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Appearing now, on dead trees!

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Today, Dreaming in Code should be arriving in stores. Amazon has officially switched it from “available for preorder” to “in stock now.” And I’ve swapped out the “coming soon” banner on the book’s Web site for a “now available” sign.

For a writer whose career has arced from weekly newspapers to daily newspapers to round-the-clock Web sites, the transition to writing an old-fashioned book has been one big exercise in delayed gratification. By the time I started writing about the project on my blog, I’d already been working on it (researching and preparing a proposal) for almost two years. From that point to first draft was another year and half, and then more than one year further to get from draft to finished-book-in-your-hand. In this business, impatience doesn’t pay.

The extended timeline does provide many opportunities for reflection, and one of the things I’ve kept returning to is how utterly essential to my work the blogosphere has been. Of course I interviewed lots of people the old-fashioned way. But the fact that so many software developers now use the Web as an open notebook allowed me to explore the subject far more deeply and more widely than if I’d needed to track down and talk to each one of those programmers in person.

So thanks to every developer who’s posted thoughts on his or her work — you’ve made my work easier, and better. And thanks to all of you here who’ve followed along the escargot-paced progress of this project. During its multi-year course, writing here — and knowing that a bunch of great, smart people were reading and responding — helped keep me sane.

Now it gets fun. I’m not doing a world tour, a fact for which I and my family are grateful. But I’ll be making a number of public appearances here in the Bay Area, as well as some in-house events at some companies. Here’s the list (they’re also on Upcoming and Eventful):

Thursday, Jan. 18, 7:30 p.m.: Reading at Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park

Sunday, Jan. 21, 2 p.m.: Pleasanton Library (cosponsored by Towne Center Books), Pleasanton

Wednesday, Jan. 24, 12:30 p.m.: Reading at Stacey’s Books, San Francisco

I’m also doing presentations at Yahoo, Microsoft (Redmond) and Google over the next couple of weeks. If you work at one of those places and want more info, just let me know.

We’ll see what I learn from the people at those events, who undoubtedly will know more than I do, and I’ll try to bring some of it back to the Berkeley Cyber Salon on Feb. 25, where I’ll be hosting a panel on the themes of Dreaming in Code.

An interview and a profile

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed Cone about Dreaming in Code. I first met Cone years ago when he was organizing the panel I spoke on at the first BloggerCon. I’ve always enjoyed his work; like me, he’s someone who is equally interested in politics and technology, and blogs about both of them.

The Cone interview is now up at CIO Insight. It was fun to talk about the issues in the book for a relatively expert readership, where I could skip over some of the basics and jump right to the harder questions. Cone did a great job of drawing me out and then trimming the verbal excess from my responses.

CIO Insight: Are we just being impatient with a branch of knowledge that is still fairly new? Or is there something inherent to software development that makes it so weird and vexing?

Rosenberg: You get one perspective that says, hey, we now have a computer on every desk that does things that were unimaginable 20 years ago, and they’re all connected in this network that gives us instant answers and instant connections. These are miraculous things. And then you find other people who say, you know what? We’re still writing code basically by picking out characters one at a time, we still have programs that are laid low when a single bug creeps in, we still have projects that take ten times longer than they should, we need to rethink everything from the ground up.

I don’t have an answer between them. My personal temperament is more towards the optimistic. In the end, what you’ve got is this industry that’s been conditioned by Moore’s Law, and by its own fantastic financial success, to assume that the curve is always an upward curve, that everything gets better at an exponential pace. That’s the experience of the technology industry. You have that smacking up against the reality of human experience, of creativity, of people working in teams. We have these basic human factors, psychology, the limits of the conceptual capacity of the human brain—things that do not move at an exponential pace. They simply don’t. They tend to move linearly, if they are improving at all. People in the technology industry are loath to accept that.

This theme is also at the heart of another piece that occupied me for a considerable part of the fall — a profile of Charles Simonyi that is on the cover of the new issue of Technology Review. I covered Simonyi and his Intentional Software project just a little bit in Dreaming in Code, and I’m grateful to Jason Pontin at TR for giving me the chance to look at him, and it, more fully.

