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Archives for January 2007

Mace’s podcast, Kedrosky’s plug

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It is now two weeks to the day from Dreaming in Code’s in-store arrival, and I’m still trying to catch my breath. I’m going to write some fuller posts responding to some of the questions and criticisms I’ve received both in person and online. And I promise I’ll get back to Code Reads soon! Here, first, are a couple of quick pointers to more recent coverage and interesting stuff:

Scott Mace, whose Calendar Swamp blog has been an invaluable resource, interviewed me early on during my media marathon for the Open Source Conversations podcast, and the interview is now available. This was one of the deepest and fullest (and longest!) interviews I’ve done to date; many thanks to Scott for his enthusiasm for the book and his willingness to dig into some of the details.

Paul Kedrosky is both extremely smart and, I tend to think, at the harder-nosed end of the tech-pundit spectrum, so I was delighted to read his post calling Dreaming in Code “excellent.” “Rosenberg’s new book,” he wrote, “is sobering and required reading for anyone naive enough to still expect miracles from large-scale software development.” Thanks, Paul.

“Code” on Marketplace, in Washington Post

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While I was stuck with my family at an airport for hours today waiting for the airline to figure out how to start the plane’s engines (no kidding), elves were at work extending my national sway. Or at least, I could say, work I had previously finished was making its way toward the public.

The Marketplace interview is online now, here. And I’ve got an op-ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Both of these are pegged to the occasion of Windows Vista finally heaving itself across the finish line.

Dreaming in Code on Marketplace

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If all goes as planned, today’s edition of Marketplace, the Public Radio business show, will include an interview with me about the book, Windows Vista, and the challenges of making software. I had an enjoyable talk with Kai Ryssdal, the host, last week. I’ve been traveling with my family this weekend, but I’ll be posting more soon…

Meanwhile, back at OSAF…

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Anyone who reads Dreaming in Code through to the end is going to want to know what happened at the Chandler project in the time since the conclusion of the book’s narrative (it ends at the end of 2005, with Chandler at version 0.6, ready to begin some limited “dogfooding,” or use by inhouse early adopters).

Some of the early reactions to my book have presented Chandler as a total bust and proceeded on the assumption that the project is dead. That’s not at all the case. For the moment, Chandler remains a program that most people aren’t going to download and use, and it’s still not going to break any speed records. But it plainly has made steady progress over the past year. OSAF is now planning what it’s calling a “preview” release in April.

A lot more of the project’s big-picture features are now at least partially implemented — particularly the Dashboard, a sort of universal “inbox” for sorting tasks and calendar events and email according to “Getting Things Done”-style principles.

I sat down with Katie Parlante, Sheila Mooney and Mitch Kapor right before Christmas to get an update on what had happened at OSAF with Chandler during 2006.

[Read more…]

Notes from the actual road

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In the past several days I’ve been talking nonstop about Dreaming in Code to radio hosts and bookstore crowds and a roomful of people at Microsoft Research in Redmond.

I am continually delighted by the interest people are showing in the book and its subject. Most wonderfully, I am finding that the radio folks are actually reading the book (or, you know, some of it, anyway!). I know how crazed their work schedules are, so that tells me that either (a) there are a lot of closet programming geeks out there in the radio world or (b) maybe I achieved some of my goal of taking this dauntingly arcane subject and making it approachable for people outside the field.

Tomorrow it’s Google for me, then I’ve got a long-planned family vacation over an extended weekend. But I’ve also got a backlog of stuff to post — so I’ll try to get to it all soon.

Notes from the quasi-road

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Thanks to all the people who showed up at Kepler’s Thursday night to hear me talk about Dreaming in Code. It was my very first event as a published author, and it was great to see so many interested faces and hear so many intelligent responses. I’m even getting the hang of signing books as a left-handed person (binding gets in the way, ink smudges, etc.). In the Murphy’s Law category, my car battery died on University Ave. in Palo Alto where I’d stopped for coffee beforehand; fortunately, I knew my way around well enough to hike to Kepler’s in time to make an only slightly sweaty appearance. (Triple A took care of getting the car started for the trip home to Berkeley.)

