Gadgetopia

Open House: I want to go so bad it hurts. Joel, send me a ticket. Great pictures at that URL of their new office space. Someone in New York needs to go and take pictures. Here at Fog Creek Software we recently finished a big expansion of our office space. ...

Fog Creek Software Management Training Program: I wish I lived in New York. Can you just imagine how much you'd learn with these guys? Our latest thinking is just to train a new generation of leaders from the ground up. To that end, today we're launching an experimental new program, ...

About Fog Creek Software: I wanted to send Joel Spolsky an email today, and I was prowling around the Fog Creek site looking his email address when I stumbled onto this "About Fog Creek" page. It's well-worth reading (which makes it a glaring exception to the average "worthless by definition" ...

Friday, October 31, 2003: This is a great idea, but it's punishment, not deterrence because blog comment spammers will never hesitate long enough to figure out if posting is worthwhile or not. "We've reengineered it so that URLs become links to a redirect server hosted by Fog Creek which, we ...

Project Aardvark: What a fun gig this would be, just to check out the legendary Fog Creek offices. I want to go. Do you live anywhere near Manhattan? Do you want to meet Joel, check out the Fog Creek Office, try out Fog Creek Copilot, and get paid $30 for ...

Copilot: coming soon from Fog Creek Software: The guys over at Project Aardvark finally spilled the beans as to what they're really up to. They're apparently hot-rodding Windows Remote Assistance. [...] a service that lets you help your friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems over the Internet. Built ...

We talked about this film way back when Project Aardvark was announced. Fog Creek Software had an idea for a piece of software, and they recruited four college students over the course of one summer to build it. And they filmed them doing it. (They may claim to have made ...

Fog Creek Software - About the company: I noticed this on the new Fog Creek Web site. The average Fog Creek developer has 694 square inches of screen real-estate, 2 desktop computers, and an Aeron chair. Most have private offices with windows and doors. Related to this, I m reading Peopleware: ...

Bionic Office: I've been waiting for this post for a while, ever since reading Joel's (hysterical) treatise on how he found his new office. He's now had it built out and here are the details and the pictures. "The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about ...

New websites: Joel Spolsky just had both his Web sites Fog Creek and Fog Bugz redesigned by Happy Cog Studios. He has an interesting piece this morning about the process, and about how he incrementally destroyed one design and had to start over. That s when I knew we ...

Project Aardvark: This is happening over at Fog Creek Software, the Spolsky joint in New York. I could only be so lucky. I can't wait for the film. Yes, it's true... there will be a filmmaker, Lerone Wilson of Boondoggle Films, working out of the Fog Creek office this summer ...

Joel on Software - Tuesday, August 26, 2003: Fog Creek has eliminated their Home Edition of CityDesk, thus upping the cheapest price from $79 to $299, which I find awfully depressing. "We used to have both a Home Edition and a Professional Edition. That was a brave experiment, which was, ...

Wasabi: In response to comments from his post yesterday (which we discussed), Joel has released information about Wasabi, which is a compiler they wrote so they code generate code for FogBugz in VBScript (for Windows) or PHP (for Linux). Fog Creek used to write in VBScript and automatically convert it ...

Lately, I've seen a couple "boutique job boards." Fog Creek just put one up, and so did 37 Signals some time ago. Prices are fairly high: 37 Signals is $250 for a month, and Fog Creek is $350 for three weeks. But therein lies the attraction I think: you get ...

Fix your mom s computer for mother s day: Joel rules. What a great promotion idea. This Sunday is Mother s Day. Why not fix your mom s computer? You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn t pop up every 15 seconds. To make ...

Sunrise: 37signals' CRM tool for small business is coming soon: A couple of weeks ago, 37 Signals announced their new CRM tool. Sunrise is a CRM-ish tool for small businesses. We're aiming to change the small business CRM market with Sunrise in the same way we changed the small business ...

Meet the Life Hackers: Here is scientific proof that bigger computer screens make you more productive. The stats are buried in another article about general productivity (I think -- I didn't read all of it). On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - ...

Joel on Software - Fixing Venture Capital: Here's a good article about why your company should or shouldn't seek VC money. It's long, but it gets very good down below the graphs the bit about the four curves getting out of whack makes a lot of sense. "VCs do ...

A Whole Lotta Features: This is a good tutorial on how to run an entire site from MT, but it runs into a problem that I've written about before. "...and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a ...

The Perils of JavaSchools: Spolsky goes ballistic on Java and the dumbing down of computer science instruction in colleges. If you don't deal with pointers and functional recurison, then don't even think about working at Fog Creek. As an employer, I've seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning ...

Simplicity: This is a good essay that's a huge counterpoint to the "embrace limitations" philosophy that 37 Signals started pushing a few years ago when Basecamp came out. I think what Joel is saying is that you need features, but they need to appear simple to the end users. And ...

IT Conversations: Joel Spolsky - Joel on Software: This is a great MP3 interview with Spolsky. (I know, I'm pathetic -- I should just move to New York and start stalking him...) Towards the end of it (it's almost an hour), he talks about making sure you don't bind your ...

Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky): This a good post that discusses how Joel Spolsky changed his mind about user interfaces. I knew Spolsky was very thick-client oriented for a long time, but this post has some interesting insights and information on how and why he ...

Announcing FogBugz On Demand: Fog Creek moves into the world of hosted software. I’m happy to announce that FogBugz On Demand is now available. This is a professionally-hosted version of FogBugz 5.0, previously only available as a download. In the end, $21 per user per month is not a phenomenal ...

The Development Abstraction Layer: There's a big quote here, but it's worth reading, as it the entire article. This is why I want to work at Fog Creek. A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...