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Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

  Posted: July 28th, 2010, 7:40am MDT by Steve Yegge

  EYJAFJÖLL, ICELAND — Java programmers around the globe are in a panic today over a Wikileaks press release issued at 8:15am GMT. Wikileaks announced that they will re-release the source code for thousands of Open Source Java projects, making all access modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'.
  
  Agile Java Developer Johnnie Garza of Irvine, CA condemns the move. "They have no right to do this. Open Source does not mean the source is somehow 'open'. That's my code, not theirs. If I make something private, it means that no matter how desperately you need to call it, I should be able to prevent you from doing so, even long after I've gone to the grave."
  
  According to the Wikileaks press release, millions of Java source files have been run through a Perl script that removes all 'final' keywords except those required for hacking around the 15-year-old Java language's "fucking embarrassing lack of closures."
  
  Moreover, the Perl script gives every Java class at least one public constructor, and turns all fields without getters/setters into public fields. "The script yanks out all that @deprecated shit, too," claims the controversial announcement.
  
  Longtime Java programmer Ronnie Lloyd of Austin, TX is offended by the thought of people instantiating his private classes. "It's just common sense," said Lloyd, who is 37. "If I buy you a house and put the title in your name, but I mark some of the doors 'Employees Only', then you're not allowed to open those doors, even though it's your house. Because it's really my house, even though I gave it to you to live in."
  
  Pacing and frowning thoughtfully, Lloyd continued: "Even if I go away forever and you live there for 20 years and you know exactly what's behind the doors — heck, even if it's a matter of life and death — plain old common sense still dictates that you're never, ever allowed to open them for any reason."
  
  "It's for your own protection," Lloyd added.
  
  Wesley Doyle, a Java web developer in Toronto, Canada is merely puzzled by the news. "Why do they think they need to do this? Why can't users of my Open Source Java library simply shake their fists and curse my family name with their dying breaths? That approach has been working well for all the rest of us. Who cares if I have a private helper function they need? What, is their copy/paste function broken?"
  
  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who coined the term "Opened Source" to describe the jailbroken open-source Java code, fears he may be arrested by campus security at Oracle or possibly IBM. The Wikileaks founder said: "Today the Eclipse Foundation put out a private briefing calling me a 'non-thread-safe AbstractKeywordRemovalInitiatorFactory'. What the fuck does that even mean? I fear for my safety around these nutjobs."
  
  The removal of '@deprecated' annotations is an especially sore issue for many hardworking Java developers. "I worked hard to deprecate that code that I worked hard to create so I could deprecate some other code that I also worked hard on," said Kelly Bolton, the spokesperson for the League Of Java Programmers For Deprecating The Living Shit Out Of Everything.
  
  "If people could keep using the older, more convenient APIs I made for them, then why the fuck would they use my newer, ridiculously complicated ones? It boggles the imagination," Bolton added.
  
  The Eclipse CDT team was especially hard-hit by the removal of deprecation tags. Morris Baldwin, a part-time developer for the CDT's C++ parsing libraries says: "We have a policy of releasing entire Java packages in which every single class, interface and method is deprecated right out of the box, starting at version 1.0."
  
  "We also take careful steps to ensure that it's impossible to use our pre-deprecated code without running our gigantic fugly framework," the 22-year-old Baldwin added. "Adding public constructors and making stuff non-final would be a serious blow to both non-usability and non-reusability."
  
  The Agile Java community has denounced the Wikileaks move as a form of terrorism. "It was probably instigated by those Aspect-Oriented Programming extremists," speculates Agile Java designer Claudia Hewitt, age 29. "I always knew they wanted to use my code in ways I couldn't predict in advance," she added.
  
  Many Java developers have vowed to fight back against the unwelcome opening of their open source. League of Agile Methodology Experts (LAME) spokesperson Billy Blackburn says that work has begun on a new, even more complicated Java build system that will refuse to link in Opened Source Java code. The new build system will be released as soon as several third-party Java library vendors can refactor their code to make certain classes more reusable. Blackburn declined to describe these refactorings, claiming it was "none of y'all's business."
  
  Guy Faulkner, a 51-year-old Python developer in Seattle, was amused by the Wikileaks announcement. "When Python developers release Open Source code, they are saying: Here, I worked hard on this. I hope you like it. Use it however you think best. Some stuff is documented as being subject to change in the future, but we're all adults here so use your best judgment."
  
  Faulkner shook his head sadly. "Whereas Java developers who release Open Source are code are saying: Here, I worked hard on this. I hope you like it. But use it exactly how I tell you to use it, because fuck you, it's my code. I'll decide who's the goddamn grown-up around here."
  
  "But why didn't they write that Perl script in Python?" Faulkner asked.
  
  
  
  MORE NEWS
  
  Previous article: San Francisco Airport Announces That All Restrooms Near You Are Now Deprecated
  The SFO port authority announced today that all airport restrooms located anywhere near you are now deprecated due to "inelegance". The newer, more elegantly designed restrooms are located a short 0.8 mile (1.29 km) walk from the International Terminal. Read more
  
  Next article: Eclipse Sits On Man's Couch, Breaks It
  New Hampshire programmer Freddie Cardenas, 17, describes the incident: "We invited Eclipse over for dinner and drinks. Eclipse sat down on our new couch and there was this loud crack and it broke in half. Those timbers had snapped like fuckin' matchsticks. Then my mom started crying, and Eclipse started crying, and I ran and hid in my bedroom." Read more

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  The Acceleration of Addictiveness

  Posted: July 27th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  The Top Idea in Your Mind

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  The growing empire of Stack Exchange

  Posted: July 16th, 2010, 7:57pm MDT

  We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week!

  • Gaming
  • Cooking
  • Pro Webmasters

  We’ll have three more for you next week, too.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Blogger Finger

  Posted: July 14th, 2010, 9:06pm MDT by Steve Yegge

  Well! I've sure had a nice relaxing blog-free year. No worries, no haters, no Nooglers wandering by my office and staring at me through the window as if they expect me to crap in my hand and hurl it at them. Not that I wasn't tempted.
  
  Nope, it's just been peace and quiet and reading and coding and practicing my guitar and stuff. It's been awesome.
  
  And now that everyone's completely forgotten who I am, or whatever exactly I'd said that made them feel all butthurt inside -- as measured by my incoming email rate, which is finally near-zero -- I figure it's probably safe to get back in the water.
  
  I'm not really sure what my plans are going forward, other than staying employed at Google until the day comes when I need one of their comfy, brightly-colored caskets. Other than that, my plans are flexible. I'm feeling downright leisurely at the moment.
  
  I realize now that I was trying way too hard to change the world via blogging, and it made me care maybe just a little too much. This was bad for my mental and emotional health. Caring is fine. Lots of things are worth caring about. Very few of them merit sacrificing your health.
  
  Fortunately during my ad-hoc sabbatical I was able to gain some new perspectives by distancing myself a bit from the constant storm going on in the tech world.
  
  One nice perspective I gained is this: There is nothing on this earth that can make everyone happy. Reddit is a huge, living, breathing demonstration of this, since essentially no reddit post ever goes above maybe 80% approval, and a "good" post seems to hover around 65%-70% liked.
  
  That made me feel better about the haters. Haters abound. They're just a fact of life, part of the human condition. There's no need to waste energy hating haters.
  
  Another perspective I gained was that decorating your mansion with works of art you know nothing about is amazingly rewarding, as long as you can mix it up by leaping across rooftops and assassinating bad guys and hanging with your buddy Leonardo. I swear, if they ever make a movie about my life, the handsome and dashing actor who plays me, when asked on his deathbed which of life's pleasures had given him the greatest happiness, will say something cheesy that makes the audience ooh and aww with appreciation, but it'll be total Hollywood bullshit, because what I really will have said was "gaming".
  
  Yet another perspective I gained is that I now actually agree with everyone who complained that my blog posts were too long. Reddit has ruined my attention span for online material. There seems to be no such thing as too frequent, but there's definitely such thing as too long. So I'll be better about that.
  
  I used to have this pet theory that the length of my blogs is a big part of why they've been noticed at all. I mean, look at this dude. If he'd written only one or two crazy things, he'd be just another nutjob, but by dint of almost superhuman persistence he's managed to get the entire world to laugh at him.
  
  I was sort of aiming for getting people to laugh with me, but I used the same basic recipe as Time Cube Dude. And the formula seemed to be working, modulo the haters.
  
  However, Dave Barry -- my Personal Childhood Hero (66% liked!) -- always wrote his columns in chunks of 800 words, even if it necessitated inserting filler words such as "booger" and "legislative session" into his articles about wine tasting or car engines or bat guano, or whatever it was that caught his fancy that week.
  
  Overall it seems likely that post-length is less important than factors such as quality, consistency, passion, relevance, and legislative booger session.
  
  So I was originally thinking of writing up to a maximum of 800 words today, and I'm at about 500 now, but I've been really successful at my Not Caring Too Much Initiative, so... later! Nice chatting with ya. Cheerio!
  
  HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT...
  
  Just to ensure this post isn't entirely devoid of content I'll share something important that I learned last year.
  
