From CIOI: "Scott Rosenberg has written an important and entertaining book about the way software projects work—or don't. Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Crown, 2007), chronicles an open-source effort to build a better personal information manager. Published this month, the book also delves into the history and culture of software development in an attempt to answer a fundamental question: Why is software so hard?"
Read my interview with Scott here. Amazon page for the book here. Rosenberg blogs about related stuff here.
From our conversation: I hope people will come away from the book with a deeper understanding of what happens in the making of a piece of software. I felt that in so many books about making technology, you'd get to the point where people actually start creating the software and then it would be kind of like the sex scene in an old movie: They would just skip it, cut to the next morning, cut to the marketing team getting ready to ship the product. It was like people would avert their eyes from the actual act of making software. Maybe they were afraid readers would be bored, or didn't understand software.
[cross-posted from the dayjob blog.]
This is my second interview in a row with a journalist. Like Chris Anderson, Rosenberg spoke in fully-formed paragraphs. Makes the job easy.
UPDATE: Lots of interesting conversation -- and some funny cracks, too -- over at Slashdot.
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