Aug 14 2007
Dreaming in Code
I was about halfway through Dreaming in Code when Harry Potter arrived in the mail. When I put the book down to start Deathly Hallows, I was somewhat dissatisfied with it. The story, to that point, was an account of a group of rather well-known programmers and visionaries with the goal of producing an open source personal information manager (PIM) application–like Microsoft Outlook–that would revolutionize the way we use PIM software. A lofty ambition for sure, but with the talented team that was assembled to write the software, you would think they could accomplish just about anything. It wasn’t the case.
The first half of the book chronicled the problems and the struggles of the organization its first two years. The story didn’t necessarily drag on and on, but you could see from a mile away that the team was going to have problems so there were no surprises, nothing to look forward to; Just day in, day out problems with developing software. So, after I finished HP7, I was tempted to just leave Dreaming in Code where it was and move on. I decided to finish it however, since I had only a couple hundred pages left. I’m glad I did.
The second half of the book left the development team and began an investigation of why software projects–all software projects–have such difficulty. Without going into too much boring detail, it essentially boils down to software development being as much a creative process as it is engineering, and you can’t really rush the creative process. There’s a lot more to it than that, but nobody wants me to try to rehash the analysis. Trust me. The point is that the second half of the book was much more enjoyable the first half.
Although I enjoyed part of this book, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it unless you are really interested in the day-in, day-out functions of a software development organization or you want an analysis of 30+ years of software engineering problems, what we’ve learned from them and what we haven’t.