The first part of the profile, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta,” is up at the TR Web site now; the second part is slated to go up tomorrow. Since the piece was written as one integral whole, you might want to wait till you can read it all at once — I’ll post the link. It was fun to be writing for print again, and Technology Review is looking very spiffy these days, so this is one that you just might be better off reading on paper.
[tags]charles simonyi, ed cone, technology review[/tags]

First responses to Dreaming in Code

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I spent many, many years writing reviews — of plays, movies and books. Over the next few weeks, it’s my turn to be on the receiving end. I have vowed to savor the praise, to engage with the honest feedback, and to avoid tiresome quarrels with any pans. Hold me to that if I slip, okay?

I got some warm advance comments from Joel Spolsky earlier this week, and that was cool — since Joel’s reliably entertaining commentary was one of the factors that persuaded me it’s possible to write about programming without putting readers to sleep. Today marked my first mainstream review, in BusinessWeek. They liked the book, calling it “a fascinating look inside one software-development project” and saying that I “know my subject” and “its scenes are vivid.” I’m grateful for the praise.

BusinessWeek also said that it was “frustrating” that, at the end of the book, Chandler still isn’t done: “Under deadline pressure from his publisher, [Rosenberg] sat down to write the book even though the project had not been completed.”

In fact, the decision to wrap up when we did was mine. No one at Crown, my publisher, pressured me. No publisher wants to wait forever for a manuscript, I guess. But I’m sure if I’d gone to Crown and said, “It will be a better book if we wait another six months,” they’d have approved.

If it had looked like the product was going to be complete (or reach some critical milestone) in only a few more months, I’d have just pushed back my writing schedule. But at the end of 2005, which is where the book’s saga leaves off, there was still no way to predict when the Chandler story would end.

More important, I felt that I’d already unearthed more answers to the questions I’d set out with — why is making software so hard? why does it take so long? what can we learn by observing the intricacies of a real-world project? — than I could possibly fit in one book.

One of the themes at the heart of Dreaming in Code is the strange nature of what I call “software time.” Working on software often means entering a sort of twilight zone in which the normal timeline of the calendar becomes a bottomless black hole.

If the Chandler story had provided a slam-bang finale, that’s how I’d have ended the book. Instead I tried to give Dreaming in Code a conclusion that’s peculiarly true to the material, in a way that I hope readers will find pleasing.

At book’s end, the Chandler team was just beginning to use their own program in “dogfood” fashion. I’ll be posting more soon about what’s happened with Chandler since that point; 2006 saw considerable further development, with a new focus on a “ship-it mindset,” and a fully usable “preview” edition is now scheduled for an April 2007 release. (Katie Parlante, one of the Chandler team’s key managers, has posted an update over at the OSAF blog with more details.)
[tags]osaf, chandler, book reviews, dreaming in code, businessweek, joel spolsky[/tags]

Building a book site with WordPress

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It probably says something about me that, after completing years of work on my book, one of the things I most looked forward to was…building the Web site for the book. Aside from my work at Salon and my launching of various blogs, it had been years since I built a Web site on my own, and I relished the chance to look around at all the new tools for content management that have emerged in the interim.

But pretty quickly I realized that learning any new tool takes time, and I didn’t have a lot of time. And then I also realized that I’d spent a lot of time last summer learning to use WordPress as the new platform for my blog, and there was no reason under the sun I couldn’t use WordPress to build the book site for Dreaming in Code. WordPress lets you publish static pages; all I had to do was customize some templates, and voila! — blog software without the blog.

I am, as I admit at the start of Dreaming in Code, barely a programmer myself. But I can find my way around a template, I can borrow snippets of code and mess with a system that already works just enough to get it to do what I need it to do. This approach was, once upon a time, called “end-user programming”: the idea of enabling sophisticated users to extend and adapt a powerful piece of software without their needing to master complex programming languages. Spreadsheets depend on end-user programming; back in its day, Hypercard did, too. (Bonnie Nardi’s 1993 book A Small Matter of Programming is a good outline of the concept, focusing on spreadsheets and CAD systems.) A good blogging tool like WordPress is an invitation to end-user programming. And I admit it: I had fun!

