[HN Gopher] Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
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Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Author : mtlynch
Score : 468 points
Date : 2023-09-08 13:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mtlynch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io)
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Maybe this is a dumb question: but what happened to the software
| they built? Did they end up shipping it? Did it become a Fog
| Creek product?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Co-Pilot became a real product.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| They still using Wasabi (inhouse programming language based on
| VB) ???.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Fog Creek ceased to exist and became Glitch several years ago,
| which was when they split off from anything using Wasabi (I was
| working on the FogBugz team at the time):
| https://medium.com/make-better-software/fog-creek-is-now-gli...
|
| It' now a part of Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/press/press-
| releases/fastly-announces...
| krallja wrote:
| No, I killed Wasabi
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777829
|
| FogBugz and Kiln were acquired by a private equity firm five
| years ago.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| To be fair, the reason this has so few views is because the
| original was deleted. There are earlier HN threads on this, e.g.
| here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236711
|
| Regardless, still a great post and highly worth watching.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Also:
|
| _Aardvark 'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13794989 - March 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _Aardvark 'd (Fog Creek documentary) is now up on YouTube for
| free_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539337 - May 2011
| (4 comments)
|
| _Ask YC: Anyone seen the Aardvark 'd movie with Paul Graham?_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518580 - March 2009 (1
| comment)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, interesting. I'd seen it pop up on YouTube before, but the
| versions I saw were all pretty bad DVD rips. Some of the old
| threads mention that the versions were uploaded by Boondoggle
| Media, the film's producer and the same uploader here. So maybe
| the producer took down the old versions and replaced them with
| a high-quality version, or maybe the official high-quality
| version was available before and I just never discovered it.
| theresapeter609 wrote:
| [dead]
| pdovy wrote:
| Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember watching this in
| college around 2008 or so, and it leading me to apply for their
| internship program. I guess as marketing material it worked!
|
| I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about
| the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being
| very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in
| London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm
| sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.
|
| Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone
| ended up!
| bufordtwain wrote:
| Interesting article. I enjoyed watching that movie not too long
| ago which made it even better.
|
| A small correction: In the picture of the reddit co-founders the
| caption is incorrect, it says "reddit co-founders (right to left)
| Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and Steve Huffman in 2005". It
| should be "left to right".
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks for reading and for the correction! I've updated the
| post.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| In those days I spend way too much time reading and posting on
| the JoS forum.
| dannb wrote:
| This is so fun. Thanks for sharing. Does anyone else remember the
| 6-episode TechStars TV series for Bloomberg from back in 2011?
| I'd love to rewatch that, too. https://vimeo.com/27175079
| c17r wrote:
| I don't have that one but I do have the 8-episode "Start-Ups:
| Silicon Valley" from 2012.
|
| Also "Startup.com" from 2001
|
| And "e-Dreams" from 2001
| sagarkamat wrote:
| I remember watching this documentary a few years ago and thinking
|
| 1) this concept had so much promise but man they could have made
| this docu better
|
| 2) those are some famous names before they became famous
|
| 3) we need more such docus that capture forever the daily office
| life at a particular point in time
| nwoli wrote:
| Great documentary. I remember seeing it years ago though so it
| must have been published elsewhere and seen by many more people
| becuase I doubt that "300 views" count is right
| mtlynch wrote:
| Yeah, I recall seeing a low-quality DVD rip on YouTube a few
| years ago. When I was researching the article, I found lots of
| places online where Joel and the other people in the
| documentary had linked to YouTube URLs that are now dead, so I
| think there were definitely copies on YouTube floating around
| for a while.
| rezmason wrote:
| I own one of only 5,000 copies?!
| nikhilgk wrote:
| That's a good bout of nostalgia - almost felt like watching an
| episode of Halt and Catch Fire. Joel, PG and Steve Yegge where
| some of the influential writers of that time who seemed to have a
| big impact on how people thought about careers, startups and
| corporate life.
| gecko wrote:
| This is honestly quite a trip to read (I'm the Benjamin Pollack
| in the movie). I did want to make two small corrections, though:
| In one scene, she's being interviewed on her birthday. Nobody
| remembered, so she had to buy herself a birthday hat.
| While she's explaining this to the camera, one of her co-
| workers shushes her for making too much noise. On her
| birthday!
|
| No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit
| dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled
| header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized
| Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before
| saying a pile of profanity on film. In retrospect, Liz talking
| about her birthday and me suddenly cussing like a drunk sailor
| would've been a much better take. I regret the error.
| [Benjamin Pollack] seems to have never caught the startup bug,
| mainly working at larger, more established companies.
|
| I worked at Fog Creek (max ~60 employees during my tenure,
| usually more like 40) from 2005 to 2014, Khan Academy (~120 if
| you count contractors) from 2015 to 2017, Spreedly (~40) from
| 2017 to 2018, and Bakpax (there were a dozen of us) from 2018 to
| 2021 (we got acquired, I wanted to _stay at startups_ , so I
| didn't stay once we were bought), and another small startup
| briefly after _that_ before settling at The Knot Worldwide. Yes,
| I 'm currently at a very large company (~6500), but I'm a bit
| confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.
|
| I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of
| these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to
| provide.
|
| _[Edit: I 'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about
| the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]_
| codinghorror wrote:
| Hi Ben! We'll always have London..
| gecko wrote:
| I'm happy to always have London, but I could do with
| forgetting most of Cambridge.
| krallja wrote:
| What about Cockfosters?
| atesti wrote:
| >I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the
| movie or about that time at Fog Creek
|
| Why was FogBugz for your server discontinued silently? I think
| you had build something really great at the end with the change
| to .net and the plugin architecture (which would have made it
| possible to do customizations even in the cloud). Also how kiln
| integrated was great.
|
| Did key people leave so that FogBugz basically stopped to be
| maintained anymore? Where you still around when they removed
| the plugins and tried to put it back and maybe switched to
| elastic search etc.?
| gecko wrote:
| Everything you're asking about happened after I left, so I
| have no idea. I didn't even know they'd discontinued FogBugz
| for Your Server.
|
| _[Edit: We did discontinue Kiln for Your Server while I was
| there. We nuked that because the support burden was_
| monstrous _, to the point we needed three extra SDETs /sales
| engineers purely to handle testing and on-prem bug fixes. It
| threatened Kiln's ability to be profitable. The FogBugz team
| may've made the same calculus a few years later.]_
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Do you think there's anything the development team could
| have done to reduce the support burden, or that a team
| developing what we now call an on-prem product should do to
| minimize the support burden today? I know we have tools now
| that weren't available back then, e.g. containers. And .NET
| is open source and runs on Linux now, so that might have
| also helped.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Shipping a VM would have simplified things, but nobody
| did that, and nobody was going to download that. For
| Linux, we packaged everything we could, but it was still
| bring your own MySQL, and people had all sorts of
| terrible configs.
