3 ms·

Splolsky's problem is that his software is even more pedestrian, boring to work on, and useless than Microsoft's data synchronization products that he's making

by tx 18y ago

Splolsky's problem is that his software is even more pedestrian, boring to work on, and useless than Microsoft's data synchronization products that he's making fun of. I know there are FogBugz users out there but I haven't met a single one in person. Besides... a commercial bug-tracker in 2008? Give me a break. Their Co-Pilot product is pretty interesting project to work on, but it's not their bread-n-butter. FogBugz is. And why would one even need top-notch programmers to write a bug tracker? You attract the best talent by interesting projects and existing great talent that you've attracted previously. That's a chicken-and-egg problem, unless founders are smart hackers themselves, this is why it's so important.

johns 18y ago
The "interesting" parts for writing FogBugz, is working with Wasabi, their homegrown compiler that spits out classic ASP and PHP. That's an interesting challenge, right?? /sarcasm To their defense, FogBugz is more than a simple bug tracker. Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used.
- henning 18y ago
  FogBugz has an intelligent design that makes it easy to get issues and customer interaction into the tracker so that it gets in and stays there rather than being scrawled on sticky notes and gone over verbally between only two people in someone's office. It has a good spam filter that does n-category email classification like JGC's POPFile. It has data entry interfaces that combine the best of an unorganized PIM like 37Signals' Backpack with an organized issue tracker like Trac. (Personal experience: Backpack is great to start out with for just about anything, but does not scale over time.) But, these are more about good design than turbogenius brilliance, and good design does not require rocket science, it requires perspective and taste.
- ovi256 18y ago
  >Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used. Not for long. I'm working on an EBS (improved) implementation as a Trac plugin. Haven't decided if I'll open source it though.

by tx 18y ago

johns 18y ago

The "interesting" parts for writing FogBugz, is working with Wasabi, their homegrown compiler that spits out classic ASP and PHP. That's an interesting challenge, right?? /sarcasm To their defense, FogBugz is more than a simple bug tracker. Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used.

henning 18y ago
FogBugz has an intelligent design that makes it easy to get issues and customer interaction into the tracker so that it gets in and stays there rather than being scrawled on sticky notes and gone over verbally between only two people in someone's office. It has a good spam filter that does n-category email classification like JGC's POPFile. It has data entry interfaces that combine the best of an unorganized PIM like 37Signals' Backpack with an organized issue tracker like Trac. (Personal experience: Backpack is great to start out with for just about anything, but does not scale over time.) But, these are more about good design than turbogenius brilliance, and good design does not require rocket science, it requires perspective and taste.
ovi256 18y ago
>Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used. Not for long. I'm working on an EBS (improved) implementation as a Trac plugin. Haven't decided if I'll open source it though.