Great, great podcast interview with Scott Rosenberg of Salon by Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing. They go over Rosenberg's new book, Dreaming in Code, covering 3 years at OSAF and the challenges with Chandler. They also talk about Mozilla vs. OSAF, which was interesting.
The author's note reads:
The shelves of the world are full of how-to books for software developers. This is not one of them. I'm barely an elementary programmer myself. I wouldn't presume to try to teach the experts. And if my research had uncovered some previously unknown innovation or fail-safe insight into building better software, I'd be smarter to seek investors, not readers.
So while I hope that programmers will enjoy this work, it is meant equally or more for the rest of us. It poses a question and tells a tale. Why is good software so hard to make? Since no one seems to have a definitive answer even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, fifty years deep into the computer era, I offer, by way of exploration, the tale of the making of one piece of software -- a story about a group of people setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, stymied by obstacles old and new, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting.
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