|
| And it was kinda pre-cloud, so usually we got provisioned
| on some pentium ii forgotten in a closet.
| justinjlynn wrote:
| Huge respect for making that work in the first place!
| Would love to hear some kind of retrospective about what
| wa involved in that - I'm super curious.
| borski wrote:
| God, every time I think it's gotten better to ship
| appliances, it really... hasn't.
|
| We had an on-prem solution at Tinfoil, because some of
| our customers needed it (gov, finance, healthcare, random
| big enterprise co, etc.)
|
| We were lucky, in that we at least had Docker; or so we
| thought. Right up until top 5 investment bank decides to
| write their own orchestrator and use an internal
| container repository. Ugh, fine.
|
| Oh, and also wants to use their own MySQL db? But, uh, we
| use Postgres... and Mongo (tech debt)... and... no?
|
| So what did we do? We shipped a VM. You told us your VM
| solution of choice, we handed you a file, you set up our
| .ovf or .ova or whatever, it phoned home (only while
| setting up), got licensed, and off you went.
|
| Debugging was miserable. We later started adding remote
| debugging capabilities into our contracts because the
| support burden was ridiculous.
|
| Thing is, we were at least a little smart about it;
| single codebase, lots of feature flags, lots of internal
| testing (and our saas customers bled first, before VM
| customers), etc. I honestly might even do it again, but
| now there are much better solutions.
|
| But all of this is to say: people did install VMs, and
| people did download them. I don't have the numbers in
| front of me, but I'd be mightily surprised if less than
| nearly 70% of our revenue (but not our customer base!)
| came from on-prem appliances. We sold them at a _very
| significant_ premium, for obvious reasons.
| toyg wrote:
| I just assumed they followed the usual commercial trajectory:
| build server software, realize it's much more profitable to
| sell as service, discontinue on-prem sales.
| krallja wrote:
| We still had about a dozen developers combined on
| FogBugz+Kiln at the very end.
|
| The plug-in API was very bad for performance and security,
| especially in a multitenant cloud application. That led a
| team to experimentally reimplement the entire frontend as a
| single-page app (code named Project Ocelot, whose shirt I am
| wearing today). Webhooks and a well-designed web API would
| have been a much tidier solution than the plug-in API.
|
| FogBugz For Your Server had constant support costs, like Ben
| said, but also the application started growing all sorts of
| supporting services (a QueueService, an ElasticSearch
| cluster, Redis...) that made the existing InstallerShieid
| installer a huge cost to maintain.
|
| Later, I wrote an "autosetup" script in PowerShell to help
| developers and support engineers onboard faster, which later
| became the new installer for FogBugz On-Site / Manuscript On
| Premises. It was designed for a single edition of Windows
| (Server 2012 iirc?) and SQL Server. We sold a million bucks
| worth of licenses for that.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here. Cool to see your response here!
|
| > _I 'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary
| of my career._
|
| I worded that poorly, you're right. I meant early-stage
| startups at the scale of Fog Creek when you started. I've
| updated the post.
|
| > _No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck
| shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale
| precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and
| then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt
| myself before saying a pile of profanity on camera._
|
| Ah, thanks for the context!
|
| I watched that scene over and over trying to figure out what
| happened. It sounds like a "shush" but it's also weirdly
| stretched out. Liz seems to have heard it as a shush, as she
| shushes herself after. It shows Michael look over at you, but
| it's not clear if he was reacting to the noise.
|
| There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree
| about whether it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was
| hard to put much stock in it. This is a much more satisfying
| answer.
|
| I've updated the post to link to your comment here.
|
| > _I 'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the
| movie or about that time at Fog Creek._
|
| How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your
| website that you recommend people watch it "if [they]'re
| feeling masochistic." Is it just the awkwardness of being the
| focus of a film at that age or were there things you disliked
| about how it came out?
|
| What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it
| change during your tenure?
|
| [0]
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813987/trivia/?item=tr0602787&...
| anildash wrote:
| One other bit of trivia, Alexis Ohanian drew one of the
| versions of Fog Creek's kiwi mascot that was featured on some
| t-shirts and merch, though never in any of the products.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Wow, I never expected to hear from so many Fog Creek folks!
|
| Thanks for sharing that bit of trivia, Anil. How'd that
| happen?
| anildash wrote:
| At that time Alexis was drawing logos or art for products
| he advised or knew the founders of, including most
| notably Hipmunk. I'm not sure if Joel asked him to draw
| it, or he volunteered, but it happened and then early in
| my time at Fog Creek, Alexis and I were catching up about
| some other stuff and he told me that version of the kiwi
| was his.
| fsckboy wrote:
| logos aren't just trademarks, they are also themselves
| copyrighted, and if he never explicitly gave up the
| rights...
| borski wrote:
| He'd have to care, which I can pretty much guarantee he
| doesn't.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Great bit of trivia. Thank you for sharing!
| gecko wrote:
| There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree
| about whether it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so
| it was hard to put much stock in it. This is a much
| more satisfying answer.
|
| Liz thought I shushed her for a long time, but I didn't even
| know that until _years_ later, at which point I apologized
| and explained what actually happened. So I guess there was
| disagreement in the sense that I didn 't know she thought
| that, but we talked that through many years ago.
|
| I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio
| wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for _years_ , I have
| generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having
| accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.
| How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on
| your website that you recommend people watch it "if
| [they]'re feeling masochistic." Is it just the
| awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were
| there things you disliked about how it came out?
|
| On a personal level, there's a lot I dislike. There was a lot
| of pressure on us to have reality-TV-show-like conflicts,
| which we mostly just didn't have. As a result, I end up being
| the antagonist in quite a few scenes (the building jump
| experiment is the main one), where it looks like I'm a bit of
| an asshole due to how things got edited together. So, normal
| reality TV show stuff.
|
| (Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but,
| like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how
| far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be
| like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel
| happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I
| can't say it bothers me.)
|
| I also just kind of feel like it's a lousy movie. The
| soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording
| studio, and you can tell. The interviews are usually not
| asking great questions, as much as rehashing Joel's and
| Paul's blogs via interviews. And there's the fact the movie
| is _so close_ to being about reddit and Y Combinator right at
| their inception, but somehow, just...misses it.
|
| I should tone down the "masochistic" comment so it doesn't
| sound like I'm bitter or hate the film. I don't. I just don't
| really know it's worth a watch in 2023.
| What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd
| it change during your tenure?
|
| I learned a lot about tech, I got incredible freedom to work
| how I wanted on what I wanted, I had great coworkers, and I
| really believed in and used all of our products. They all
| brought me joy. That was all good. And it wasn't a grindstone
| like some of my friends went through at thefacebook and
| Google, so I had time to genuinely enjoy my hobbies and be
| with friends.
