JP Landry

and fools seldom differ.

While Doug and I are colleagues, we do not interact much. We work at different locations in different departments on different things. I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve actually talked to Doug and our interaction via email or other impersonal mediums is rare. That is why it intriguing that 1) Doug wrote about a book in general, which I planned to do today, and 2) he mentioned Gödel, Escher, and Bach which I started reading just yesterday. Maybe this coincidence even fits in with Doug’s argument somehow, but I’ll leave the philosophy up to Doug.

I can here to post about Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. While I’m an avid reader, I’ll somewhat ashamedly admit that I mostly read SciFi/Fantasy. When I was at the book store a week ago I decided to try something new and ended up with Dreaming in Code. I couldn’t be happier with my choice and maybe it will lead me into being nonfiction junky now. That is at least a little bit better than SciFi/Fantasy junky according to my wife. Like Doug I’m not here to write a book report, but rather to recommend Dreaming in Code. While at face value the subject matter of the book is a large software project that didn’t go anywhere, or at least hasn’t gone anywhere yet after many years of development, the underlying subject is about software development in general. Rosenberg does a wonderful job mixing the Chandler team’s struggles with discussions on why software development is hard and what people have tried to do about it.

An old software engineering buddy of mine used to love to point out the numerous articles that said “Software is hard”, or his favorite “Hardware is easy. Software is hard” because I was a hardware guy at the time. While I never doubted that software is hard, as I’ve become more and more involved in software development at DTI I have seen it first hand how difficult software development can be. I can empathize with some of the Chandler team’s difficulties and it is somehow comforting to hear that the entire industry has some of the same problems. Reading Dreaming in Code feels like having a beer with the guys after work. Sure discussing, theorizing, complaining, etc. about your projects usually doesn’t make them easier, but don’t you feel better afterwards?

JP Landry
Network Division Manager