14 ms·

I actually bought this on DVD. I miss Joel on Software and hearing about Fog Creek.

kcartlidge 3y ago
> 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.
mattl 3y ago
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 3y ago
The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was another great article.
tailspin2019 3y ago
> I actually bought this on DVD I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!
amerine 3y ago
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.
toyg 3y ago
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.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    I guess it was (at least initially) built by interns.
  - toyg 3y ago
    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...
- carb 3y ago
  I thought the Never Rewrite article was about Netscape, not Mozilla or Firefox? Agreed, these are great posts.
  - prepend 3y ago

> 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.

mattl 3y ago

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 3y ago

The follow-up blog post about automating / streamlining the postal form printing just to ship out the ordered DVDs was another great article.

tailspin2019 3y ago

> I actually bought this on DVD I did too. It was quite motivating to watch at the time!

amerine 3y ago

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.

toyg 3y ago

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.

jodrellblank 3y ago
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 3y ago
  I guess it was (at least initially) built by interns.
- toyg 3y ago
  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...
carb 3y ago
I thought the Never Rewrite article was about Netscape, not Mozilla or Firefox? Agreed, these are great posts.
- prepend 3y ago