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Appearances elsewhere (NOOP.nl, Fray)

December 17, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Item one: Jurgen Appelo was kind enough to include Dreaming in Code earlier this year in his Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books Ever. (Top 100 and best ever! Yow!) When he came back to me and asked me to do one of his “Five Easy Questions For…” interviews, how could I refuse?

Here is the result, in which I talk about, among other things, my early days as a freelancer, what inspires me to keep writing, and what is more interesting than software development.

Item two: Earlier this year, while I was deeply immersed in work on the new book, Derek Powazek asked if I’d contribute to Fray, his labor-of-love magazine — yes, a paper magazine, it’s a thing of beauty. The sensible thing to do would have been to beg off, and I was going to. But the topic of the issue was going to be “Geek: True Stories of People Taking Things Too Seriously,” and as I plowed through my book work I found my mind drifting back to my youth, and a time when I was a true geek, not for software or Tolkien or theater or politics or any of the other things I have geeked out on over the years, but for tropical fish — which was, for me, the ur-geekly pursuit.

So I wrote a little piece, titled Memories of a Fickle God, about those times. It’s online here, along with a bunch of far more captivating pieces.

But really, if you’re interested in this stuff, the thing to do is to buy the magazine (or subscribe), because it’s full of great stories and beautiful art. This is the future of the print magazine: once the profits have all migrated elsewhere, people will still publish on paper. But they’ll do it for their own damn reasons.

aquaristsmall

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Interview with Lovink re: Dreaming in Code

September 29, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

And now, we take a brief break from the financial apocalypse for some personal notes.

I remain in deep writing mode here — can’t say there’s light at the end of the tunnel yet, but I can say the tunnel is reasonably comfortable!

But I wanted to point those interested to an in-depth interview I recently gave to Geert Lovink, the critic and author of works like “Zero Comments” and “Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse.” It’s all about Dreaming in Code and Chandler. Here’s a brief excerpt:

GL: Most IT books you can buy are propped-up business show cases that only talk about success. Dreaming in Code is so radically different in this respect. The project drags on, and at times, the text is amazing honest, up to the point of straight out European negativity. How did you manage to do this? You wrote the book in San Francisco, not in Berlin.

SR: I’ll take this as a compliment. I started my career as a theater critic. I prize honesty. I can’t imagine working on a book for 3-4 years if I didn’t set out to be honest. When I hear “how did you manage it?” it sort of sounds to me like, “how did you get away with it?” But in fact my publisher and editor were always behind the project. My book proposal was really clear about what kind of book it was going to be…

Some readers were disappointed that Dreaming in Code didn’t give them more bullet points about how to improve their development projects. I had hoped that it was clear from the first page that this just wasn’t going to be that kind of book. If I knew how to solve these problems I’d be busy solving them, not writing about them! But writing about them has value, nonetheless, I hope. Just serving witness to the incredibly difficult and uniquely problematic work that software developers do — that was my aim, in the end.

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Chandler 1.0 ships

August 10, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 5 Comments

When I first began reporting on Chandler for Dreaming in Code at the very start of 2003, there was talk of shipping a 1.0 version within a year. Then, in following years, the project got so bogged down that at times it was hard to imagine it ever arriving at such a milestone.

Well, on Friday, the OSAF team released a 1.0 version of Chandler. At the moment I am too deep in the swamps of blog history circa 2001 to do full justice to this news, but must take note nonetheless.

Chandler, of course, is the personal-information-management application whose story sat at the center of my first book. I last checked in on the project at the start of this year, when OSAF and Kapor parted ways.

It’s been close to six years since Mitch Kapor first announced plans for Chandler, and the application today is quite different from what was envisioned then. But it does fulfill at least a portion of the ambitious agenda Kapor set: It’s fully cross-platform, and, from the user side, it takes a very flexible approach to data. The program was once positioned as a calendar with email and task capabilities, and it’s still got those features, but it’s now presented as a notebook program — it’s “The Note-To-Self Organizer.” You store information free-form and then can organize it according to now/later/done triaging, turn items into tasks and schedule them on the calendar, group data in multiple collections, and share it across the web via the Hub server. I’m looking forward to experimenting more with it.

The OSAF blog post announcement includes some more detail. And James Fallows has a good post up at the Atlantic.

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Singing in Code

March 3, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

OK, this one is just for plain fun: it’s the first Wordyard playlist.

When I was planning my campaign of global domination for Dreaming in Code I had visions of a multimedia onslaught. I’d pull together video clips that epitomized the nightmare of software scheduling, from A Brief History of Time to Groundhog Day to Lawrence of Arabia (that quicksand scene, of course), and music that similarly reflected the themes.

Didn’t get too far…but I did compile a list of songs that might be the book’s soundtrack. (Tip of the hat to Largehearted Boy‘s custom of inviting authors to assemble playlists for their novels, and to Josh Kornbluth‘s loving selection of apropos tunes to precede his solo shows.)

(1) “Put Your Hand On The Computer,” They Might Be Giants — ‘Cause that’s how it always starts.

(2) “Bill Gates Must Die,” John Vanderslice — Certainly, most open source developers aren’t obsessive sociopaths like this song’s narrator. But they have always harbored a certain animosity toward the founder of Microsoft, and sometimes it gets a little personal. (Bonus rationale: This song once fried my motherboard.)

(3) “Source Tags and Codes,” And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — “Spend half a life deciding what went wrong / Trying to find out what took you so long.”

(4) “Dot Dash,” Wire.

(5) “Systems Crash,” Guided By Voices.

(6) “I Want to Live on an Abstract Plain,” Frank Black.

(7) “Information Age,” Damon and Naomi.

(8) “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” Billy Bragg.

(9) “Raymond Chandler Evening,” Robyn Hitchcock — Chandler the software is named for the novelist. But the song’s last line (“And I’m lurking in the shadows / ‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet”) echoes my software epic’s in medias res ending, too!

(10) “Your Belgian Things,” the Mountain Goats — “The arteries are clogging in the mainframe / There’s too much information in the pipes.”

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Those paperbacks are gone

February 29, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

I’m out of copies, so this concludes the free-paperbacks-for-bloggers program.

Two side notes:

A handful of the requests I received got trapped in the spam filter. I think the word FREE adds a lot of points. (This is something for Wired editor Chris Anderson to ponder as he pursues work on his new book about “Free” as a business model!)

Also, a surprisingly high percentage of the folks who requested the book failed to include their street addresses in their original email. Despite knowing that they were asking me to send them something via snailmail, their minds just blanked on that little prerequisitie.

I think many of us — certainly including me — do so much of our business on the Net these days that the pesky details of physical-world object transfer just slip right by us.

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Chesterton quote archeology

February 28, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

That Orwell quote earlier this week that began “Our civilization is founded on coal” had a “pace Chesterton” at the start that puzzled me. A number of you wrote in with suggestions, including a pointer to a fascinating debate between Chesterton and Bernard Shaw about whether to nationalize the coal mines, moderated by Hilaire Belloc.

But I believe Mark Bernstein found the ur-instance of the Chesterton reference:

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this–that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.

So, what Orwell was really saying was: sorry, G.K., our civilization is not founded upon abstractions, it’s founded on the hard reality of coal mining. And thus Stroustrup’s reformulation — “our civilization is built on software” — takes us full circle, back to the many layers of abstraction that constitute our program code.

It all connects!

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Free Dreaming paperbacks: going, going…

February 28, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Thanks for the great response to my offer. I’m sending out copies today to all the bloggers who’ve requested, and I’ve got just a handful left. If you want to read the book and post something about it, let me know soon!

UPDATE: No books left, sorry.

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