|
| The dislikes are mostly just versions of me noting that
| working in an anarchistic environment is great only if you
| shout loudest and care more than the next person, but I will
| add that that company was _so_ young in _so_ many ways. We
| often were figuring out how to do things from base principles
| instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing,
| because we weren 't sure if we knew how to tell that someone
| knew what they were doing. And when we started to hire our
| way out, we made Some Mistakes. So, things that fell out of
| those bits.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my
| bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I
| have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about
| having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.
|
| I feel like Amazon treats IMDB user submitted data just
| like reviews on the retail site. They just don't care.
| Anything goes. I've tried to get data corrected on multiple
| occasions for it to fall on deaf ears. Much like wikipedia
| where changes are reverted to previously incorrect data
| because of editor fiefdom turf wars. So you can't win
| either way.
| alexgartrell wrote:
| I had an internship at Fog Creek and would add that it was
| probably the most friendly and harmonious place I worked,
| which made it very reality-show-incompatible (and very
| 21-year-old-me incompatible, I wasn't asked back lol).
| Certainly the representation of you as an asshole was
| ridiculous IMO.
|
| (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In
| retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-
| centric at first?
| gecko wrote:
| (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In
| retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to
| make kiln hg-centric at first?
|
| No; I think it was a mistake to not also support
| Subversion out-of-the-box.
|
| Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git
| on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would
| not have been a viable option. (I _did_ look at Bazaar
| and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and
| Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other
| reasons.) But Kiln 's core value prop at the beginning
| was actually code review, and I think we could've found a
| cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow
| that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given
| our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's
| goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of
| bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln.
| The resulting product would've been _very_ different,
| mind, but I think it would 've gone way better.
|
| The other three technical mistakes we made, since you
| didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of
| Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I
| love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL
| (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot
| directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just
| jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three
| decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a
| time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that.
|
| I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing
| well!
| alexgartrell wrote:
| It was a joy to work with you as well :)
|
| It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might
| be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire
| for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a
| less capable team would have never landed on the "let's
| maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t.
| Wasabi.
|
| As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right
| thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected
| tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog
| posts for the next ten years :p
| kamens wrote:
| hi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me
| alexgartrell wrote:
| I still remember when I came to you with my "attachments
| shouldn't live in the mssql database" plan and you said
| "yeah, probably, but doing it any other way would be a
| million times harder to maintain." You were 100% right
| and I think of it often when I encounter someone who is
| about to do a similar dumb thing for "the right reasons."
| borski wrote:
| wait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously
| I wasn't there don't have the _clearly important_
| context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if
| attachments didn 't live in mssql?
| toast0 wrote:
| With no context, but much experience with databases...
|
| Storing attachments as a blob in a database has all sorts
| of disadvantages I'm sure you're aware of, but it has the
| major advantage that if you can see the reference to the
| attachment, you can fetch the attachment. With links to a
| filesystem, you have to deal with issues like the
| frontends can't access the files because they're on the
| wrong system, or the network filesystem is down or ....
| There's a lot of possibilities.
| Throw10987 wrote:
| Not 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it
| might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs
| to maintain an additional storage system along with all
| the associated costs, which is not just storage alone.
|
| Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of
| needing to configure storage for different tiers of
| access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of
| course if your blob data is stored in tables that have
| OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to
| separate it out.
|
| This is speaking from recent experience of having to
| manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that
| engineers have created rather than bothering to put in
| the main application data store.
| krallja wrote:
| The punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from
| MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the
| code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because
| that's how we shipped complete backups to customers!
| anildash wrote:
| here's a well-deserved upvote
| gecko wrote:
| As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right
| thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-
| effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful
| technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
|
| I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was
| simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the
| result. So not a _complete_ loss.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I am always happy when I look back on the monobugz days.
| I think it was a formative experience in evaluating
| claims like well, of course it works, so many other
| people already use and depend on it. O RLY?
| jsight wrote:
| I never understood the disdain for Java that I'd hear
| from Spolsky. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly
| more cross platform than .net at the time.
| codinghorror wrote:
| I dunno, I'm with Joel on this one. Not a Java fan.
| krallja wrote:
| I was at the strategic offsite where we decided to go
| with .NET. Java wasn't installed on Windows by default.
|
| The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was
| written in Java, by the intern in the class before
| Aardvark'd. It transpiled ASP to PHP.
|
| Every intern class was named after an animal with the
| next consecutive letter. I don't remember any of them
| except Aardvark, and I was a "B????" intern!
| blinkymach12 wrote:
| From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi
| archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark,
| B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??
| c17r wrote:
| > The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the
| recording studio, and you can tell
|
| You can still listen to the soundtrack on Amazon Music :-)
|
| I bought both the DVD and the soundtrack back in the day.
| While it's no Grammy winner, there are a couple of good
| ones in there
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > _(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it,
| but, like everyone else, I 've grown a lot since then.
| Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let
| myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making
| me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and
| grow. I can't say it bothers me.)_
|
| Yeah, there were definitely lines where my first reaction
| was that the interns come across badly. But I was a year or
| two younger than you guys at the time, and I thought about
| how I'd probably sound if someone asked me to talk on
| camera about working on software. I'm thankful that nobody
| did.
|
| > _The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the
| recording studio, and you can tell._
|
| Oh, yeah, that does explain the soundtrack.
|
| While I was listening to it, I felt like it was written by
| someone who didn't know any programmers, but they were
| trying to write a song that would appeal to the geeky
| stereotype of a programmer.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Fun article! I bought this DVD back in college, when I was
| studying computer science then. I was a long time reader of
| Joel's blog, going back to high school. I was going to be working
| in NYC after college. Back then, there were no real "tech jobs"
| in NYC. It was after dotcom 1.0 crash, but before the post-Google
| boom. The main companies you could work for in NYC as a
| programmer were Wall St firms, unless you wanted to end up in a
| general "IT department" for a BigCo.
|
| I then got a job offer at Fog Creek when graduating college,
| incidentally for their Software Management Training Program. I
| turned down the offer, but one funny detail is that in the job
| offer package, which Fog Creek FedEx'ed to my NYC apartment,
| there was a printed copy of the Aardvark'd DVD in a DVD case.
|
| As for the documentary itself, I remember liking it, but I
| watched it at that moment. The connection to YCombinator makes
| total sense to me. Joel was trying to get smart CS grads to stop
| taking boring internships with BigCo's outside of tech where they
| wouldn't actually get end-to-end software product build-and-
| launch experience. His primary competition in NYC? The Wall St
| firms (Goldman, Morgan, Lehman, etc.) whose summer internships
| involved apprenticing on a big internal software system for a
| couple of months while being marketed to by HR to join that Wall
| St firm full time after college. YCombinator was trying to
| convince this same cohort of ambitious CS grads to start startups
| instead (e.g. the reddit founders at UVa).
|
| Today, the competitive landscape for startup summer talent is
| totally different. The tech companies _are_ the BigCo 's, in NYC
| or SV. It's probably the Wall St firms who need some help
| convincing summer interns to join today.