  Here's what I learned: after Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, the second most common hand ailment is known as Trigger Finger.
  
  Its more formal name is digital tenovaginitis stenosans, which is ancient Latin for "electronic hand inflamed vagina without writing", which I believe is why most people prefer to call it Trigger Finger.
  
  I have it, you know. Trigger Finger, I mean, not an inflamed vagina.
  
  Although Trigger Finger is "idiopathic", a fancy word meaning that doctors don't have a fucking clue what causes it, it is widely known in musical circles as a musician's injury. It happens to musicians who overpractice, usually in preparation for a recital, performance or recording session.
  
  I found all this out after being diagnosed with it.
  
  It is not idiopathic in my case. I have the benefit of hindsight, and I know exactly what caused it. It turns out that if you play a certain right-hand arpeggio on a classical guitar enough times -- where "certain arpeggio" here refers to Hector Villa-Lobos' Etude No. 1, and "enough times" is approximately 650,000 times in a 5-month period^[wtf?] -- you acquire Trigger Finger. That's not precisely what I was playing, but it'll serve.
  
  Trigger Finger is a painful, debilitating, demoralizing injury. I highly recommend not letting it happen to you. Your body will begin telling you when it's time to ease up on the practice sessions. Listen to your body when it says that.
  
  As for specifics, there's not much to tell. My hand started hurting. Then it hurt real bad for a month. Ibuprofen and cold/hot packs didn't help. It got steadily worse. Even quitting guitar altogether for another month didn't help. I could no longer use my right hand, and it was beginning to feel permanent. I wasn't even sure why it was happening. I was terrified and I began to despair.
  
  My Google doctor was great. She referred me to a specialist -- a hand surgeon. I told her I didn't really want to see a hand... S-word. I could barely say it aloud. She reassured me that seeing a specialist didn't necessarily mean surgery. They might have other tricks up their sleeves. So I decided to brave it.
  
  My first trip to the specialist only took about 15 minutes. She listened to my disoriented bleating, asked me a few questions, gently felt my hand here and there, and informed me that I had Trigger Finger. She said she was going to give me a cortisone shot. She was pulling out a giant needle as she told me this. It just sort of materialized from under the table, the way a knife appears in a bar fight. It was a very large needle. She explained calmly that the cortisone is a steroid that stays wherever you inject it. They use it on athletes to reduce inflammation from certain injuries.
  
  Then she stuck the giant needle all the way into the base of my right middle finger and squeezed. Compared to the pain of my trigger finger, the injection felt like a mosquito bite.
  
  She told me that I'd start feeling better in a week, and in a month I'd be pretty much all cleared up. If not, I should come back and see her for more treatment. And no, I wasn't going to lose my hand.
  
  It was kind of weird, but on my way back to my car I think someone had been cutting onions in the elevator. A lot of onions. In the last fifteen minutes my whole life had been handed back to me with an almost casual lack of concern. I was overwhelmed with onions.
  
  A month later I was back to see her. The cortisone had helped a lot. I gave it a 66% approval rating. She said she could give me another shot, or do surgery. This time I'd done my homework. I elected for surgery. That was back in September. It was an interesting story in its own right, but the upshot is she did great. And then after that there was a lot of physical therapy.
  
  I typed the word "September" in the previous paragraph three times before I got it right. The word doesn't even have letters that need my right middle finger. My right hand, which had shaped itself into an unusable, agonized claw between March and July, is still afraid to flex and extend my middle finger. It's up to, oh, a 95% approval rating now, which I believe is phenomenally successful. Who could ask more of a hand surgery? It could have been much worse. Much much.
  
  But that last 5% is rough. The haters in my hand are a constant reminder of the old pain. When I type, or play piano or guitar, my right-hand fingers twist and curl in elaborate, incomprehensible dances to avoid a pain that is for the most part no longer there.
  
  Yep, I think it'll be easier to keep my blog posts shorter going forward.
  
  Ironically, some good came out of the experience. I've switched to a sustainable new guitar style and a new repertoire, one I enjoy greatly. And I now pay much more attention to economy of motion in my typing. And I spend more time finding pain-saving Emacs shortcuts. It makes me wonder what I might have achieved had I focused on it sooner.
  
  Surgery notwithstanding, on the whole I still think it was a great year. The year was in fact more complicated and more painful than I've let on here, but that's life for ya.
  
  And now that I'm rested up, I believe I'm ready to start tech blogging again... in moderation, anyway. The rest and relaxation and research did wonders for me. I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.
  
  
  
  [1] Talk about caring too much. I may explain this 650k figure in a future blog post if I can ever get over my embarrassment.

Joel on Software

• 

  Domain Names

  Posted: July 12th, 2010, 8:56pm MDT

  “We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.”

  Domain Names

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta

  Posted: July 7th, 2010, 1:55pm MDT

  Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?

  

  Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network, so it has the clean, elegant design that made Stack Overflow a phenomenal success.

  The newest member of the Stack Exchange Network is the first one to go through the community site-creation process called Area 51. There are more great sites in the pipeline, but they have to demonstrate that they can reach critical mass or we won’t create them.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  How to Lose Time and Money

  Posted: July 6th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "The way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Don Norman at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 12:55pm MDT

  Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.

  “Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.

  “Which button do you press?”

  It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.

  The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Area 51 is now in beta

  Posted: June 22nd, 2010, 8:40am MDT

  Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.

  Benofsky from Hacker News writes:

  Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
  
  Also, how are they going to make money?

  I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.

  (transcript)

  Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:

  I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.

  We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:

  

  Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  My secret weapon for setting executive compensation

  Posted: June 9th, 2010, 2:05pm MDT

  My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.

  You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Paul Kenny’s talk at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: June 8th, 2010, 10:31am MDT

  Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.

  Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:

  The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Random thoughts for May 18, 2010

  Posted: May 18th, 2010, 9:02am MDT

  FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily basis.

  • The Case Event Edit Plugin now lets you edit cases (instead of just appending to them).
  • Bulk Reply, so you can respond to multiple emails with the same response. You can even flip through the outgoing responses and customize each one if you want.
  • Width of the case area is now resizable.
  • We now support IMAP (in addition to POP3) for incoming email
  • Project backlog editing (for scrum/agile shops) is now much faster.

  What’s new in FogBugz 7.3?

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Kathy Sierra’s talk at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: May 10th, 2010, 12:53pm MDT

  I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a slide making fun of Stack Overflow’s terrific new VC-backed business model. She even got the unicorn!

  Watch the  whole talk here. The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Random thoughts for May 04, 2010

  Posted: May 4th, 2010, 11:43am MDT

  “And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.”

  Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Note from Taco

  Posted: April 30th, 2010, 7:30pm MDT

  Dear TechSmith,

  Thank you very much for all the pictures of your pets:

  

  Also thanks for the toys, which were great. I especially like the iPhone.

  

  Yours,

  Taco.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Sites for experts

  Posted: April 19th, 2010, 9:46am MDT

  Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.

  So far there are 32 informal proposals on meta.stackexchange.com. We’re weeks away from opening a site where these proposals can become real.

  From my answer to the Firearms proposal: “The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, ‘long-tail,’ highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that it’s clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.”

  From my answer to the Law proposal: “There are only 200 easy law questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on Mahalo and Yahoo!Answers. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only professionals can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.”

  Our core mission at Stack Overflow is:

  Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.

  The “expert” part of that mission is important, otherwise we’re just building another place for the same questions that every other Q&A site has. We want the law Stack Exchange to attract lawyers, the movie Stack Exchange to attract filmmakers, and the aviation Stack Exchange to attract pilots. What makes a community great is great people... that is, real experts. And the experts want to hang out with other experts.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Organic Startups

  Posted: April 16th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you've found a gold mine."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Gibson Blog

• 

  EXPOSITION IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE

  Posted: April 16th, 2010, 5:37am MDT by Bill

  Via my wonderful editor, Susan Allison, from a New York Magazine piece on David Simon:
  
  "Fuck the exposition," he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. "Just *be*. The exposition can come later." He describes a theory of television narrative. "If I can make you curious enough, there's this thing called Google. If you're curious about the New Orleans Indians, or 'second-line' musicians--you can look it up." The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the charaqcters from within

Joel on Software

• 

  Stack Exchange 2.0

  Posted: April 13th, 2010, 2:06pm MDT

  Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the sun? And who says we can’t run for Vice President of the United States of America?

  We tried making our software available as a hosted white label product called Stack Exchange. We thought that other people would create awesome sites on every imaginable topic. Some people did (yay!), but it wasn’t the flood of high quality sites we were hoping for.

  So we’re making a few changes. Briefly:

  1. Stack Exchange will now be free.
  2. We’re changing the way that new Stack Exchange sites are created to move to a more democratic, community process.
  3. The content of these new, community-created Stack Exchange sites will be publically owned under a Creative Commons license, instead of being owned by individuals or businesses.

  If you’ve already created a Stack Exchange site, be sure to read the announcement in more detail to hear about our transition plan. Don’t be alarmed; we’d never do anything to mess with Stack Exchange sites that are already working.

