Just completed Dreaming in Code and it was a very interesting read. One of my colleagues who consults on software process is reading it now. I liked the thematic comparison of bridge-building and programming. It’s a common reference, and it always makes me wonder whether the challenges in any complex engineering effort are more project management than they are technical. The question I have is: how much of the work do you need to understand to coordinate the effort successfully? This is a major challenge in robotics I would imagine, as in the sciences. A project manager is caught on both sides - understand too much and you overmanage, understand too little and you don’t know what (or whom) to believe.

You profile certain projects where there were lone programmers and quick turnarounds - I think this skirts many of the issues. To manage a complex effort requires difficult trade-offs and change management - and, of course, people politics. The ability to balance task and people-orientation is very difficult to find in a single individual or even a team, but it is happening all the time in the field.

I look forward to reading your forthcoming work.

See for instance this post for a little bit of the background on the lengthy intertwingling of Soul of a New Machine and Dreaming in Code …

I’m reading it right now. It chronicles a hardware team building a new microcomputer in the late 1970s.