes and theories of software development, primarily that of Brook's Law (Fred Brooks' Mythical Man Month) that adding manpower to a software project delays it, which is a recurring meme through the book. Dreaming in Code is less about Chandler and more about addressing the questions like, "Why can't we make software like we make bridges?" which delve more into philosophy of software development than the specific project in sight. This outlook also makes Rosenberg sometimes loose sight of the ordinary and make mountain out of a molehill by exaggerating simple design decisions in the process into big questions about existence and creation.

Chandler keeps on missing deadlines through the book. Halfway through it started getting on my nerves. There were times when I felt like stopping and writing to Kapor right away. One could argue that Chandler wouldn't have been a vapourware if they had chosen the web over python but that's exactly the kind of information that development team didn't have access to when they made the decision and thus led them astray. In a way, this changing topology is what makes making solid structures in software industry a challenging problem. OSAF is incredibly ambitious and stoic about their aspirations to take forward the ideas of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart.

Overall, I found it a great introduction to this industry as an outsider. Although the book doesn't expect the reader to be a programmer, it'll definitely help. Dreaming in Code encourages discussion which is why this will give you a lot of fodder to put on the coffee table with any software engineers you may know.

Lorenzo Baldi

Buono anche se a tratti un poco noioso.

Reviewed in Italy on November 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

Non è male come storia, sopratutto se vi sentite in qualche modo chiamati in causa.
Se lavorate nell'ambiente troverete qualche aneddoto interessante e rivedrete molte cose che avete sicuramente vissuto di persona.
A differenza di quello che forse ci si potrebbe aspettare, le vicende umane, sopratutto la storia del ceo dell'azienda seguita dal libro, è di gran lunga la parte più interessante del libro.
Carino e scorrevole, la sua semplicità di lettura lo rende forse anche più utile come audiobook da ascoltare nel tragitto verso il lavoro.

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Radiocode

An interesting read...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2013

Verified Purchase

...but rather stodgy in places.
Tells the story of software development in the "good old days" before programming became a science rather than an art.

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