  Read all the details on the StackExchange Blog.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  I THINK WE'VE HEARD THE CLICK

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 2:17pm MDT by Bill

  Feels to me like a full cycle of Q&A. Very enjoyable, for me, but I'll take Anabel's thanks as the closer, now. You're all welcome, and thank you for turning up.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 2:02am MDT by Bill

  From Cederic:
  Q Lets trivialise.
  A You go first!
  
  Q You obsess in your books about the desired objects of days past, contemporarily still desirable with the added patina of rarity.
  - What's your favourite old world treasure?
  A I'm more a wunderkammer guy than a big masterpiece guy. I'm with Manny Farber's termites, that way. Sir John Soane's house is probably my favorite London museum.
  
  Q - Which watch do you wear?
  A Today, an 80s Vostok, a Soviet watch. It has a certain pleasant melancholy about it.
  
  Q - Do you seek current objects of desire: iPhone or Android?
  A Not so much. I've never been an early adaptor. It's getting to the point, though, where I actually need to get something along iPhone lines. But that would be upgrading from a Nokia flip (chosen because it had very good reception, four years ago).
  
  Q - On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
  A I don't actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I'm more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I'm a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 1:37am MDT by Bill

  Q How much steeping do you do in your locations while writing? Hotels, cities, transportation options?
  A Where I happen to have gone tends to produce the locations. For Pattern Recognition. I went back to Tokyo to upgrade my 80s/90s version. Hadn't been to Moscow at all. Filtered that through writer friends who had (Eileen Gunn, Jack Womack). I do virtual steeping, though. Google Earth Street View is a spooky thing, that way.
  
  Q Do you visualize some locations from first-hand experience or do you take notes to refresh your memory while re/experiencing them again?
  A I have no way of knowing what'll reemerge from the hopper as a novel-unit, so no reason to take notes. Everything goes into the hopper. Relatively few things come out of it.
  
  Q Does this research get expensive for you? Is there a way for you to be compensated for this type of research?
  A I spend almost nothing on research. A Wired article took me to Tokyo, when I was writing Pattern Recognition. I used to buy lots of magazines. Magazines are novelty-aggregators. But the Web's taken that function over, and is free.
  
  Q Do you find that "going there" actually helps you write?
  A Having been *somewhere* helps me to write. Having a hopper full of "place" is a good thing, but that's a lifetime accumulation. And there's a certain amount of composting that goes on, in the hopper. It's not journalism, not reportage.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 1:25am MDT by Bill

  From Bravus:
  Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
  A I'm not postioned to know. Not sure who would be. Someone who has some overview of what's happening?
  
  Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
  A I read that Stross. The thing to remember is that a look at the actual economics of the thing, that way, would always have been doomy for the unpublished. Most of whom have no idea. Not that I don't think Stross is accurate. I do, but there's a way in which it's not a new scary story. New installment of the old scary story.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 4:40pm MDT by Bill

  Q What question would Lithos ask you, if he were one of your characters?
  
  A "How is this possible?" And I would explain the Internet, etc.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 8:27am MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker:
  Q I'm picking up on a thread that seems to pervade several of your previous responses, in so much as your writing gift comes at a heavy price. It's almost a suffering ...something you can't and wouldn't want to live without, yet a beast that requires a great deal of time and effort to harness? A living hell for the duration of the work, no?
  
  A Yikes! I must've sounded awfully whiny. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. Every job has its costs, some of which aren't so evident to people who haven't done it. But my intention was more to convey, to people who might want to write fiction, that the process they arrive at may not quite line up with our cultural paradigm of what writing fiction is, and that the blisters may form in places other than expected. When I started trying to write fiction, I read writers-on-writing collections, and very little of that, in retrospect, sounded much like what I've wound up having to do to make it happen.
  
  When Bruce Sterling and I were writing The Difference Engine, I'd moan sometimes about the labor required (as much fun as that was, and often it was lots of fun, but I'm basically lazy). He always had the same response: "Yeah, but it beats loading concrete blocks." Which is so obviously true, and has since become a mantra of mine.
  
  I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 3:06am MDT by Bill

  From Anabel:
  Q There's a highly successful writer who lived in my town, who ran a writers workshop where he said he used real people for some of his characters. Have you used real people to springboard some characters in your work? Was it dicey to do so?
  
  A I'd assume we (writers) all must do that some extent, but for me that all goes through some process of unconscious randomization. When my characters arrive, I don't know who they are, let alone who might have contributed DNA. There are exceptions, but usually only with characters who are more broadly parodic of particular attitudes.
  
  I had no idea who Cayce was, why she felt that way on waking, whose flat it was, why London. For months. I was inhabiting a very partial construct, waiting to see what attached itself. Waiting to find a center of gravity.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 9th, 2010, 4:49pm MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker

  Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter? A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.* The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed. Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines? A We do it from our homes, and we refuse to let them in, no matter how many times they knock. There's a contract, and a deadline for delivery of the completed manuscript. That's actually a really scary deal: a contract, and a deadline, and nobody there in the morning to tell you to get to work. Or to start gazing at your shoe. Q I guess there's less pressure on established writers, whereas newbies are pushed harder? Time management: do you place yourself under a strict regime? A The arrangement forces you to manage your own time. In the old days, in Hollywood, screenwriters in studio employ were contractually obligated to turn in a specific number of pages per day. There is nothing like that in the world of professional fiction-writing, and if there were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have been published. I have to force myself to turn up every day, in case the writing also decides to. Often, it doesn't choose to. There is more of that at the start of a book than later, mercifully. The book builds its own momentum, though each one has a different momentum. That momentum is what calls the shots, imposes the regimen. The part of me that's writing this, now, is utterly incapable of writing a novel. The part of me that just wrote a novel is profoundly unavailable, right now, and will remain so until the next time I have to go out and walk for miles, whistling for it, convinced its finally run away for good and all. People don't ordinarily meet the part of me that writes novels, and when they do, they must assume I'm not not doing very well. Which as a human being, right then, I'm not. In direct proportion to how well I might be doing, right then, as a novelist.

  
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 4:49pm MDT by Bill

  From Sentinel400:
  Q Have you ever wanted to wear a uniform?
  
  A When was I last out of one? The extent to which we are are all of us usually in uniform brings to mind Eno's definition of culture: everything we do that we don't really need to. Pajama bottoms beneath a raincoat? Out of uniform. Jeans with one leg cut off? Out of uniform. Contracultural apparel disturbs us. Countercultures are intensely cultural. Bohemias have dress codes as rigid as those of merchant banks. We all read uniforms, constantly, whether we're aware of it or not.
  
  My favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie's alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character's inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 1:35pm MDT by Bill

  From Martin:
  Q Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily aware of it, if it had?
  
  A I first watched The Wire when I was writing Spook Country, because my friend Steve Brown told me that one of the seasons had the best stuff about shipping containers he'd seen anywhere, in any medium. But what I really got from that was a sense of the physicality of the containers: that the walls are actually quite thin, things like that.
  
  But that's material. "Influence" is something else. Influence is more like weather, when you've been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can't say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it's present.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 1:09pm MDT by Bill

  From Colin:
  Q Seething, termite-like revising seems well suited to word processors, but how did it work out on that famous typewriter?
  
  A Really, really *slowly*. Thick scabs of correction fluid. Then I discovered those rolls of self-adhesive white paper tape, that restaurants used to use to correct (this is amazing in itself, to me) the *typewritten* (or maybe mimeographed) parts of their menus. So I'd stick that over a whole sentence or three, a whole para, then type over it. But then the termites would seethe again, and I'd have to paint the white fluid over the *tape*, which didn't really work that well... The pages of the Neuromancer manuscript were *3D*, topographical...
  
  Then Bruce Sterling's father gave him an Apple II. I guess he'd moved up to the first Mac. So there's Bruce on the phone from Austin: "This is *serious*, man. This thing *automates* the process." So I went down to Eaton's and bought a IIC and a dot-matrix printer, marked way down because the new Mac was the thing. So I never got the Selectric that had been the pro writer's awesomest tool when I'd started trying to write. I saw one of those for $29.95 in a charity shop, last year.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT by Bill

  From Bravus:
  Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
  
  A I have no way of knowing, really. What your question reminds me of, though, is my having asked a couple of my literature profs at UBC, in the 70s, whether they thought there were important works of fiction that we didn't yet know of. This was greeted with a sort of amazed disgust. Of course there weren't. (Neither they nor I had ever heard of Cormac McCarthy, then, and he'd been published for over a decade.)
  
  Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
  A The economics for the majority of writers, in my lifetime, have never been good at all. I suspect I imagined that the science fiction writers I read in the 60s were all doing rather well. Most of them, actually, were just scraping by, and moonlighting at other things. That was why, I'd guess, many of them seemed to write more often than was good for their writing.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 10:38am MDT by Bill

  From Twilite Minotaur:
  Q You mentioned spending a year on that one sentence. I notice myself getting tar babied into a sort of perfectionist love-hate with my own sentences (and lyrics), and then find myself paying mental alimony to a work throughout the day, swapping and rearranging bits, more like a jigsaw puzzle engineer than an 'artist' with nouns and verbs fountaining eternal from some Creativity Cortex. Paul Valery's aphorism, that,"an artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it," comes to mind. Was there some point or process for you of learning the art of abandonment, to switch off the inner micromanager, at an appropriate time so as to allow sufficient rumination to be spent on a work, but without becoming lost in it?
  
