New Soul

One of my favourite books since forever is "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It recounts the story of an attempt by a bunch of engineers to build a new microcomputer for an ungrateful company.

Whilst the technology described is now very elderly (the book was originally published in 1981) the story of what drives engineers to create is still bang up to date. So, get the book and read it. Even (or perhaps especially) if you know nothing about computers.

Then spool forward 26 years in time and read Dreaming in Code. I've not got it yet myself yet, but a review which compares it to "Soul" is good enough to get me onto the Amazon site and flashing my credit card.

Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

When "The Soul of a New Machine" came out I was working for the company the book's "Heros" were trying to compete with. Hence the quotes around "heros" as I and many others saw the book as being in a sense about the "bad guys." Now to be fair and in hindsite they were not bad guys - the engineers that is. They were people working on a project and trying to do the best they could. The book was very well-done and deserved the awards that it recieved. I've long thought that it would be great to have a similar book following a software project. My order is now in with Amazon as well.

[Rob]

There is a very good follow up article on Wired about where the various people were in 2000.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/soul.html