dreaming in code

I was pretty depressed after reading "dreaming in code" by Scott Rosenberg. This was the story of a group trying to write an information organizer called Chandler. The book was like a thriller, because it wasn't clear after half the book, that the project produced any working code. In fact it wasn't clear at the end of the book that they were ever going to getting anything working. Before I finished reading it, I did look at the web page to see the status of the software. Ummm The team who were building chandler seemingly did everything right. They used python to write the code. The project was open source. All their programmers and managers were very experienced. Still the project seemed to do very slowly. Scott also included some history of software engineering, with a lot of quotes from the book "Mythical Man Month". So the book also contains a good popular history of software engineering.