  A If an innumerate like myself can be allowed to say this, there's a feeling of equation, at the end. There's a *click*. When you hear the click, immediately down tools and exit the structure. Don't go back in until your mind's quit overclocking and you can afford some perspective. Chance's are, that *was* the click.
  
  Q Also, if you had to live in a city other than Vancouver, what would it be and why?
  A Berlin. For all the ways it disproves our ideas of psychogeography and haunting.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 7:22am MDT by Bill

  From Dawntreader :
  Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?
  A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 7:09am MDT by Bill

  From: theminx
  Q. I am always inordinately pleased when I find out that someone whose work I admire is also a fan of someone else I admire. Some artists I like (such as Douglas Coupland and Kim Gordon) are also William Gibson fans/appreciators. Whose appreciation of your work tickles or humbles you the most?
  A. Enthusiastic celebrity readers make me bashful. I actually have a hard time believing them, if that makes any sense. "You *do*? Golly!" Works better for me with random strangers who I'd imagine have any number of better things to do than read me.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 4:52am MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker:
  Q How long did it take you before you finally gained confidence to put pen to paper [i.e. attempt to write fiction] and what, if any, was your original inspiration to commit yourself?
  
  A There was never any pen. It's all been typed. I didn't begin to experiment with writing fiction until 1976 or so (I'm not sure, really) and I was extremely secretive about commitment. Secretive about the whole thing, really. I don't know why I started doing it, or why my commitment to it, when it came, as deeply private as it was, startled me with its depth. The whole thing was deeper than I have access to. And remains so.
  
  The first first fiction I ever wrote was this sentence: "Seated in the darkened screening room, Hollingsworth came to understand the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film." Except that it wasn't "Hollingsworth"; something more, er, Ballardian! This is a perfect clinical example of the new writer having failed to even begin to digest an influence, and I could never making it go any further, though I did know that the next image was of a fountain, in the courtyard of an academic research building, into which people had been tossing expensive Swiss watches rather than coins.
  
  I think I worked on that sentence for a year or more. Long enough to never have forgotten it. I think I may have eventually decided that I should regard it as complete in itself.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 2:12am MDT by Bill

  From Martin:
  Q What aspect of ZH are you most eager to talk about (that hasn't been mentioned yet) ?
  A Actually I'm not that eager to talk about it. There's a gap, between completion and issuance of ARCs, during which I don't have to, and then I will have to, daily, for months. That's a function of the industry's needs, not mine. It feels slightly unseemly to me, to talk about my own work at any length.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 6th, 2010, 1:27pm MDT by Bill

  From Digitalprimate:
  Q What would you suggest as listening while reading Zero History?
  A Not owls. Not the gentle lowing of cattle at dusk. Not dried corn rattling into a galvanized bucket.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 6th, 2010, 5:39am MDT by Bill

  From Buell:
  Q More Bigend; is Hubertus your writer-self's alter ego?
  A He seems to me like a sort of clay-footed demigod, the manifestation of something in our species that's unique to us (here, anyway, as far as we know) in ways both very good and very bad.
  
  Q I'm under the impression that to take up the excruciating task of writing a novel requires Bigend-like megalomania.
  A All sorts of things can warrant the taking up of the task, and do, but relatively few of the novels taken up, species-wide, are completed. A signed contract is a huge help on either end. And I don't mean that it's about money. Rather that there's a structure imposed, a commitment made, a timeline established.
  
  There isn't anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 6th, 2010, 3:53am MDT by Bill

  From Fuldog:
  Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
  A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".
  
  Q During the journey from the Sprawl to the Bridge to Bigend's, ever thought about changing profession, something radical?
  A Never seriously. Probably because doing this, for whatever reason, has to be more an avocation than a career. I like designers, of various things. More than "fine artists", generally.
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 5th, 2010, 12:47pm MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker:
  Q If you had a chance to meet the author of your favorite book, who would it be and what would you ask them?
  A Jorge Luis Borges. "How is this possible?"
  
  Though I don't have a favorite book by Borges, or even a favorite book. It's unlikely that meeting a writer of fiction will get me any closer to the writer's work, in my experience. The opposite effect is sometimes noted. Writers of fiction, as I understand them, are writers because they can get closer to you *as marks on paper* than they can any other way. They cannot sit and tell you. If they could tell you, then why would they write? They cannot explain. They do not know, that way. They know transiently, at best, in the act of marking paper.
  
  
  
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 4th, 2010, 1:53pm MDT by Bill

  From Mean Old Man:
  Q Essays. You're really, really good at those. I read a few of yours a while ago, and was lastingly impressed; Tokyo, watches, one about U2... How do those happen? Does Editor X in Gumbyville slap his forehead and cry, "Navel lint! William Gibson! It's a perfect fit! It'll fill an Entire! Page!! Miss Pertbottom, get New York on the line! What? I don't care if he's in Canada! GET NEW YORK ON THE LINE!", or is it more of an old school sub-rosa web ring kind of thing?
  
  A Thank you. It was my first literary form. It was probably your first too. It can happen a number of ways. Ones that involve really expensive free plane tickets (Singapore, Tokyo, say). Ones that involve being asked to consider things I'm peculiarly interested in at the time (the eBay watch one). Ones where I feel honored to have been asked (the centenary of Orwell's birth) though in some cases I've declined out of feeling unworthy. (I declined to write an obituary for Wm. S. Burroughs, but mainly because he was still alive at the time, and believed in magic.) It's not an activity I actively seek out, much, and if asked (and I'm not asked, that often) I more often decline.
  
  Q And who do you consider to be superior essayists, living or dead, worth reading?
  A Orwell comes to mind, of course, but those are classic formal essays. The various parts of something like Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory *behave* in some ways like essays, and are brilliant, but do various un-essaylike things as well.
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 3rd, 2010, 9:52am MDT by Bill

  From Fashionpolioce:
  Q Having written three trilogies, and approaching the age where some people choose to retire, do you think you'll keep writing into a ripe old age?
  A There's evidence that some people are actually better at writing novels, over fifty. And it doesn't feel like a job, exactly. More like an ongoing experiment of some kind.
  
  Q Or have you thought about doing something entirely different - like learning to sew?
  A Or knit! Etsy beckons...
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 2nd, 2010, 5:59pm MDT by Bill

  From Anabel :
  Q How has being a father affected you? In the beginning and over the years?
  A In the beginning, it allowed me to write. My wife worked, teaching ESL at UBC, and I was househusband, daytime single parent, and novelist. Not easy, but a surprisingly good fit in many ways.
  
  Q Can you speak about the delights of getting to know your kids as they mature, without alienating your kids in public?
  A I wouldn't want to. As parent, it would feel insufficiently respectful, and as writer, potentially cheesy.
  
  From Colin:
  Q So, about that terrifying process again. You have four or five people reading your daily output. Do you plow through the draft from beginning to end, or do these poor (and/or extremely lucky) souls have to read things out of order or the same page six times as you revise it?
  A I show them the chapters as I write them, and I write them sequentially. If I don't get it right on the first try, I redo it and send it again. As I go along I revise the whole thing continually, piecemeal, but I don't update them on that. Finally I send them the manuscript. So they read it initially as a serial, every few days. I don't really do drafts, more a constant termite-like seething. I actually enjoy that aspect of the process. I feel like they're badly written but handsomely revised. Revision is largely stress-free. And they are, initially, in my opinion, not that well written. And while I know that they don't have to be, at that point, it still pains me.
  
  
  Q Do you give them the first first draft of the pages, or the first draft after you've decided you're either not embarrassed or not going to worry about being embarrassed?
  A I don't give them anything initially until I have what feels like a beginning. With Zero History, I think that was the first three chapters, which are longish, dense. That way, I feel like they know where we are. There's some kind of benchmark. Then we go on from there. Until recently, I could only have one outside first reader and my wife (and daughter, when she grew into it). Over the past decade or so, I've loosened up, found a greater degree of transparency, and I find that reduces the stress in some ways. For the past few months, writing daily, I found myself wondering what that would look like on a brain scan. I suspect there's some specific neurological activity, one that I can't necessarily produce at will. It's possible to get into a groove, though, and just do it, though at definite cost to everything else in one's life.
• 

  SPLITCOIL REMINDS ME...

