Dreaming in Code – No Really!

At some point I need to reconnect with the rest of my life – I realised this as I flicked open “Dreaming in Code“, after a day of dealing with Product Development and an evening of refactoring my frankly poorly designed personal coding project (I recently decided that Java coding purely for personal pleasure was a valid hobby) – maybe Dreaming in Code wasn’t the best antidote and I need to start thinking about something else. 

But.. that’s not the books fault! In fact it is to it’s credit that it’s so immersing – that you are living the ‘dream’ of being on the inside of a software project. Anyone who has had anything to do with software development ever will have instant empathy for the protagonists and the cruel part of the book – it being complete and published before the software project was complete is somehow fitting. The agony of guessing that ending two thirds of the way in makes it all the more excruciating 

Reading this book had me living, breathing and literally dreaming of software projects!

I am very late into this book, it has been on my earnest “must read” pile along with Groundswell that I really, really must read. I have had it a while and my reading of it has been sluggish, as little treats such as Seth Godin’s excellent The Dip (which I have been meaning to blog about) have beaten it to my limited reading attention. 

So, the point of this post wasn’t to provide a review of this most excellent book (for a review check out what Joel Spolsky has to say), I am far too late for that – although it’s recently out in paperback, so I could seem sort of current! 

My point really was that occasionally we need to close the laptop, stop the Twittering and choose carefully what we do next. Take a break.

Posted on by Ian Truscott