Saturday, February 03, 2007

Scott Rosenberg: What Makes Software So Hard

Useful interview -- I also recommend reading Dreaming In Code, which I found to be a good read and a very detailed reality check on topics including open source and mega-software projects gone wrong. See this site for more on the book, but please click on the first link above if you buy the book; one of my goals for 2007 is to make more than $.13 via Amazon Associates :)

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?

A politically correct closing comment on Chandler (the article is an interview with Rosenberg):

Mitch [Kapor] is determined and persistent. They plan to ship the calendar in the first part of 2007. It could be that, in a few years, as everyone's coming down off the Web 2.0 high, people will discover it's an interesting, flexible product. It happens: Look at Firefox. Mozilla was written off, Internet Explorer had won the war, it was done, finished, end of story. And now look at it.

The final chapter on Chandler has yet to be written, of course.

Source: Scott Rosenberg: What Makes Software So Hard

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