  Posted: April 2nd, 2010, 1:11pm MDT by Bill

  Re an earlier question, I have in fact considered writing a Western. Protagonist's job is to see a shipment of high-tone Vancouver-refined opium from here to the finest divans of Manhattan. I don't know whether that ever happened, but it certainly could have. Digging in Strathcona back yards (particularly where outside toilets were located) still turns up the tiny, distinctive, branded, made-in-China bottles the local product was issued in. The last I saw for sale (the bottles) were in a fancy antique shop on South Granville, for about $100 each. Like mold-blown perfume bottles, a thin greenish glass. The late Victorian equivalent of plastic crack vials, I suppose, but prettier.
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 2nd, 2010, 12:19pm MDT by Bill

  From TwiliteMinotaur :
  Q You have spoken previously about the ghostly cloud of hypertext in which your manuscripts are now shrouded, and the way that blogging morsels of your latest writing has helped to alleviate some of the solitude of the writing process.
  A I sure have! And I've still got all of that going on, although until recently it's been mainly on Twitter. A platform Margaret Atwood and I find extremely agreeable (make of that what you will).
  Q Are there any additional neological emergences to your works and/or writing process that you've noticed during Zero History?
  A I am hoping that the phrase "the ugly t-shirt" (or simply "ugly t-shirt") will soon find its place in the jargon of security technology.
• 

  ...AND QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 2nd, 2010, 3:46am MDT by Bill

  from Gromit :
  Q Why 'GreatDismal'?
  A I had no idea what Twitter was, when a friend joined. GD happened to be in line of sight, so I used it for what I thought would be a ten-minute experience. I did live near the Great Dismal Swamp when I was five or six.
  
  From Wanderer :
  Q Why did you choose to make Bigend Belgian?
  A His full name was a found object. A Belgian one. And Belgians have a certain reputation, deservedly or not, for (1) globalism, (2) startling outbreaks of interesting perversity.
  Q And would he be Flemmish, Wallonian or from Brussels?
  A No idea.
  Q Also, is it intentional that neither his nor his mother's name is typically Belgian, though they sound like they could?
  A No, but it seems to fit.
  
  Fom LillyLyle :
  Q I just read this article about a scientist by the name of Milgrim: http://tinyurl.com/yhpg59u Is this the origin of the character Milgrim's name?
  A No. "Milgrim" is an old surname in the part of Virginia I grew up in. (So is "Wintermute", though exponentially less common.)
  
  From Trogdor :
  A You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
  Q I don't regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
  A The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
  Q But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!
• 

  WE GET QUESTIONS

  Posted: April 1st, 2010, 4:40pm MDT by Bill

  From Boogerhead :
  Q Is there an actual person that inspired the Finn?
  A No.
  
  From ][mez][ :
  Q Why novels?
  A Make a living at home, writing fiction!
  
  From digitalprimate :
  Q What's the process like from a physical standpoint?
  A Sedentary.
  Q Where do you write? When? For how long?
  A Most recently, in the library (which is really the dining room but who needs one?). 10AM til whenever, pretty much daily when it's happening.
  Q What do you eat or drink while writing?
  A Whatever's available.
  Q Do you write in Word? With pen and paper?
  A Word.
  Q Do you read or avoid reading certain things while you write?
  A I avoid reading most new fiction, while writing.
  
  From the Hydra :
  Q Why Ativan?
  A Wanted my addict character to have no trace of literary drug romanticism. Which is difficult, but benzos proved perfect.
  
  From Vesper :
  Q Which literary world would you like to live in? (Doesn't have to be of your making)
  A Not a fantasy I've ever had, actually.
  
  Q What would you say if someone picked up some of the characters from Sprawl or Bridge trilogies and wrote a book(s) with them? (Not-for-profit ones, let's say some decent fan-fic e-books)
  A Nothing. Mainly because I can't imagine being induced to read it. I don't even reread my own work, ordinarily.
  
  Q A book that you wish you had written but someone else did?
  A I don't understand the impulse. If someone else writes a book, I can't imagine writing it. My literary admiration never takes that form.
  
  From Splitcoil :
  Q What project have you considered seriously that your readers would probably find most surprising?
  A A space opera, but in the style of Paul Scott's novel The Chinese Love Pavillion. I actually had a contract, but bailed on it, wrote Count Zero instead. Envisioned as early Delany meets Andrew Eldritch, sort of.
  
  Q What do you think is the common thread (if there is one) between that project and your previous work?
  A "Earth is the alien planet."
  Q Why didn't you write it?
  A First novel had better reception than I'd expected. Cyberstuff seam seemed promising. Contracted publisher had ugliest dustjackets in history of genre.

Joel on Software

• 

  The Design of Design

  Posted: March 31st, 2010, 4:15pm MDT

  There is a new book out by Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month)!

  The Design of Design

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Stack Overflow Party

  Posted: March 31st, 2010, 2:46pm MDT

  The entire extended Stack Overflow team (including the Stack Exchange team) is meeting in New York in April to do some strategic planning. For example, we need to plan our Rock Band song lists, decide who gets to be on the drums and who is stuck with the USB cowbell, etc.

  If you’re going to be in the city on Tuesday, April 6th, we’d like to invite you to join us for a party and a chance to meet the team. This is also a chance to see the new Fog Creek office if you haven’t visited yet.

  If you want to come to the party, you must register. Please do not register if you’re not sure that you’re coming, as space is limited. Only people who are on the list will be admitted.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  QUESTIONS FROM THE BOARD

  Posted: March 31st, 2010, 6:34am MDT by Bill

  I can't answer all of these, owing to constraints of life-having, etc., but I will try to answer a few on a regular basis.
  
  First up is member Trogdor:
  
  Q: Logarithms. What the fuck is with logarithms? Also Toluene and Microfiber. WTF?
  
  A: I'm basically innumerate, and "logarithms" sound sexy to me. Kind of dirty, actually. But in a good way. Toluene is carcinogenic and smells like it is. Microfiber seems kind of miraculous to me, probably because I am old.
  
  Q: Have you ever thought about doing a western novel?
  
  A: I have sometimes thought of a Civil War novel. But only vaguely.
  
  Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?
  
  A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.
  
  Q: Least?
  
  A: They're all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I've learned, indicates that I'll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn't seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.
  
  Q: Seemed to me you enjoyed Spook Country. That so?
  
  A: As usual, I was terrified throughout. The pace seemed utterly glacial, to me. The essential thing is to have at least one trusted daily first reader. Four or five, even better. But the keyword is "trusted". When it comes to evaluating my own work, truly, my head has a contract out on my ass.
• 

  WHEW. IT'S DUSTY IN HERE...

  Posted: March 30th, 2010, 4:43pm MDT by Bill

  I've turned in the manuscript of Zero History, my new novel. Publication date is September 7, 2010.
  
  Just let me get a few windows open, get this place aired out, and we'll have a little blogging.
  
  Meanwhile, I'm @GreatDismal on Twitter.

Joel on Software

• 

  Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby

  Posted: March 17th, 2010, 6:25pm MDT

  A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and Git.

  In that podcast, I said, “To me, the fact that they make branching and merging easier just means that your coworkers are more likely to branch and merge, and you’re more likely to be confused.”

  
  This is what Taco looks like nowWell, you know, that podcast is not prepared carefully in advance; it’s just a couple of people shooting the breeze. So what usually happens is that we say things that are, to use the technical term, wrong. Usually they are wrong either in details or in spirit, or in details and in spirit, but this time, I was just plain wrong. Like strawberry pizza. Or jalapeño bagels. WRONG.

  Long before this podcast occurred, my team had switched to Mercurial, and the switch really confused me, so I hired someone to check in code for me (just kidding). I did struggle along for a while by memorizing a few key commands, imagining that they were working just like Subversion, but when something didn’t go the way it would have with Subversion, I got confused, and would pretty much just have to run down the hall to get Benjamin or Jacob to help.

  And then my team said, hey you know what? This Mercurial bug-juice is really amazing, we want to actually make a code review product that works with it, and, and, what’s more, we think that there’s a big market providing commercial support and hosting for it (Mercurial itself is freely available under GPL, but a lot of corporations want some kind of support before they’ll use something).

  And I thought, what do I know? But as you know I don’t really make the decisions around here, because “management is a support function,” so they took all the interns, all six of them, and set off to build a product around Mercurial.

  I decided I better figure out what the heck is going on with this “distributed version control” stuff before somebody asks me a question about the products that my company allegedly sells, and I don’t have an answer, and somebody in the blogo-“sphere” writes another article about me junking the sharp.

  And I studied, and studied, and finally figured something out. Which I want to share with you.

  With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part.

  The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions.

  That’s a very zen-like thing to say, I know. Traditional version control thinks: OK, I have version 1. And now I have version 2. And now I have version 3.

  And distributed version control thinks, I had nothing. And then I got these changes. And then I got these other changes.

  It’s a different Program Model, so the user model has to change.

  In Subversion, you might think, “bring my version up to date with the main version” or “go back to the previous version.”

  

  In Mercurial, you think, “get me Jacob’s change set” or “let’s just forget that change set.”

  If you come at Mercurial with a Subversion mindset, things will almost work, but when they don’t, you’ll be confused, unhappy, and unsuccessful, and you’ll hate Mercurial.

  Whereas if you free your mind and reimagine version control, and grok the zen of the difference between thinking about managing the versions vs. thinking about managing the changes, you’ll become enlightened and happy and realize that this is the way version control was meant to work.

  I know, it’s strange... since 1972 everyone was thinking that we were manipulating versions, but, it turned out, surprisingly, that thinking about the changes themselves as first class solved a very important problem: the problem of merging branched code.