Yesterday I had a similarly invigorating event at Yahoo — what seemed like more than 100 Yahoo folks brought in their lunches and heard my talk. I’ve got several former colleagues and longtime blogger acquaintances at Yahoo, and I was glad to have the chance to talk about the book, and software, to such a knowledgeable, and attentive, crowd.

Tomorrow (Sunday) I’m out at the Pleasanton Library at 2 p.m. in an event sponsored by Towne Center Books, so if you’re in the (farther) East Bay and interested, come on by!

Ed to Amanda to George

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First, Ed Cone was reading my book so he could interview me. Then, Amanda Congdon was dropping in on Ed to record a promo for the ConvergeSouth conference. Congdon was thumbing through Dreaming in Code at the start of the promo, so they worked in a little reference to the book. I found it amusing and posted it on my blog.

Now George Coates and his dramatic crew at BetterBadNews have taken this brief video clip and deconstructed it in a bizarrely funny way. “‘Dreaming in Code’ is probably one of those rare works of literature of the sort that you really have to read to enjoy,” the deadpan announcer begins. By the time the commentators have done picking the clip apart — “A dog? A guy without a head?” — we’re in David Lynch-land.

This tickles me in multiple ways, partly because I know Coates’s work from many years of covering the multimedia extravaganzas his theater company used to present, but mostly because I love the process by which this little meme has propagated — and now, mutated. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.)

Lessons from MySpace: Success is a bug

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Apropos of my previous post on YouTube and MySpace, today I read this fascinating case-study from Baseline magazine about the saga of MySpace’s understandably overtaxed systems.

MySpace’s exploding popularity has basically forced its infrastructure through a continuous cycle of upgrades, refactorings and revampings. Its managers have never had the luxury of sitting back and calmly planning upgrades; they’ve had to perform their engine surgeries on a careening vehicle.

This is what Web 2.0 is like from the back end, and it ain’t pretty. Outside of the real masters of this stuff — the Googles and Yahoos that know how to deploy, manage and maintain vast online services — it’s a big mess. This is another little-understood dynamic of the Web 2.0 startup world: There are financial reasons a successful small service might want to be acquired, but there are even more pressing operational reasons. And the more success a service finds, the more likely it’s going to risk systems flameout.

It’s not at all clear from the Baseline piece that MySpace has yet achieved a level of stability that a more mature company might desire. MySpace, of course, was acquired not by a technology company but by a media outfit, so — unlike other popular companies that were acquired by Yahoo or Google — they’re still somewhat on their own.

The Baseline piece offers two other fascinating tidbits. In the first, a normal phenomenon for a successful site — massive surges of traffic — was interpreted as a bug by the Microsoft server platform MySpace uses:

Last summer, MySpace’s Windows 2003 servers shut down unexpectedly on multiple occasions. The culprit turned out to be a built-in feature of the operating system designed to prevent distributed denial of service attacks—a hacker tactic in which a Web site is subjected to so many connection requests from so many client computers that it crashes. MySpace is subject to those attacks just like many other top Web sites, but it defends against them at the network level rather than relying on this feature of Windows—which in this case was being triggered by hordes of legitimate connections from MySpace users.

“We were scratching our heads for about a month trying to figure out why our Windows 2003 servers kept shutting themselves off,” Benedetto says. Finally, with help from Microsoft, his team figured out how to tell the server to “ignore distributed denial of service; this is friendly fire.”

Second, it seems that MySpace didn’t actually originally intend to allow the level of customization that has made it so popular; its engineers just never got around to filtering out the user-customized formatting.

That feature was really “kind of a mistake,” says Duc Chau, one of the social networking site’s original developers. In other words, he neglected to write a routine that would strip Web coding tags from user postings– standard feature on most Web sites that allow user contributions.

The Web site’s managers belatedly debated whether to continue allowing users to post code “because it was making the page load slow, making some pages look ugly, and exposing security holes,” recalls Jason Feffer, former MySpace vice president of operations. “Ultimately we said, users come first, and this is what they want. We decided to allow the users to do what they wanted to do, and we would deal with the headaches.”

Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.
[tags]baseline, myspace, web 2.0, software development[/tags]

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.