The part that wasn’t fun was wrestling with CSS. I know that CSS achieved a Good Thing in helping Web designers clean up HTML and separate content from presentation and all that. But making a Web site look exactly the way you want it to look was a hell of a lot easier back in the days of tables and simple HTML than it is today. There are still a few elements of my site that aren’t aligned exactly the way I want them; I gave up trying to figure out why — life is too short! CSS was a step forward for designers’ control of their Web work but a step backward for the end-user programming that made the Web what it is today.

Code Reads notes and other doings

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First, my apologies for falling behind on this project — travel and freelance work ate into my writing time. From now on I should be able to keep more to schedule.

This week concludes our Dijkstra marathon. Next week we’ll tackle Knuth’s retort to Dijkstra, “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. The week after, it’s on to Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto.

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments; you’ve kept some informative and spirited discussions going in each of the previous Code Reads postings, and I, for one, am learning a lot!

Beginning tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday, 11/7), I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Conference, from which, wi-fi willing, I will try to do some live or semi-live coverage. If I can keep my eyes away from the election returns…

Rebecca Blood’s “Bloggers on Blogging” interview

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About six months ago, while I was deep in the editing process for my book, Rebecca Blood emailed me and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview for her series “Bloggers on Blogging.”

Rebecca is one of the people who literally wrote the book (well, a book, one of the first and best) on blogging. So I said, sure — as soon as I’m done with Dreaming in Code. We reconnected over the summer and exchanged emails on a wonderfully leisurely schedule that actually gave me time to think about my answers.

Today she posted the result. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spout off at length both about my writing and about the nature of blogging, my ideas about it, how blogging has affected national politics, and more. It’s a great series — and great company to be in.

Here’s a taste:

With regard to blogging, what was your most memorable moment?

I think it would be sitting down at the computer late at night a couple of days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I was heartbroken at the prospect of an unnecessary and ill-advised war. I grew up at the tail end of Vietnam and always assumed that, whatever other mistakes the nation would make in my lifetime, we would never let ourselves make that one again. I put my kids to bed, thought about the world Bush’s mistake was likely to shape for them, and poured out my heart in a post I titled Eve of Destruction (the comments are still at the old location).

When I hear people arguing that we didn’t and couldn’t know before we invaded Iraq what we know now, I recall that moment. It reminds me that many people knew just how deceptive and stupid the Iraq policy was from the start. And it makes me grateful that the Web and our blogs serve as a day-by-day and hour-by-hour collective record of what we knew and when we said it.

[tags]scott rosenberg, rebecca blood, blogging, bloggers on blogging[/tags]

Off to OOPSLA

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I’ll be heading up to the OOPSLA conference next week (I’ll be there all day Tuesday and Wednesday). It’s in one of my favorite cities in the world, Portland; and it’s a chance for me to brush up on the software realm as my book nears publication.

OOPSLA stands for “object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications”; it’s a venerable conference dating back about 20 years, and it serves as something of an epicenter for the more visionary or radical tradition in the software development world.

I attended OOPSLA two years ago, and it was one of the highlights of my book research — with presentations from all sorts of interesting people, including Alan Kay, Jaron Lanier, Ward Cunningham and Richard Gabriel. This year’s speakers include Brenda Laurel and Charles Simonyi.

If you’re at the conference and want to chat, leave a comment here or drop me an email.
[tags]oopsla, portland[/tags]

Fallows on Iraq

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We’d sent James Fallows my book because I knew he’d had a longstanding interest in software — how it’s created and how creative people use it — and so I figured there was a chance he’d enjoy it. I’d chatted briefly with him when he interviewed me last spring for an article he was writing about Chandler. But I’d never met him in person.