|
| Ironically, I turned down the Fog Creek full-time job to work at
| Morgan Stanley. The latter felt like a more Linux-y job to me,
| and I was big into Linux and F/OSS -- also, student debt bills
| needed paying.
|
| But then just a few years later I ended up quitting that Wall St
| job to start a startup that went all the way from seed through
| venture financing and eventually to exit. Fog Creek and Joel
| remained an inspiration in terms of how we built our engineering
| culture. See e.g. slides 11-13 here:
| https://speakerdeck.com/amontalenti/fully-distributed-and-as...
| [deleted]
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Thanks for this write-up. This is absolute gold. It's crazy
| looking back and seeing how different everything was.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _It 's crazy looking back and seeing how different everything
| was._
|
| Yeah, that struck me as well. For some reason, I expected their
| tooling to be much more modern, but then you see them running
| Windows XP, and I have this visceral reaction like, "Oh no! You
| can't be running that!"
|
| They also go to a "trade show" which you find out is actually a
| ColdFusion conference. But even at the time, that was pretty
| dated, and the interns admit they're not sure what ColdFusion
| is.
|
| I was impressed reading Joel's functional spec at how well it
| holds up. I don't think it's a very popular way of designing
| software anymore, but I still prefer big design up front
| (BDUF), and I suspect Joel probably still works that way. The
| only thing that felt dated to me about the functional spec was
| 1) the emphasis on code conventions, which he admitted at the
| time didn't belong in the spec, and 2) how it focused a lot on
| what would happen in v2 rather than aggressively keeping scope
| to the MVP.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Having read most of Spolsky's blog posts, I'll make the
| inference that the spec being functional and having reference
| to code conventions isn't a far stretch for him.
|
| He worked at Microsoft in the Excel group, specifically, he
| was a Program Manager (PM) on Visual Basic for Applications
| (VBA). see bottom of
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/04/25/vba-for-
| macintosh-... and
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
| rev...
|
| Functional specs and PMs go hand in hand at MS.
|
| Microsoft devs, at least in certain groups, used the
| Hungarian coding convention (Systems aka DOS/Windows group
| had one dialect, Apps aka Office had another dialect) see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
|
| This seeped into VB/VBA as well.
| mickeyp wrote:
| You can't corral a bunch of interns -- of potentially unknown
| skills levels, even with our hindsight of where they wound up
| -- and expect them to wing their way through a "greenfield"
| project to launch in 10-or-so weeks. Especially not when
| you're filming them also.
|
| Imagine them arguing endlessly about how many points to give
| to the VNC extensions they needed? And at a time when most
| businesses had maybe heard of agile, but never used it.
|
| Functional specs are super-duper common still. I do (often
| fixed-cost) bespoke software for clients: can you imagine a
| non-tech client and me handwaving our way through a complex
| project one sprint at a time? No, thank you.
|
| Having said all that, Joel's a talented guy, and he probably
| had a really good idea of what he'd have to do to build the
| whole thing. When people like that write the functional spec,
| you're going to wind up with a high-quality document.
| ozim wrote:
| I think that is my main issue with "Business Analysts" I
| have to work with. Most of the time they have no clue at
| all about the system and no writing ability.
|
| They just throw ideas in Jira tickets and if you start
| asking questions or clarifications to put ticket back for
| rewrite they nag you are not agile enough and dragging
| whole company back to waterfall.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Windows XP has a lot less bullshit than the recent versions.
| I'd definitely take it now over 10 or 11, behind a
| firewall/NAT of course. ;-)
|
| Just needs a modernish browser and third-party terminal.
| cygwin tools or equivalent.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Quite possibly the peak Windows version (with service
| packs). The default UI was certainly tacky, but you could
| switch to Classic.
|
| Windows 7 is a close second.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It also lacked a firewall at launch, despite claims to its
| great security.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Windows XP was so much less intrusive than the more recent
| versions of Windows. You actually felt like you were in
| charge, most of the time anyway.
| mojomark wrote:
| Thank you for this comment - I'm a physical systems engineer
| working with software engineers and trying to bridge the gap
| from a "Systems Engineering" perspective - where on the HW
| side we use Functional (what the system should do) and
| Allocated specifications (how the system is physically
| architected). I struggle with that bridge - it's largely a
| terminology mismatch, which is oddly much more difficult than
| I expected to overcome. Sometimes finding the right words
| makes all the difference. I'd never heard the term BDUF
| before.
|
| I can see that there's a belief that the BDUF approach
| implies the design must be perfected before starting to code.
| I like a healthy concept sketch to use as a roadmap, and
| evolving accompanying documentation along the way. I use MBSE
| tools. I certainly would never say a system design is
| perfected nor are all requirements ever set in stone (under
| config control - yes, immutable - no). This helps me see
| where push back is coming from of the SW Dev side.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| manicennui wrote:
| I actually bought this on DVD. I miss Joel on Software and
| hearing about Fog Creek.
| mattl wrote:
| I was given a copy on DVD when visiting Fog Creek around this
| time. I vaguely recall it was for sale on Google Video when
| that was a thing.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the
| postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was
| another great article.
| amerine wrote:
| Same!!!! I still have it knocking around somewhere in the
| basement. Wild to think about where we've all gone since that
| era. Amazing ride.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > I actually bought this on DVD
|
| I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > _I actually bought this on DVD_
|
| Same here. Bought it back when it was released, and still have
| it.
|
| Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I agree with the article in that it
| was very much all over the place in terms of scripting.
| toyg wrote:
| I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so
| that every developer had a window and a door. I think they
| later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time
| someone had actually put real thought into developer's
| ergonomics when building an office.
|
| Other classics from his blog: why you should never do a Big
| Rewrite (he was scathing of Mozilla), "Fire and motion",
| relentless advocacy for "boring" tech, the historical bits
| about Excel and Lotus... I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more. It
| really was a blog worth reading, when most of them were already
| turning into the "microblogging" spam that eventually begat
| Twitter.
| [deleted]
| function_seven wrote:
| > _I remember when he made a splash by designing the office
| so that every developer had a window and a door._
|
| I can't believe it's been 20 years since I read this post[0],
| but I remember how clever it was that each office had a only
| a single window, but had sight lines to other windows also,
| making it look like each one was a corner office.
|
| [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Off the back of Joel's blog posts I convinced my employer to
| go with FogCreek CoPilot (remote control / remote assist
| software), and it was such a disappointment; after all the
| blog posts about how to Do Software Right(tm) I has raised my
| expectations that the result of all this process and care
| would surely be as good as anything could reasonably be. It
| had few features, was unreliable and slow from the UK, and
| comparatively expensive.
|
| It's a long time ago so I can't remember the details, but
| it's stuck with me for ~15 years as a lesson in not believing
| the hype, and ... I dunno, you can't procedure your way into
| building amazing things, maybe? Post-hoc looking back from
| the outside, FogCreek building somewhat generic tools for
| developers seems very navel-gazing like they didn't have a
| burningly compelling idea (such as StackOverflow was) and you
| can't add more private offices unto business/market success.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I guess it was (at least initially) built by interns.
| toyg wrote:
| The compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was
| pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because
| normies were paying top dollar to be able to write on the
| web. Joel described it in a post as "the future belongs to
| people who can make JavaScript sing", which was slightly
| ahead of time.
|
| As many developers did at the time (and still do), they
| built their own tools, and eventually realized their
| bugtracker was decent enough to sell to Joel's blog
| readers. FogBugz sales quickly outstripped CityDesk, so
| they pivoted to selling Dev tools. From there onwards, they
| were a bit all over the place. They still managed to score
| StackOverflow and Trello, though...
