Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three years, 4,732 Bugs and One Quest for Transcendent Software

January 23, 2007
Scott Rosenberg | Editor and Co-founder, Salon.com

Why is software so hard? Our civilization runs on software, yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater the ambitions, the more it seem to fail. Scott Rosenberg tried to answer this question by taking us inside the Open Source Application Foundation, a software startup by Mitch Kapor (of Lotus Development) to follow what was supposed to be their “one year race” to a brilliant new kind of software. Five years later the project is still in development, with no release in sight. Through this story we can learn about both a unique and troubled project and also a brief history of the software industry, complete with very real characters such as Alan Kay, Donald Knuth and Mitch Kapor.

Speaker Details

Scott Rosenberg is a journalist, editor and blogger. He was a co-founder of Salon.com and an early participant in The Well. His first book was the bestselling Dreaming in Code:Two Dozen programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs and One Quest for Transcendent Software.Recent article about Scott:Salon Co-Founder Receives Knight Grant to Create Forum for Journos to Admit Their ErrorsBayNewser – San Francisco, CA, USAHe’s the author of two books: Dreaming in Code and Say Everything: How … On his blog, Rosenberg writes he’ll be starting the pilot project in the Bay Area …The full schedule of upcoming talks in the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series is available here: http://sharepoint/sites/visitingspeaker/default.aspx