So when I learned that he was scheduled for a book-tour stop right here in Berkeley today, on the publication of his new Blind Into Baghdad, I rolled myself down the hill to the UC Journalism School for his packed lunchtime talk on Iraq.

If any American journalist has a right to shout “I told you so!” about everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq, it’s Fallows: his Nov. 2002 Atlantic piece, “The 51st State,” foretold the endless difficulties the U.S. would face in the wake of a successful assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Shouting isn’t Fallows’ style. Instead he spoke forcefully and thoughtfully for 45 minutes. He argued that, right now, there are simply no good alternatives or “right” choices for the U.S., just varying degrees of bad options. The Democrats, he said, shouldn’t fall into the trap of offering specific proposals about what to do to fix things. Instead, they should point to the upcoming elections as a simple moment of accountability — a chance to offer a vote of no confidence in a president who says “stay the course!” and a vice president who says he’d do everything “exactly the same” if he had another chance. Then, if Democrats succeed in winning any share of power, they’ll need to devise an “adaptive” policy, since no one can predict how events will unfold.

Asked about how future historians will view the Bush administration, Fallows pointed to 2002 as a pivotal year, in which the nation started with a budget surplus, considerable national unity and unprecedented global support. Where did it all go? Why did Bush throw so much down the Iraq hole? Ten days after 9/11 the president delivered a great speech — then he did nothing in the months that followed to summon national resolve, develop an energy policy or express a broader strategy.

Questioned about the prospect of military action against Iran, Fallows said an attack would be “the most reckless military action in my lifetime. And I don’t think it’s going to happen.” The U.S. military is “100 percent” opposed, he said. He guessed that the Bush administration’s hints and leaks about possible military moves against Iran were part of a “crazy man negotiating strategy.”

This gave me a flashback to fall of 2002, when I’d returned to my high school alma mater for the celebration of its newspaper‘s centennial, and hosted an alumni panel of journalists and political insiders discussing the prospect of an invasion of Iraq.

The consensus of the panel — Robert Caro, Marc Fisher, Mark Penn, and Nicholas Horrock — was that the Bush administration was unlikely to deliver on its threats to invade Saddam’s Iraq. The sabre-rattling was a negotiating tactic — a big game of chicken.

Oops. That was one inaccurate consensus — composed, I imagine, of part wishful thinking and part underestimation of the Bush administration’s recklessness. I dearly hope Fallows’s guess on Iran isn’t rooted in a similar thought-mix.
[tags]James Fallows, Iraq, Iran, Blind into Baghdad[/tags]

Thoughts on a Thinkpad migration

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My old laptop, a trusty Thinkpad X30, began falling apart recently — literally, the plastic case developed cracks in the corners and pieces started to fall off. I don’t blame IBM: This machine got a lot of use during the years when I was working on my book — even fell off the table once or twice. It did good service. But I’m not going to trust my work to a computer that is shedding its protective casing like space shuttle tiles. So it was time to buy a new laptop.

I’ve been using ultracompact Thinkpads since 1998 or so and the days of the model 560. These computers have never failed me — never had a hard drive crash or other awful malfunction — despite years of abuse. (Mac folks, I love your operating system, but I don’t love its laptop hardware, so until there’s a Mac laptop that’s as lightweight and reliable as a Thinkpad, and that has a trackpoint-style pointer, it’s just not going to happen for me. Sorry.)

In ordering a new Thinkpad X60s, I wondered whether anything would have changed under the new Lenovo management. The good news, I’m happy to say, is that this Thinkpad continues to feel solid and behave well. The keyboard is if anything a little better than the X30’s (except I absolutely abhor the insertion of the “Windows” key and that funny other key on the right between “alt” and “ctrl” — what does it do, simulate the right-click? who needs it? why crowd the other keys? my fingers liked “alt” and “ctrl” right where they were, thank you!). It’s fascinating to put the new screen next to the old laptop’s LCD and see how 3-4 years of constant use have dimmed the display — something one doesn’t realize without this direct side-by-side comparison.