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > I remember when he made a splash by designing the office so
| that every developer had a window and a door. I think they
| later abandoned the idea, but it felt like the first time
| someone had actually put real thought into developer's
| ergonomics when building an office.
|
| I think Tom DeMarco wrote about this in the 80s. Interesting
| how we've now even managed to make the computer system itself
| a high-interrupt environment for developers. OTOH, the trade-
| off between collaboration and focus is a touch one.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Joel started his career at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, where it
| was common for developers to have their own private offices.
|
| I was there from 2007-2010, long after Joel had left, but I
| mostly had a private office the whole time. I had to share an
| office for the first six months, but then after that, I had
| my own private office for the rest of my time there. My last
| year, I got a window office. Most of my co-workers had
| private offices, too.
|
| I got spoiled because that was my first job out of college,
| and I've never had such a good office setup as I did there.
| allenu wrote:
| I worked at Microsoft from 2005-2017 and mostly had a
| private office during that entire period. There were some
| teams that I joined in the later years that were more
| "startupish" that worked in open spaces, which I really
| didn't like, and you could see the company moving to that
| model in the mid-2010s.
|
| Having a private office spoiled me as well, although I had
| come from companies that had cubicles. There was nothing
| like being able to close the door and turn up your music
| while you were coding. Nowadays, everyone is out in the
| open with headphones on, of course.
| sgerenser wrote:
| I worked for Microsoft (not in Redmond) in 2020-2022, and
| remember seeing on Yammer posts about "Hey look, we're
| turning these old abandoned offices (nobody wants to work
| in a private office anymore, amirite?) into [touchdown
| spaces/mini conference rooms/storage areas]!"
|
| I don't know if it was _all_ private offices, but the
| general feeling was that private offices were going away.
| Moot point for us as we were a satellite office that
| never had private offices to begin with.
| vxNsr wrote:
| wait, you guys actually used yammer????
| fakedang wrote:
| And here I was wondering why Microsoft paid so much for
| it. Well this answers it.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Yeah, Yammer was used pretty extensively within
| Microsoft. I didn't use it much, but if you were at
| Microsoft but not based in Redmond, it was probably the
| best way to keep up with what was going on company-wide
| (for those that actually cared).
| carb wrote:
| I thought the Never Rewrite article was about Netscape, not
| Mozilla or Firefox?
|
| Agreed, these are great posts.
| prepend wrote:
| Wasn't Mozilla/Firefox started as a complete rewrite of
| Netscape? So the complaint was something like "why not just
| fix the recently OSSed Netscape instead of writing Firefox
| from scratch."
| marktangotango wrote:
| The funny thing to me is, knowing Joel, the interns and
| developers being interviewed where the few, the proud, who could
| solve fizzbuzz. Nowadays that's... quaint given the prevalence of
| leetcode style interiews.
| [deleted]
| meatmanek wrote:
| Having passed a Fog Creek internship interview a few years
| later, I can say the questions were definitely harder than
| fizzbuzz. I don't remember the exact questions (One was a
| technical design question about how to do some sort of optimal
| screen layout, which ended up being an NP-hard problem). Very
| similar to the questions asked by Microsoft and Google and many
| other companies around the same time -- whiteboard coding in C
| to do some sort of data structure manipulation, etc.
| itronitron wrote:
| I watched Startup.com many years ago and haven't seen another
| movie about startups since. I highly recommend it for anyone that
| wants to be inoculated.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/?ref_=ttls_li_tt
| c17r wrote:
| There's also "E-Dreams" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/
| no_wizard wrote:
| Are there any good documentaries about the tech industry from the
| perspective of companies building themselves?
|
| I've seen a few about notable blowups and some about big tech,
| but nothing that follows a startup through their lifecycle or
| covers the in day to day innards of the business like this one
| tries to.
|
| I saw RevolutionOS and it was good but there aren't any others
| I've been able to find like it either.
| wallflower wrote:
| While it is not what you are looking for exactly, if you have
| not seen it, the General Magic documentary is extraordinary. It
| might make you cry.
|
| https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
| iamgopal wrote:
| Was Trello from the same company ? It was first awesome sass
| product I have seen.
| krallja wrote:
| Yes, Trello was spun out from Fog Creek in 2014 and acquired by
| Atlassian three years later.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Aaron Swartz, Steve Huffman, and Alexis Ohanian, months after
| they launched reddit
|
| Aaron didn't launch reddit. He wasn't even involved until six
| months in.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realize it was that late.
|
| Swartz, Huffman, and Ohanian are the only YC participants they
| interview, and they show them all working side-by-side, so I
| assumed they were all working on Reddit, but I just checked how
| they introduce Swartz and his title card doesn't say Reddit
| whereas Huffman and Ohanian's do.
|
| I've corrected the post.
|
| Wasn't he involved sooner than a year after? I thought it
| launched in Summer 2005, and then Swartz joined the same year.
|
| > _Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python
| in the past week._
|
| Aaron Swartz's blog post, "Rewriting Reddit," published
| 2005-12-06
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
|
| And then this profile of Swartz said he joined in November
| 2005:
|
| > _Ohanian and Huffman bought in, and by November 2005,
| Infogami and Reddit had merged, forming a new umbrella company
| called Not A Bug._
|
| https://qz.com/594715/when-aaron-swartz-met-paul-graham-his-...