  And here is the most important point, indeed, the most important thing that we’ve learned about developer productivity in a decade. It’s so important that it merits a place as the very last opinion piece that I write, so if you only remember one thing, remember this:

  When you manage changes instead of managing versions, merging works better, and therefore, you can branch any time your organizational goals require it, because merging back will be a piece of cake.

  I can’t tell you how many Subversion users have told me the following story: “We tried to branch our code, and that worked fine. But when it came time to merge back, it was a complete nightmare and we had to practically reapply every change by hand, and we swore never again and we developed a new way of developing software using if statements instead of branches.”

  Sometimes they’re even kind of proud of this new, single-trunk invention of theirs. As if it’s a virtue to work around the fact that your version control tool is not doing what it’s meant to do.

  With distributed version control, merges are easy and work fine. So you can actually have a stable branch and a development branch, or create long-lived branches for your QA team where they test things before deployment, or you can create short-lived branches to try out new ideas and see how they work.

  This is too important to miss out on. This is possibly the biggest advance in software development technology in the ten years I’ve been writing articles here.

  Or, to put it another way, I’d go back to C++ before I gave up on Mercurial.

  If you are using Subversion, stop it. Just stop. Subversion = Leeches. Mercurial and Git = Antibiotics. We have better technology now.

  Because so many people dive into Mercurial without fully understanding the new program model, which can leave them thinking that it’s broken and malicious, I wrote a Mercurial tutorial, HgInit.

  Today, when people ask me about that podcast where I dissed DVCS, I tell them that it was just a very carefully planned fake-out of my long time friend and competitor Eric Sink, who makes a non-distributed version control system. Like that time he started selling bug-tracking software, and, to punish him, we sent him a very expensive Fog Creek backpack with a fake form letter that made it look like we were doing so well that expensive backpacks were the standard Christmas gift we were sending every FogBugz customer.

  I seem to have run out the clock on this site. It has been an extreme honor to have you reading my essays over the last ten years. I couldn’t ask for a greater group of readers. Whether you’re one of the hundreds of people who volunteered their time to translate articles into over 40 languages, or the 22,894 people who has taken the time to send me an email, or the 50,838 people who subscribed to the email newsletter, or the 2,262,348 people per year who visited the website and read some of the 1067 articles I’ve written, I sincerely thank you for your attention.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Puppy!

  Posted: March 14th, 2010, 4:53pm MDT

  At  right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week!

  Some of you may have seen my final column in Inc., in which I announce my retirement from blogging effective March 18th, the 10-year anniversary of Joel on Software.

  Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. I look back on those Inc. columns and they literally don’t feel like mine. It’s as if somebody kidnapped me and replaced me with an indistinguishable imposter who went to Columbia Journalism School. Or I slipped into an alternate universe where Joel Spolsky is left-handed and everything he does is subtlely different.

  I’m not going to stop writing altogether.

  What I am stopping is the traditional opinionated essay that has characterized Joel on Software for a decade. I’m not going to write Ten Ways to Get VCs to Salivate, I’m not going to write Why You Have To Buy a $10,000 Italian Espresso Machine for your Programmers, and I’m not going to write Python is For Aspergers Geeks or Ruby is for Tear-streaked Emo Teenagers. After a decade of this, the whole genre of Hacker News fodder is just too boring to me personally. It’s still a great format... the rest of you, knock yourselves out... I just can’t keep doing that particular thing.

  There will still be some posts here—don’t unsubscribe. There will be announcements of new projects, stories of things that I’m doing, and links to other things I might write, like HgInit, the Mercurial tutorial.

  Philip Greenspun and Dave Winer (with DaveNet, even before Scripting News) pioneered the Internet Pundit style of essay writing which has served so well for fifteen years. They started as lone voices in a new medium, but the genre spread like wildfire. It was perfectly prognosticated in the 1990 Christian Slater movie Pump Up The Volume. If you’ve already forgotten it, here’s what happens (not a spoiler): Slater plays a kid with a low-power radio station in his bedroom, broadcasting in the middle of the night to the other isolated, angsty kids in his high school. Interesting drama ensues. 102 minutes later, by the time the credits roll, high school kids everywhere are spouting their opinions on their own pirate radio stations. And that’s exactly what happened with blogging, until we got where we are today, with millions of people expressing themselves and using the exact same narrative techniques and stories and styles that the first bloggers pioneered.

  What we need now, I feel, is not another essay repeating No Silver Bullet for the 18,000th time. We need something that is more objective (based on measurable truth and falseness rather than just lists of anecdotes about successful projects and failed projects). We need something that reflects the best new ideas about what authorship means in 2010, not just electronic forms of 18th-century pamphlets. We need to stop rewriting the same things again and again (fail fast! NDAs are worthless! Execution matters, not ideas! Use the right tools for the job!). Instead we should start filling in the long tail of knowledge.

  So that’s what I’m going to do with the next decade.

  More details on my faux retirement:

  • I’m drastically cutting back on speaking engagements. I already committed to speak at Business of Software 2010, in Boston in October, so that’s still on.
  • This week’s StackOverflow Podcast will be the last in that format. Jeff and I are working on a new format and will come up with something exciting, new and different, so stay tuned for the details, but the current format is getting kind of tired.
  • Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
  • The Joel on Software discussion group, in long decline, will close. The Business of Software group will remain open.

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Facebook / LinkedIn importers

  Posted: February 18th, 2010, 7:05am MST

  New StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if you’ve already put in your job and education history on LinkedIn or FaceBook. Try it out.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Raising money for StackOverflow

  Posted: February 14th, 2010, 7:21pm MST

  A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meeting more VCs, and doing a road show for the other firms that might be interested in investing.

  Jason (and his guest James Segil) both agree that we should take more time picking the right partner. We’re going to be in bed with these guys for years, they say, and we have to approach this like picking a spouse.

  Anyway, people emailed me in shock and surprise that we would even consider VC, considering the things I’ve written.

  
  flickr.com/photos/niznoz / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0Why are we seeking venture capital for StackOverflow?

  Almost ten years ago, I wrote about two kinds of companies, the Ben and Jerry’s type of company, which grows carefully and organically, and the Amazon type, which uses huge amounts of investment capital to get big quickly.

  At the time, I had no doubt that I wanted Fog Creek to be a Ben and Jerry’s type of company, and that model has served us well. By staying profitable and growing carefully, we’ve managed to survive two big downturns and we’ve grown into a stable, 34-person company that’s a great place to work and is likely to remain stable, and a great place to work, for a long time.

  StackOverflow, though, is a bit of a different story.

  There are a few indicators for the type of company that I believe can benefit from, and should take, VC.

  1. There’s a land grab going on. The business is in a new field with no competition, but the field has proven itself, and is obviously going to get very crowded very soon, so the faster you can grab territory, the better.
  2. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable. I always point to the example of the Starbucks IPO, which was brilliant because it was so simple. Every new Starbucks store that opened in Seattle became profitable in a matter of months. They tried a couple of stores in Chicago and Washington just to make sure it wasn’t a Seattle thing, and those worked even better. Thus, the formula of opening as many stores as possible was as close to a sure-thing as possible, so raising money was a no-brainer.
  3. The business itself could benefit from the publicity of getting an investment from someone who is thought of as being a savvy investor.
  4. The investor will add substantial value to the business in advice, connections, and introductions.
  5. The business can potentially have a big exit or become a large, publically traded company.
  6. The founders are not in it for their own personal aggrandizement and are happy to give up some control to make the business more successful.

  There are counter-indicators, of course: signs that you shouldn’t consider VC. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

  1. If the founders are risk-averse and are willing to trade a much smaller payout for lower risk.
  2. If the founders are technical without substantial business experience and wish to maintain absolute control forever.
  3. If the investor is mostly “dumb money,” i.e., someone who doesn’t know about the field. The proverbial dentist, who is happy to give you a half million bucks, but doesn’t know the first thing about CPMs and CPCs and CTOs, so you might as well not bother.
  4. If you’re going into an established field with a lot of competition, there’s no benefit to speed; you’re better off slowly building a niche business and growing from there, quietly taking one customer at a time away from the competitors.
  5. If the product is immature and unproven, in which case, expensive marketing efforts will be wasted proving to the world how bad your product is.
  6. If the founders don’t have enough of the right kinds of industry connections, or the idea is not compelling enough, so that raising VC would take months or years
  7. If there is any other way to raise the kind of money you need, for example, by selling actual products to customers.

  When I put all these things together the conclusion is that StackOverflow is one of those rare companies for which VC can really work. Jeff and I started out with a goal for StackOverflow of changing the way programmers and system administrators get answers to their questions on the Internet, which was deeply broken. In 18 months we’ve accomplish that: we’ve got 6 million unique visitors every month. Now we’re biting off the bigger goal of changing the way everyone gets answers to their questions on the Internet, and that’s something we can’t do alone.

