Dreaming in Code

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software is a (2007) Random House literary nonfiction book by Salon.com editor and journalist Scott Rosenberg. It documents the workers of Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation as they struggled with collaboration and the software development task of building the open source calendar application Chandler.

Rosenberg spent time observing the organization at work and wrote about its milestones and problems. The book intersperses narrative with explanations of software development philosophy, methodology, and process, referring to The Mythical Man-Month and other texts of the field. In a review in the Atlantic, James Fallows compared the book to Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine.

At the time of the book's publication, OSAF had not yet released Chandler 1.0. Chandler 1.0 was released on August 8, 2008.

References

• Seattle Times review, March 9, 2007
• Harvard Magazine review, March 2007
• News & Observer review, January 21, 2007
• CIO Insight interview, January 5, 2007
• Business Week review, January 15, 2007

External links

• Official web site
• Amazon page for "Dreaming in Code"
• "Joel On Software" review of "Dreaming in Code"
• Author interview at Salon.com