Dreaming in Code

Posted: January 2, 2011 | Categories: Miscellaneous

I've been interested in Chandler for a long time now. Chandler, if you don't know about it, is an open source project created by Mitch Kapor (one of the founders of Lotus). Chandler was supposed to change the world of calendaring in personal information management, but I don't think it ever did.

For Christmas, my boss gave me a copy of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software a book that chronicled the creation of the project and associated program. The book was on my Amazon wish list, so it was great that my boss picked it up for me. I'd heard that the book was a hard read and being almost finished with it, I see why. The author tried to tell the story, but spent way too much time talking about other stuff that wasn't really related to what was happening with Chandler. It's like he wanted to write a book about this cool open source project, but wanted to write the book for non-developers. There are sections and chapters dedicated to providing some background on the technology and problems faced by development organization – I guess there to help the non-developer understand the background. Unfortunately, I'm really not sure why a non-developer would be interested in the book.

I downloaded the latest version of Chandler the other day and I'm going to poke and prod at it over the next few weeks. I just ordered some parts for a new PC build, so I'll setup a little sandbox and see what the program has to offer. I need to find a calendar I can share with my wife and ultimately my kids as well (as they get older). I probably need to take a look at Google Calendar as well.

I'll let you know my thoughts on Chandler when I finish my evaluation.

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