  So, off I go, on a StackOverflow road show. I’ll be in Silicon Valley Feb 24-Mar 3; drop me a line if you want to get together.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Headcount

  Posted: February 11th, 2010, 8:12pm MST

  In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If you hire sales and marketing staff too early, they don’t really get much traction, and you may start to think that sales and marketing are a waste of time. This led me, in the early years, to believe that a healthy software company should have a lot of real software developers and maybe no sales and marketing.

  At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer... even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify. In the US Marines everyone, even the cooks, is a rifleman. Of course that’s because the cooks are in friggin Afghanistan getting shot at so they better be riflemen, whereas our receptionist almost never has to drop into the source code and bang out a class. Almost never.

  Over time, though, as your product gets better and better, the more sales and marketing people you hire, the more you sell.

  That’s because programmers multiply salespeople, and vice-versa.

  I’m a nerd, so I’ll be real math-y about this. Define the quality of your code on a scale from 0 to 1.

  0 means your product solves absolutely no problems for anybody so nobody in their right mind would ever buy it. Microsoft Bob.

  1 means that every single person on Earth, if they bought your software, would be net happier, even after paying your fee.

  Your software starts at 0 and slowly climbs up the hill.

  If everybody in the world knew about your software and was encouraged to evaluate it, the number that would buy it would be (Earth population) x Quality.

  Sales and marketing functions exist to encourage earthlings to find out about your software and evaluate it. These functions will have no effect on sales if your quality is extremely low. But as the quality gets higher, the value of sales and marketing goes up, commensurately. Double the quality, and the same sales effort yields double the revenue.

  The population of the planet is so large, and the effect of sales and marketing so hard to scale, that by the time your product is really great, the optimal ratio might be very heavily tilted in favor of sales and marketing. Large software companies might have 5 or 10 or 20 people in the sales organization for every developer.

  This explains, among other things, why US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development. The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed.

  It is not the case (as commonly believed by nerds) that marketing is a substitute for code quality. The best marketing in the world cannot force people to pay for a useless product.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Why testers?

  Posted: January 26th, 2010, 2:04pm MST

  My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach it not to jump on people, not to poop in the house, to sit on command, and to never, ever, ever chew on the iPad. Never. Good girl.

  With dogs the main trick to training is that feedback has to be immediate. If you come home to discover that, hours before, the dog tipped over the garbage can in the kitchen, it’s too late for training. You can yell at her but she just won’t get what you’re going on about. Dogs are just not that smart.

  For programmers, getting better at what you do requires quick feedback, positive and negative, on what you’ve just done. The faster you get the feedback, the faster you’ll learn. With long-cycle shrinkwrap software, it can take a year or more to hear feedback from customers.

  That’s one of the reasons we have testers. A great tester gives programmers immediate feedback on what they did right and what they did wrong. Believe it or not, one of the most valuable features of a tester is providing positive reinforcement. There is no better way to improve a programmer’s morale, happiness, and subjective sense of well-being than a La Marzocco Linea espresso machine to have dedicated testers who get frequent releases from the developers, try them out, and give negative and positive feedback. Otherwise it’s depressing to be a programmer. Here I am, typing away, writing all this awesome code, and nobody cares. Boo hoo.

  Who should be a tester? That’s tricky! Software testing is one of those careers that isn’t that well known, so a lot of people who would be great at testing and would probably enjoy it a lot never consider applying for jobs as testers.

  Signs of a good tester:

  • Scientific
  • Loves a good puzzle, even the kind that takes days to solve
  • Likes to think about things methodically
  • Generally likes working with software and computers

  You don’t have to be a programmer to be a tester. A lot of companies want testers to be programmers who write automated test suites. It seems more efficient that way. This reflects a misunderstanding of what testers are supposed to do, which is evaluate new code, find the good things, find the bad things, and give positive and negative reinforcement to the developers. Sure, automated test suites are a time saver, but testing software covers so much more than that. If you put too much emphasis on those scripts, you won’t notice misaligned text, hostile user interfaces, bad color choices, and inconsistency. Worse, you’ll have a culture of testers frantically working to get their own code working, which crowds out what you need them to do: evaluate someone else’s code.

  A particularly terrible idea is to offer testing jobs to the programmers who apply for jobs at your company and aren’t good enough to be programmers. Testers don’t have to be programmers, but if you spend long enough acting like a tester is just an incompetent programmer, eventually you’re building a team of incompetent programmers, not a team of competent testers. Since testing can be taught on the job, but general intelligence can’t, you really need very smart people as testers, even if they don’t have relevant experience. Many of the best testers I’ve worked with didn’t even realize they wanted to be testers until someone offered them the job.

  If you:

  • Love software and computers
  • Want to work on a software team, and
  • Don’t particularly like programming

  you should consider being a tester. (We’re hiring! What a coincidence!)

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Rocket Surgery Made Easy

  Posted: January 25th, 2010, 2:21pm MST

  Steve Krug has written a follow up to his usability classic Don’t Make Me Think. The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple “hallway” usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  A little less conversation

  Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 1:33pm MST

  “As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a ‘keep everyone on the same page’ problem. But often what they actually have is a ‘stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something’ problem.”

  From my latest Inc. column: A Little Less Conversation

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Secret language

  Posted: December 30th, 2009, 8:01am MST

  Microsoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!”

  This is ironic, to use the Alanis Morissette meaning of the word [NSFW video].

  The whole reason Microsoft even needs a v-team of 13, um, “V DASHES” to compete against Open Office is that they’ve become so insular that their job postings are full of incomprehensible jargon and acronyms which nobody outside the company can understand. With 93,000 employees, nobody ever talks to anyone outside the company, so it's no surprise they've become a bizarre borg of "KT", "Steve B", "v-team", "high WHI," CSI, GM, BG, BMO (bowel movements?) and whatnot.

  When I worked at Microsoft almost two decades ago we made fun of IBM for having a different word for everything. Everybody said, "Hard Drive," IBM said "Fixed Disk." Everybody said, "PC," IBM said "Workstation." IBM must have had whole departments of people just to FACT CHECK the pages in their manuals which said, "This page intentionally left blank."

  Now when you talk to anyone who has been at Microsoft for more than a week you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Which is OK, you can never understand geeks. But at Microsoft you can’t even understand the marketing people, and, what’s worse, they don’t seem to know that they’re speaking in their own special language, understood only to them.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  HAPPY HOLIDAYS

  Posted: December 24th, 2009, 11:44am MST by Bill

  "Mean what you say, but don't say somethin' mean. Have a blessed Solstice."
  
  --Dr. John (known as the Night Tripper) on Twitter today

Joel on Software

• 

  Let’s stop talking about “backups”

  Posted: December 14th, 2009, 8:30am MST

  Is your desktop backed up?

  Did you backup that server?

  Are your backups on a different machine?

  Do you have offsite backups?

  All good questions, all best practices.

  But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.

  And that’s when you discover that:

  • The backed-up files were encrypted with a cryptographically-secure key, the only copy of which was on the machine that was lost
  • The server had enormous amounts of configuration information stored in the IIS metabase which wasn’t backed up
  • The backup files were being copied to a FAT partition and were silently being truncated to 2GB
  • Your backups were on an LTO drive which was lost with the data center, and you can’t get another LTO drive for three days
  • And a million other things that can go wrong even when you “have” “backups.”

  The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore. If you’re running a web service, you need to be able to show me that you can build a reasonably recent copy of the entire site, in a reasonable amount of time, on a new server or servers without ever accessing anything that was in the original data center. The bar is that you’ve done a restore.

  Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Stack stats

  Posted: December 13th, 2009, 3:57pm MST

  The higher someone’s Stack Overflow reputation, the more likely they are to have submitted a CV to Stack Overflow Careers:

  

  This is not entirely surprising, of course: the more time someone has invested in Stack Overflow, the more likely they are to (a) know about Stack Overflow Careers, (b) be willing to invest $29, after all the hours they’ve already sunk, and (c) have the confidence that their CV is going to impress the kind of employers that are using the site.

  Still, the participation rate in Stack Overflow Careers is pretty impressive, and it somewhat confirms the claim we’re making to employers, which is that when you search for CVs on Stack Overflow, you are looking at some pretty gosh darn good programmers.

  While I’m rattling on about statistics, here’s a little bit of data about Stack Overflow traffic itself that you may not have seen.

  We use Quantcast to measure our traffic. Currently, they’re showing us as the 740th ranked site in the world (of all sites), with 6 million monthly unique visitors, 1.9 million from the US. And the growth is pretty steady, except for a couple of weeks at the end there which reflect the holiday season:

  

  Comparing our traffic to our big competitor is difficult because they don’t use Quantcast, so we have to rely on Alexa, which has a reputation for particularly terrible data, but here’s what that looks like:

  

  Are there any sites out there for programmers with more traffic than Stack Overflow? I haven’t found any, using the available data... even msdn.microsoft.com has less, according to Quantcast, but I find that hard to believe.

  In either case, having decided that Stack Overflow was the biggest programming site in the world, I thought, “hey, it should be easier for us to get ads.” I asked our ad guy, Alex “DailyWTF” Papadimoulis, if Microsoft had bought any ads. They’re about to launch Visual Studio 2010, which is probably going to have the biggest marketing campaign (in dollars) in the history of developer tools, and you’d think they’d want to spend something at the biggest programming site in the world. Here’s what he wrote back:

  “Microsoft is doing huge spends, but they’re going through McCann for the VS2010 launch (IIRC). Agencies really don’t like us. Now if we go to video units with fly-over… oh they’ll start loving us!”

