The romantic cliché of the lone introverted genius shaping masterpieces through many midnights of unfathomable incantations is mercifully absent. Rosenberg follows the Open Source Applications Foundation‘s Chandler project through several years of development, from initial impetus to its milestone 0.6 release. We see the process as it actually is: as a highly social undertaking in which people pass through the project, and the project passes through people’s lives. The developers have families, pets, outside interests; they also have passions (often conflicting) about technology and the process of creation.

Dreaming in Code is much more than a simple chronicle: Rosenberg delves deeply into the history of software development and the frustration it causes for its participants and customers as the results never seem to improve even as the underlying hardware undergoes the most rapid progress of any technology ever.

Issues of data representation, storage, and synchronization are front and center in Dreaming in Code, all carefully explained by the author in terms that make sense to the non-practitioner while remaining recognizable to us professionals (he’s really, really good at this).

I might give this book to my mom to read.

[Disclosure: I've known Andi Vajda, one of the developers portrayed in the book, for about twenty years, and count him as a friend.]

Lots of books will teach you how to process data with particular technologies, but Kent’s book goes deeper. He shows in chapter after chapter how database practice fails to match the way humans actually use information.

Data and Reality is almost thirty years old, but the issues haven’t really changed: if anything, they’re much more in our collective faces.

This book may be for you if:

• you feel strongly that you and your Social Security number (U.S. tax identification) are not the same thing,
• you wonder whether Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens were the same person for all purposes,
• you don’t know what to put down for Homer’s year of birth in that author/title cataloguing app you downloaded,
• you wonder about people who think that something doesn’t exist if it’s not in the expected database (or if it’s not on the Web).

Information philosophy

If these issues sound a lot like the first ten minutes of a college philosophy course, that’s intended. Philosophy is all about seeking answers to questions we don’t often pause to ask.

Pause.

Pause.

We run into questions like these all the time in building software, especially now that we’ve woven the Web and woven ourselves and our lives into it.

On Information in Rotation I’m going to call this category “Information Philosophy”; I think it will get woven in with the more orthodox techy blog-fodder as we go along.

Anyhow, I strongly recommend Data and Reality, which is available as print-on-demand or (inexpensive) eBook from the publisher at the link I gave above (as of 2006-12-28).

[The paperback has ISBN 9781585009701 and the eBook 9781420898880. Does this make them different books?]