Thumbs down to Lenovo only for not offering a simple port replicator for the X60s — they make you spring for the fancier dock. Other than that, I’m pretty happy. And no, there was no way I’d wait to buy a new computer in order to graduate to Windows Vista. My philosophy is, never buy a 1.0 product. These ultracompact Thinkpads are so good because IBM has years of experience making them. Similarly, Windows XP (once it’s been upgraded and patched ad nauseam) has had most of its flaws beaten out of it in the years since its debut. Anyone who goes with Vista at launch has to be ready for a boatload of snags and bugs.

One eye-opening sidelight on globalization: the Lenovo web site sent me a UPS tracking number once my order shipped. When I plugged it in at UPS, I could follow my package’s progress all the way from Shanghai to the US. Not much more than a decade ago we were arguing about whether, you know, it was OK for advanced US computer technology to be made available to China. Now, we track the packages of advanced US-designed, China-manufactured computer technology from China’s ports to our doorsteps.

Anytime you move from computer to computer there is the hassle of migrating data (not too bad in the era of voluminous external drives — and migrating that way automatically leaves you with a convenient backup copy). The bigger hassle these days is installing your apps — assuming you haven’t gone completely over to the web-based model, which I certainly haven’t. Thankfully, Ecco Pro still installs nicely, from disk or download. Some of my other stalwart apps have gone free (like Opera) or free/ad-supported/paid (like Eudora), so it’s just a matter of download time plus digging up an old key. (If you have an OS problem, though, you have to deal with the horror of Microsoft activation — today Dave Winer reports one egregious example.)

But with the software installation comes the patching, and that is something of a nightmare. In the case of Windows XP, I dutifully installed a mountain of security patches, but declined the installation of the “Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool” (I’ve protected myself extremely well from malicious software without it). Once I turned down the current month’s edition of this tool, the auto-update wanted to install each previous monthly version, going back to its inception a couple of years ago. There was no way to defeat this that I could figure out. other than laboriously saying “no thanks” to AutoUpdate each time it turned the calendar back a month.

Then there was the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Once installed, it decided there were three critical patches I needed. But each one demanded that I install it, then reboot, separately. WTF? Three reboots for some lousy updates to a piece of software for reading a proprietary document format that I only use when people make me?

Adobe is full of smart engineers. Can’t they roll these things up, or at least set them up so the reboot only triggers once, after all the downloaded updates have installed? And gee, wouldn’t it be nice if they actually told us what these updates did, so we could decide for ourselves whether they actually matter?

Once again, we are asked to do things for the convenience of our software tools. The ostensible servant calls the shots.
[tags]thinkpad, laptops, software hassles, globalization[/tags]

Proofs

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Apologies for the week of blog silence here. I was otherwise engaged: the page proofs for Dreaming in Code landed on my doorstep right before the holiday weekend, so that was my Labor Day weekend, and the evenings since.

It is a strange — and, I have to admit, wonderful — feeling to see this project, which I first conceived in the fall of 2002, near completion. From vague notion to typeset pages — in only four years! (The official publication date is Jan. 16, 2007.) Next up: bound galleys… blurbs… then books!

Now my energy turns from the page to the Web, where I will be building out the book’s site, at present mostly a placeholder, with excerpts and more. Here on this blog, I’m also planning to start a new project around the book’s theme — the mysterious difficulties of creating software — that I’ll be announcing soon. I don’t mean to be mysterious; there are just some details to be worked out between me, my blog and Salon.

In the course of seeing my 100,000-or-so words transformed from a Word document (it’s what the publishers want!) to a typeset galley, I’ve learned a bit more about what goes into making the text of a book look good and fit right. (My editor and the Crown designers did a great job with Dreaming in Code.) So when I recently stumbled on this blog by a book designer — addressing the realms of typography, castoffs and such — I took note. Fascinating stuff if the extent of your knowledge of publishing design is, like mine, drawn primarily from the newspaper world and the computer desktop.

[tags]Dreaming in Code, books, publishing[/tags]