No Open Blockers

I’ve been reading Dreaming in Code for the past week. I forget where I first heard of it, but after a recommendation from a coworker on the Spacewalk team (thanks Partha) I finally followed through with checking it out.

The subtitle does a good job of explaining the book’s purpose: “Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software”. I hesitate to call it a case study in software projects because I don’t think it does justice to the book’s relaxed, conversational style. Rather than reading like a formal study, it’s the story of the development of Chandler an open source personal information manager with high goals. Rosenberg also provides a ton of related information to help frame the choices the Chandler team had to make, which increases the book’s audience significantly to include non-professionals.

I wish I was in a position to assign required reading for CSC majors. I’m not sure what class this would fall under (the most likely candidate is Software Engineering). Even then, the bigger challenge is convincing students of the value.

In short, anyone considering a career in programming needs to read this book. It provides an incredibly good insight into what it’s like to work on an actual project, an insight that students normally only get with experience after they’d graduated. Like I said, it’s presented more as a story of what happened rather than a technical manual, so it’s not painful to read.

But I cannot stress enough how much I would have appreciated such a detailed look into a real software project before I started on my career. Software Engineering text books describe what to do “by the book”. This book shows you a more realistic view of how those theories and practices can (and often do) go wrong.