Fred Moody

A coder or designer could find this book engaging; a normal human would not. While the senior developer on my team found it interesting, I as project manager found it too "close to home." The author chronicles the history of the Sendak project and it's team of intelligent, intense players. Combined with pressure from Bill Gates, a goal of delivering on time, dependency on the SPAM project to provide core tools, and no clear requirements, the team went through months and months of leaps and tangents. The time frame is fixed but whenever everything else slipped or requirements changed at the last minute, the late delivery was blamed on the final one to carry the baton -- the developer. And yet somehow, through intensity and politics, teams scrambled and succeeded. One other point worth mentioning: the author shows snippets of C++ code as needed to illustrate points -- quite effectively.… (altro)

The dustjacket subtitle for this book, "A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier", left me with the expectation of following a larger organizational unit rather than a single project team, but that's what you get. It's very similar to Dreaming in Code, minus the big-picture bits that form the best part of that book, and with the ever-looming specter of Bill Gates in the background.

Published in 1995, the author has a vision of Microsoft that can only be described as awe. He treats Gates as a demigod. When the final ship date for the product ended up aligning to the initial prediction, his response is: And there shone round me then a blinding light. Trembling and astonished, I stood up and made my way outside. I walked across the Microsoft campus until I came to the strip of concrete [leading to Gates' office]... I stopped and stared up in wonderment, through a bank of windows, to where the Gates of Wrath was stored.

As one of the kids more or less in the target audience for this product, Explorapedia, it was nostalgic to hear mention of other software in the market at the time, from Creative Writer to Just Grandma and Me (whose multilingual features fascinated me at the time.) Yet, I have no recollection of ever seeing or using Explorapedia, despite the author's final predictions of great success when it finally came out.

It's interesting to look back on this book from the perspective of 12 years of the development of the home computer market, and the way Microsoft's public image has developed. The Microsoft mystique is what really drives what is otherwise a rather dull and repetitive slog through politics, hurt feelings, and changes of plans. Moody spends more time than Dreaming in Code's Rosenberg visually painting a of the team, particularly programmer Kevin Gammill, in all their 90's glory. Nonetheless, the value of this book comes down to being a techno-history primary source; for a narrative on the ups and downs of software development, go with Dreaming in Code.… (altro)