In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. I read a lot of George Orwell early in my career but I’d forgotten this passage, which Brad DeLong hoisted into the light of blog last year: Writing about the act of programming itself is as difficult as writing about any act of writing: the subject is an essentially interior process between the mind and the page (or screen), and it’s highly resistant to illumination.Ĭonsider the difference when the topic of an essay is a rough physical act - like, say, digging coal out of the ground. Others don’t think I did, and some days I agree with the criticism. I’m grateful that a good number of the book’s readers who’ve posted their thoughts feel that I achieved that goal. But I also wanted to create a journalistic record of the day-to-day experience of the software developer at the start of the 21st century - to tell a story about the act of programming itself. Today he blogs at wrote Dreaming in Code because I believed that, as Bjarne Stroustrup says, “our civilization is built on software.” I noticed that creating software remains stubbornly difficult in certain ways, and, despite its centrality to our civilization, our understanding of that difficulty remains deficient. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two sons. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, and many other publications.
Before leaving Salon in 2007 to write SAY EVERYTHING he conceived and prototyped the Open Salon blogging community.īefore Salon he wrote on theater, movies, and technology for the San Francisco Examiner for a decade and was honored with the George Jean Nathan Award for his reviews. He also started the Salon Blogs program in 2002 and began his own blog as part of it. Most recently (2011-2014) he worked as the executive editor of Grist, a non-profit green news site.īefore that he founded, a project funded by the Knight News Challenge that built a “bug-tracker for news” - a service people can use to report errors in news coverage in their communities and try to get them corrected.Īt Salon, Scott served as technology editor and, from 1999 to 2004, as managing editor and vice president for editorial operations.
Writer, editor and website builder SCOTT ROSENBERG is a cofounder of and author of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest For Transcendent Software.
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