Thoughts on Dreaming in Code

I recently finished reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. I generally don’t read too many dead-tree books but I’m attempting to start reading more technical works. This isn’t really a technical work, but an anecdotal story of Rosenberg spending three years chronicling the Chandler project, an attempt to build an open source PIM. While the context is the Chandler project, the issues raised are those of software development in general, and one of the recurring themes in the book is that despite the notion that a project is special, it will often make the exact same development mistakes that have been made thousands of times before.

It seems timely that I just finished this book; last week on Twitter I heard that Chandler was dead. Which shouldn’t be a surprise… Rosenberg followed the project for three years, and in that time very little progress was made. The project started with grand visions of revolutionizing the way people managed information, and by the end of the last chapter they had a partially-functioning calendar. In the meantime, the web took off, and there were 100 various calendars online that all featured far greater personal and group functionality than Chandler.

The book is a decent read for anyone involved in software development, although it’s painful at times to watch the team make the same mistakes made thousands of times before. Did I learn anything? Not really… other than to pay attention to what I already knew.