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes you're right, he joined them six months in. I'll fix my
| comment.
| manicennui wrote:
| RIP Aaron Swartz. His being mentioned still makes me feel a bit
| emotional.
| endgame wrote:
| I can't believe that all happened over ten years ago. MIT hung
| him out to dry, and who knows what he could've achieved if that
| hadn't happened?
| manicennui wrote:
| Even if he never achieved anything, I rather that he be
| alive.
| johnny99k wrote:
| I've never understood the obsession with Aaron Swartz. He
| clearly violated the IP of many hundreds of people (could be
| thousands) by releasing content he didn't own. He also
| trespassed on university property to do it.
|
| From the stories I heard, he was a complete asshole to people
| that didn't agree with him and was even fired from Reddit at
| one point.
|
| This is authoritarian behavior: I'm going to do what I want
| regardless of the law and what you believe because it's what I
| want. I have found that many of the hackers from the 90s and
| early 2000s that I read about in 2600 were like this. They
| masqueraded as freedom fighters, but in reality were just
| authoritarians without power. When their side is in power, they
| have no problem trampling on the freedoms and rights of the
| people they dislike.
|
| It kind of makes sense to me as an adult. Hackers are
| authoritarians without power. You don't do what they want, so
| they are going to destroy your website/livelihood/life. Petty
| kings without a kingdom. This morphed into the cancel culture
| we see today and groups like Antifa.
|
| His suicide was tragic, but we don't need more people with this
| attitude running a lemonade stand, let alone a tech company or
| anything important.
| raincole wrote:
| > It kind of makes sense to me as an adult. Hackers are
| authoritarians without power. You don't do what they want, so
| they are going to destroy your website/livelihood/life. Petty
| kings without a kingdom. This morphed into the cancel culture
| we see today and groups like Antifa.
|
| Yeah of course hackers from 90s and cancel culture people on
| Twitter are the same kind of people.
|
| LMAO.
| prepend wrote:
| > He clearly violated the IP of many hundreds of people
|
| Or one journal. Authors didn't get copyrights as the journal
| kept them.
|
| This was the point though is that the copyright there was/is
| immoral and that the papers should be freely available.
|
| And of course he didn't trespass as he was a guest of a
| student.
|
| And I think the argument is that he didn't even violate the
| journal's copyright as the journal allowed download from the
| university network.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You have no idea what you're talking about. Aaron was the
| furthest thing from an authoritarian. Just because freedom
| fighters break the law does not equate them to
| authoritarians, and the rest of this is similarly mistaken.
|
| That you have no compassion for someone who committed suicide
| due to copying bits shows a lack of humanity that I hope no
| one emulates.
| sfjailbird wrote:
| I am fascinated with the trajectory of Joel and his company.
| Maybe because I followed it so closely from Joel's earliest
| essays (which are classics and have become commonly accepted
| wisdom, the source mostly forgotten) and the Fog Creek forums
| (the Business of software) which had a great cast of characters
| and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of years.
|
| One of the interesting things is it seems to me like Joel, for
| all his wisdom, always made weird (I would say wrong but the man
| is a legend after all) decisions. Like his whole premise was to
| hire great programmers, give them an office with a door that
| closes, and watch great software appear. Which would take at
| least ten years. It was clear that this software was originally
| CityDesk (a content management system, say no more), then FogBugz
| (the issue tracker doomed from the start by its name alone), and
| even Copilot, to circle back to the documentary.
|
| The magic never happened, but lo and behold, out of nowhere comes
| Stack Overflow and makes all of those other ventures an only
| slightly relevant footnote. And not from any clever Strategy, but
| completely serendipitously! Turns out Joel was more right than
| even he probably thought - just press on being great, something
| great will come out of it. Though not necessarily what you had
| planned. There is something beautiful about this, to me.
|
| I am sure people will tell me how ridiculously mistaken and
| misunderstood my take is, but it's how I read the story.
| ozim wrote:
| Is it really that fascinating?
|
| I also followed Joel's essays and was more into it back then.
| But as I look at it now it is generic startup setup. They
| pivoted enough times to land gold mine. With getting developers
| do what they like they were able to pivot quite easily and they
| were onto hiring smart people.
|
| In the end that is what sane business person should do, pivot,
| pivot, pivot until you land great idea. Only thing you cannot
| pivot are great people because there is limited amount of those
| and there is unlimited amount of ideas.
|
| What bad companies do is sticking to some bad idea that maybe
| earns money but then they burn through legions of junior devs
| to keep train going.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| There was a podcast with Joel and Jeff as they talked through
| the development of Stackoverflow. It seemed that Joel had hired
| Jeff to code it, and then discussed what it should be like, and
| then as Jeff had something to show they talked about where it
| would go.
|
| Meanwhile, there is plenty of software physiology sprinkled all
| throughout. It was a fascinating podcast.
|
| At least that's what I remember from it, I haven't listened to
| it since it came out, what... 15 years ago??
|
| https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange
| codinghorror wrote:
| "hired" is a bit of a stretch! Joel had some design input,
| and the original "let's replace this terrible thing with
| something better" idea for sure, and Expert-sex-change was
| the mimeograph, but it was me, Jarrod Dixon and Geoff Dalgas
| and then Kevin Dente in the earliest days.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Holy shit! Thanks for the correction Jeff!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Home runs are a lot fewer in number than fouls or even base
| hits. Not entirely surprising.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >(tail of the g!)
|
| I was very active on the BOS forums. But that isn't jogging any
| memories. Perhaps it was before my time?
| sfjailbird wrote:
| A forum member started a topic to point out an issue with the
| Fog Creek website: On the top-left Fog Creek logo (which
| could be clicked to go to the main page), the tail of the
| letter 'g' was non-clickable. The poster pointed out that
| this should be fixed. Joel himself (who rarely participated
| on the forums) commented along the lines that the guy should
| immediately check himself into a mental hospital.
|
| It was pretty hilarious, a lot of people took issue with
| Joel's comment and it was the drama for a few days. Standard
| web forum stuff :) Hmm, now I wonder if that kind of comment
| would be judged harder in today's climate!
| chubot wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but fog creek was private the
| whole time
|
| I bet they made a killing from both citydesk and fogbugz
|
| There's no way to know, but if they had nice offices in
| Manhattan and were self funded in those days, that's a clue
|
| Fogbugz was a solid #2 in the market from what I remember
|
| There are lots of people making tons of money in areas like CMS
| and bug tracking
|
| The ones you hear bragging about money are usually trying to
| attract employees to a marginal business
|
| The ones who are making money don't want to attract competitors
| by talking too much
| JoyfulTurkey wrote:
| The office with a door thing was how Microsoft was back in the
| day, if I remember correct. From the stories I heard, some of
| the offices were ridiculously small/narrow but they still had a
| door.
|
| Joel was a Program Manager for Excel at MS so my guess is he
| brought that mindset over.
|
| Really, I wish more places would go back to that. Being able to
| work with minimal interruptions is great.
| Calamitous wrote:
| Ironically, after working in cubicles and _hurk_ open floor
| plans for most of my career, now I have an office with a
| door. Ten feet from my bedroom. ;)
| borski wrote:
| Also how Apple was.
| veidr wrote:
| I forget even who the competitors were, but FAUGUEBOGGEZ (as we
| called it then) was wildly popular for being less shitty than
| the #1 at that time. (Maybe it was JIRA, or maybe my memories
| of having to use JIRA have overwritten every other shitty bug
| tracking system I hated...?)
|
| Anyway, it didn't remain so, but IIIRC FogBugz was on top (in
| terms of being the consensus-better-than-the-actual-market-
| leader) for at least a few years.
