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

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts. To find out why it’s so hard to bend computers to our will, Scott Rosenberg spent three years following a team of maverick software developers—led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor—designing a novel personal information manager meant to challenge market leader Microsoft Outlook. Their story takes us through a maze of abrupt
dead ends and exhilarating breakthroughs as they wrestle not only with the abstraction of code, but with the unpredictability of human behavior— especially their own.

Scott Rosenberg is a writer and editor who started making web pages in 1994 as an editor of the San Francisco Free Press and as a co-founder of Salon in 1995, where he was both a technology and managing editor. He began blogging in 2002, and is currently a contributor to Backchannel, Steven Levy’s technology-focused publication. His book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, tells the story of blogging. His follow-up, Dreaming in Code, discusses software development and its discontents.