|
| Which, if you didn't take 50 or 100 million in VC money, is
| probably a massive success for 99.99% of people.
|
| But yeah, nothing compared to the most-used website in the
| history of programming.
| eichin wrote:
| We looked at FogBugz as a replacement for RT, but it had some
| severely opinionated limitation on release flow/version
| numbers that meant it didn't fit our _existing_ product
| releases, let alone our future plans. (I think we were pretty
| interested in it for the UI and the dynamic velocity
| modelling? But the presentation /demo pretty much ended with
| the "so don't do that" discussion :-)
| emmelaich wrote:
| Definitely JIRA/Atlassian. I remember Joel cursing "those
| Australians" in one blog post.
|
| Not literally cursing but you get the idea.
| ayewo wrote:
| IIRC, there were several competitors with no clear leader [1]
| but Bugzilla was pretty popular. Then Trac [2] showed up with
| a clean UI which allowed it to gain mindshare among OSS
| projects.
|
| JIRA ultimately became the market leader due to having a
| product that sucked less than what was out there and being
| infinitely customizable. One of the things Atlassian did to
| gain mindshare was to gift large OSS projects, often under
| the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) banner, free licenses to
| JIRA and Confluence.
|
| FogBugz was popular if you were a regular reader of Joel's
| blog or if you had heard of the Business of Software
| community. Outside of that bubble, it wasn't that well known.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-
| tracking_s...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trac
| fleaflicker wrote:
| Don't forget trello
| tom_ wrote:
| Everybody I know that used FogBugz seemed to really like it!
|
| They also did Trello.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I definitely liked it a lot more than Jira back in the day.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I actually liked Fogbugz a hell of a lot more than Jira...
| Sadly it's been sold and is barely a shell of what it was but
| it had a lot of a premise and was a lot more developer
| friendly.
| raincole wrote:
| You said it like CityDesk and FogBuz were some miserable
| failures.
|
| Were they? Or they were actually profitable for years?
|
| To be honest the whole comment reads very SV vibe. Go big (as
| big as StackOverflow) or go home.
| stevoski wrote:
| CityDesk was a miserable failure.
|
| FogBugz earned some good money. I suspect it bankrolled them
| so they could make Trello (which had very little revenue).
| ekanes wrote:
| I think that's the right take. If you're are legitimately good,
| and you press on long enough, (and admittedly you have some
| luck), you'll often win eventually.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Persistence. Sometimes being good isn't even required, as
| long as you keep at it.
| wvenable wrote:
| > Fog Creek forums (the Business of software) which had a great
| cast of characters and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of
| years.
|
| If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters is
| still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this day.
| It's a bit crazy.
|
| Stack Overflow came right out of Joel's complaints about
| Experts Exchange and is probably the best example of being with
| the right people at the right time with the right idea.
| toyg wrote:
| > If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters
| is still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this
| day.
|
| Uh, where...?
| mdemare wrote:
| You're on it now.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I think they are referring to another forum, but I guess
| they have their reasons for not naming it.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| And it doesn't look like forum exists anymore. I guess it
| also tapped out.
| wvenable wrote:
| It did have a redirect but at some point the domain name
| expired. It was kind of a fun domain to own though.
| marktangotango wrote:
| I would guess this one, but I don't think any usernames
| carried over. Except maybe the one I can't recall right now
| (startup related to streaming video over .gif back in late
| 90s iirc).
| sfjailbird wrote:
| I actually know which one he is talking about, but since
| he didn't call it out, I won't either (maybe they like it
| quiet).
|
| But what happened was that Joel freaked a bit out over
| some of the drama on the Business of Software forums and
| shuttered them, in spite of them being very popular and
| having a huge community - another one of those weird
| decisions. In an alternate timeline, they would have been
| HN.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I was one of the moderators on Business Of Software. IIRC
| (its a long time ago) it was finally shuttered because:
|
| -it was getting less and less popular
|
| -the software that ran it was getting creaky
|
| Also I suppose it was marketing for FogBugz. When Trello
| and StackOverflow took off, it wasn't really needed
| anymore.
|
| Joel was a brilliant writer. I miss his insight.
| wvenable wrote:
| When Joel stopped publishing articles there wasn't any
| content to drive the conversation. However, it was still
| a pretty popular forum when it was closed by Joel.
|
| I think it's successor peaked in popularity way after
| that but started to drop off as there was no obvious way
| to get new users. The old method of people checking their
| HTTP logs for referrers to see who was linking to their
| content and then joining the conversation stopped being a
| thing.
| thom wrote:
| Not to drag up dirt, but the drama was someone's quite
| public suicide and I suspect Joel concluded the bad PR
| wasn't worth the good will generated otherwise.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Yes, and it wasn't the BOS forum but an off topic forum
| he created in an attempt to draw the dross away from the
| main forum.
|
| I think BOS eventually died a natural death.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| So what are Joel and Michael up to these days? Have they retired
| to roll around in piles of money, Scrooge McDuck style? ;0)
| raldi wrote:
| Joel has leapt into Burning Man with both feet, building a
| gorgeous and (of course) technically impressive one-dimensional
| light show out of a giant military whip antenna.
| krallja wrote:
| Michael finally left Atlassian last year. Based on the Trello
| sale I have to imagine he was there mostly for fun not money.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 'Atlassian' and 'fun' are 2 words I'm not sure I've heard
| together before.
| ekanes wrote:
| Software leaders who want to succeed long-term could learn a lot
| from Spolky's leadership style.
| nickpp wrote:
| Loved this energy at the time. So inspiring, even for folks far
| far away from Joel's world. Could credit it for quite a few
| people's future success.
|
| So different from today's sentiment of "Only rich kids can play
| with startups, you shouldn't even bother. You need universal
| healthcare/UBI first".
| Apocryphon wrote:
| No one says that about startups these days. What they do want
| is low-to-near-zero interest rates.
| ska wrote:
| Startups in the valley were a thing well before low interest
| rates were even imagined. Interest rates change the
| landscape, but it's hardly a prerequisite.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sure, but this boom has been really driven by them. No
| one's clamoring for UHC/UBI, in contrast to cheap capital.
| facorreia wrote:
| I followed Joel's posts and learned a lot from them. He
| inspired me and had a concrete impact on my career and what I
| value as a software engineer.
| dang wrote:
| His posts used to drive me crazy in a love-to-hate way, but I
| read them regularly because he's a good writer. I just
| disagreed with him about everything.
|
| One day I clicked on a link that took me to one of PG's Lisp
| essays. Who was this guy? I'd never read anything like it.
|
| That's how I found out about PG, it's what nudged me to
| finally learn Lisp, it's what led me to follow YC before it
| was YC (and HN before it was HN), and thus it's why I'm here.
| Thanks Joel!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791989
| facorreia wrote:
| Great story, thanks for sharing.
|
| I believe that Joel's ideas like using source control,
| making a build in one step, having a bug database, having
| the best tools that money can buy, and writing a spec
| resonated with me in great part because I worked on ERP-
| style projects that were often built to support large and
| complex business processes that were well defined.
| LizGH wrote:
| Hi!
|
| Liz (Gordon) Hall over here. Your blog post made my day. I
| couldn't stop laughing and smiling. Seriously, best thing in a
| while so thank you!
|
| Ok, some things:
|
| - Considering Ben P. was the one who sent me the article I'm
| contractually obliged to agree with the updated "shh" being a
| cut-off "sh*t". But, please don't edit or change one thing in the
| article regarding the great shh debate of 2005, it's perfect the
| way it is :)
|
| - I was going to say we sold way more copies than 5,000 but after
| fact checking myself via emails from 2005/2006 it is, in fact,
| around 5,000. It felt more though because many were international
| copies and I had to find a way to convert the film to PAL, then
| we all spent like a week hand packaging each dvd leading up to
| Thanksgiving.
|
| - Aardvark'd was actually Google Video's FIRST documentary. And
| to prove it, I found my old resume circa 2006 which, is so
| insanely hysterical I will bravely share this part here:
|
| * Work directly with CEO Joel Spolsky and CFO Michael Pryor *
| Contributed to the growth of the company by becoming the abstract
| layer: I do everything but code * Manage the summer internship
| program including the: recruiting, interview schedules, travel,
| living arrangements, and plan the summer event calendar * Oversaw
| construction expansion as we doubled our office space * Deal
| directly with building management to maintain office needs *
| Organize catering schedule, keep kitchen stocked and anticipate
| all needs of the programmers * Project/Production Manager on
| "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks", Google Video's first feature
| length film, sold over 5,000 copies worldwide
|
| - I will swim upstream here and declare I think it's a perfect
| film lol. Seriously though, for me it captures a moment in time
| that I will forever look fondly upon. I had no idea that it was
| the starting point for my career in tech. I also love Lerone, the
| film marker, who has gone on to make great films featured on PBS
| :) Plus, no one in my life believed the stories I would come home
| and tell and with the film I finally had proof.
|
| - Some key players missing from the post: Ben Kamens and Michael
| Pryor. Ben went on to be the VP of Eng at Khan Academy and is the
| CEO of his own company Spring Discovery
| (https://www.springdiscovery.com/) so basically, a badass and
| nicest guy I know.
|
| And Michael... in a million years I never thought I'd have a
| career at Fog Creek. My plan was to stay a year then move back
| into TV Production. But Joel and Michael, they created a company
| that was way ahead of its time in terms of not only tech but
| company culture. It was special and I knew I was lucky stumbling
| into this other world. Michale and Joel pioneered so many things
| but after 18 years in this industry I can say with confidence
| they pioneered a people-first culture. I'm forever grateful to
| those two.
| thom wrote:
| Even if it only sold 5000 copies, I remember getting the DVD in
| the swag bag for StackOverflow dev days, so it must have
| reached a pretty big international audience over time.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Hi, Liz! Really glad to hear you enjoyed the post!
|
| > _I will swim upstream here and declare I think it 's a
| perfect film lol. Seriously though, for me it captures a moment
| in time that I will forever look fondly upon._
|
| The documentary does a great job of capturing that. In all your
| scenes, you seem like you're having a great time. Your
| responses in the interviews are so fun and positive, even when
| you're reading mean blog comments about Fog Creek or maybe-or-
| maybe-not being shushed.
|
| I mentioned this in the blog post, but it was satisfying to see
| how you grew your career as Fog Creek became more successful,
| and it's great to hear how positive an experience you had
| working there.
| anildash wrote:
| Liz we had another couple hundred of those still sitting in
| boxes in the office as late as when we gave over the space to
| Trello around 2018. How many did you make?!
| iamwil wrote:
| Maybe this is lost to time now, but YC started in Boston. They
| used to do the summers in Boston, and winter batches in SF. But
| then PG didn't want some other copycat accelerator to call
| themselves "the YC of SF", so they just moved to SF. Perhaps
| around 2009/2010 or so.
|
| Anyway, if you want to know what the Boston YC looked like,
| that's where PG is being interviewed. Since Reddit is there, it's
| the first batch, which should be 2005.
|
| PG is making chili because it's the way he feeds a whole bunch of
| people at once. YC kept it up throughout the years, and chili is
| one of the things to remain from the early days, last I heard.
| Dunno if they're still doing that.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > summers in Boston, and winter batches in SF
|
| Wise idea ;)
|
| > copycat accelerator to call themselves "the YC of SF", so
| they just moved to SF
|
| Yeah I think that if you believe in your idea but runs the risk
| of this it makes sense. Because SF was the bigger fish, even at
| the time
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's a rather unbelievable reason to relocate a company.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| It's more of a loaded term than meant literally.
|
| "The YC of Pittsburgh" for instance wouldn't attract the best
| talent worldwide, but SF and SV is known globally as the
| center of tech. If someone replicated YC in the global center
| of tech, they'd have a big advantage over YC.
| 2arrs2ells wrote:
| The chili & other crockpot recipes were still going strong in
| S12 ("crockpots scale linearly with number of startups") - but
| pg was no longer cooking.
|
| Batch dinners are catered these days and have been for a while.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I can't recall where I read it, but I thought they moved
| because they didn't see a future in Boston. They thought the VC
| community just wasn't viable there (which seems like a bet that
| panned out - not many prominent VCs in Boston compared to their
| peers).
| bewuethr wrote:
| The Social Radars has an episode where they interview PG,
| covering much of the history of YC:
| https://www.thesocialradars.com/episodes (second from the
| bottom).
| borski wrote:
| > _We funded the second batch in Silicon Valley. That was a
| last minute decision. In retrospect I think what pushed me
| over the edge was going to Foo Camp that fall. The density of
| startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in
| Boston, and the weather was so nice. I remembered that from
| living there in the 90s. Plus I didn 't want someone else to
| copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon
| Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.
| So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of
| those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the
| ambitious one were the same._
|
| > _If we 'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y
| Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite
| part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a
| building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own
| building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time
| was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it
| then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. Yet again we
| lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the ideal
| place to put something like YC. But even then we barely made
| it. The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the
| founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still
| wet._ [0]
|
| and, from 2007:
|
| > _The idea that startups would do better to move to Silicon
| Valley is not even a nationalistic one. It 's the same thing
| I say to startups in the US. Y Combinator alternates between
| coasts every 6 months. Every other funding cycle is in
| Boston. And even though Boston is the second biggest startup
| hub in the US (and the world), we tell the startups from
| those cycles that their best bet is to move to Silicon
| Valley. If that's true of Boston, it's even more true of
| every other city._ [1]
|
| He goes on in the second essay about why VCs in the valley
| are more aggressive and more deals get done than in Boston or
| anywhere else, but I suspect that was a huge part of the
| reason for the move from Boston
|
| [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html [1]
| http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
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