  What he’s referring to is the fact that we don’t accept any kind of animated ads on Stack Overflow, because, well, they’re evil, so we lose a lot of revenue from advertising agencies who are looking for the most aggressive possible ways to get in people’s faces. Whatever. Don’t care. We hate animated ads and I’m pretty sure our users do, too.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  When and how to micromanage

  Posted: December 9th, 2009, 6:49pm MST

  “Like most entrepreneurs, Ryan and I are still learning about how to manage people and teams. And we’re both used to hiring very smart and dedicated people who will get things done to a high standard if you give them some general direction and set them free. But on this trip, we started to notice that this style of hands-off management, which works so well with our own staffs, just wasn’t working when we had outside vendors involved.”

  From my December column in Inc.: “When and How to Micromanage”

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Programmer search engine

  Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 3:24pm MST

  For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing them or deciding if they’re smart—it’s been finding them in the first place.

  What I’ve dreamed about is a programmer search engine.

  The ideal programmer search engine would only include programmers who are actually looking for jobs. If you’ve ever emailed someone based on a resume you found through a traditional search engine, you’ve probably discovered that they’re not actually on the market.

  It would only include people willing to work in your neck of the woods.

  It would show you CVs right away, and, ideally, it would show you something about their programming skills besides the usual resume blahblah.

  Well, OK, that day is here, and I’m like a kid in a candy store. Nom nom. Announcing the other half of careers.stackoverflow.com: the employer’s side!

  Right now, there are about 928 candidates on there. That’s a start. What’s more interesting is whether there’s a candidate who meets your needs.

  Let’s say you’re searching for a full time Java programmer within 40 miles of Palo Alto. Right now there are 11 candidates listed. All but one are active on StackOverflow... one even has reputation over 4000 points.

  Want a bit more choice? Check the box that indicates that you’re willing to relocate. Now there are 80 matches, all of whom have the legal right to work in the states. Candidates have a lot of flexibility indicating where they’re willing to work. Even if you need a Ruby on Rails programmer in Oklahoma City, as long as you’re willing to pay for relocation, you’ve got 7 choices. You’ve got 14 choices in London (with the legal right to work.) If you think that a Python programmer could learn Ruby, you’ve got 51 choices. There are plenty of choices whether you’re hiring in Tel Aviv, Sydney, Silicon Valley, or New York. There are four programmers in Copenhagen right now. No relocation required. All of them highly qualified, actually; any one of them would qualify to interview at Fog Creek.

  Stack Overflow Careers is something of a chicken-and-egg business. We have to get a big audience of programmers and a big audience of employers all at the same time, and then it’s like a junior high school dance, with the boys on one side of the gym and the girls on the other side, and for a while you just sit there holding your breath to see if anyone will dance. We invited a few hundred employers as beta testers... these were the companies that have been listing jobs on StackOverflow over the last six months, and so far, they’ve found a few dozen candidates that they liked. Once it gets to that point, we’re out of the loop, so we don’t really know how many people are actually finding jobs, but please email me your success stories and failure stories so we can keep working to make it better.

  In the meantime, Jeff and the StackOverflow crew have done something brilliant: they’ve made it possible to do searches and see how many candidates match even before you have to pay. So if you want to try it out but are afraid that there aren’t students looking for OCaml internships in Houston, you can try it, and find that there is, indeed, one. So, try it out right now. There’s no obligation, and we’re happy to give you your money back if you don’t think you got good value.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Apple's Mistake

  Posted: November 19th, 2009, 12:39pm MST

  "Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style. How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?"
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Upgrade your career

  Posted: November 5th, 2009, 6:34am MST

  Do you like your job?

  Do you enjoy the people you work with?

  Would you want to have lunch with them? Every day? Alex Papadimoulis thinks that Fog
  Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright Creek’s free lunches are “cultish,” but everyone at Fog Creek loves them. Maybe it’s the mandatory brain implant we install in each new worker, but I like to think that we just enjoy eating together because we genuinely like each other and like spending time together. If you can’t imagine eating lunch every day with your coworkers, I hate to break it to you: you might not like them. Is it OK to spend most of your waking hours with people you don’t like?

  Do you actually enjoy doing your job? If you wake up an hour early in the morning, do you think, “Yay! I can go in early and get another hour of work in!” Or does that sound ridiculous to you?

  Are you learning? When was the last time you had to learn a new skill? Is this year kind of like last year, or are you doing something new, stretching yourself, challenging yourself to be better?

  At one of the recent DevDays events, I asked the audience (almost 100% programmers) how many of them were incredibly satisfied with their job, found it fulfilling, and were treated well by their employers. Only about 25% of the hands went up. I asked how many people either hated their job and couldn’t wait to find something better, or were actually actively on the job market. Again, about 25%. The rest were somewhere in the middle: maybe they can tolerate their job, but they’re keeping an eye open for something better.

  Who is this DevDays audience? They’re the elite of the elite of the best programmers out there. They’re the people who participate in Stack Overflow, the people who read, the people who are constantly trying to learn more about programming and software development. More than half of them paid their own money to attend a one day conference. They’re the most desirable software developers on the planet. And 75% of them are not delighted with their job.

  That’s unacceptable. I’ve been saying for ten years that the top developers have a choice of where to work, and the top employers need to work harder to attract them, because the top developers get ten times as much work done as the average developers.

  And yet, I still keep meeting ridiculously productive developers working in shitholes.

  We’re going to fix this, right now. Thus, Stack Overflow Careers.

  We’re going to completely turn the job market upside down, for the best software developers and the best companies.

  This is a talent market. Developers are not even remotely interchangeable. Therefore, recruiting should work like Hollywood, not like union hiring halls of the last century.

  In a union hiring hall, downtrodden workers line up like cogs, hoping to make it to the front of the line in time to get a few bucks for dinner.

  In Hollywood, studios who need talent browse through portfolios, find two or three possible candidates, and make them great offers. And then they all try to outdo each other providing plush work environments and great benefits.

  Here’s how Stack Overflow Careers will work. Instead of job seekers browsing through job listings, the employers will browse through the CVs of experienced developers.

  Instead of deciding you hate your job and going out to find a better one, you’ll just keep your CV on file at Stack Overflow and you’ll get contacted by employers.

  Instead of submitting a resume, you’ll fill out a CV, which links back to your Stack Overflow account, so that you can demonstrate your reputation in the community and show us all how smart you really are. To a hiring manager, the fact that you took the time to help a fellow programmer with a detailed answer in some obscure corner of programming knowledge, and demonstrated mastery, is a lot more relevant than the Latin Club you joined in school.

  Employers can see how good you are at communicating, how well you explain things, how well you understand the tools that you’re using, and generally, if you’re a great developer or not. And they can see your peer reputation, so all that hard work you’ve been putting into helping people on Stack Overflow can karmically come back and help you upgrade your job to the latest, state-of-the-art, great place to work.

  Stack Overflow has grown incredibly fast. After a year in business, it gets over a million page views most weekdays and currently stands as the 817th largest site on the Internet, according to Quantcast. It reaches 5.2 million people a month. But Stack Overflow Careers doesn’t have to be massive. It’s not for the 5.2 million people who visit Stack Overflow; it’s for the top 25,000 developers who participate actively. It’s not for every employer; it’s for the few that treat developers well and offer a place to work that’s genuinely fulfilling.

  Read the FAQ, then go file your CV now, and upgrade your career.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

  Posted: November 3rd, 2009, 5:50pm MST

  My new Inc. column is up. “For a guy who wrote a book on how to hire great programmers, it’s mortifying how incompetent I’ve been at enlarging the sales team, which, right now, consists of one terrific account executive and a dog. (I’m just kidding. There’s no dog.)”

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Figuring out what your company is all about

  Posted: November 1st, 2009, 2:51pm MST

  What is your company about?

  Recently I got inspired by Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users and Head First series of books revolutionized developer education. She kept saying the same thing again and again: help your users be awesome.

  Kathy taught me that if you can’t explain your mission in the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,” you are not going to have passionate users. What’s your tagline? Can you fit it into that template?

  It took us nine years, but we finally worked out what Fog Creek Software is all about, which I’ll tell you in a moment, but first, some backstory.

  In the early days, we were all about making a great place to be a software developer in New York City.

  Yep, that was all there was to it. Almost every software job in the city was terrible. You had a choice of which kind of terrible. Want to wear a suit and work long hours under crummy conditions? Take a job at a bank. Want to report to a manic-depressive creative who demands that you stretch HTML in ways that would have you put to death, in certain countries? Take a job at a media company. Want to work 24/7 in a basement with water pipes dripping on your head and get paid in worthless stock options? Take your pick of the revenue-free dotcom startups.

  Why New York, then? There are lots of great product companies where software developers are treated very well in Redmond, Washington. But I was sick of trying to live in lesser cities. Sure, the Seattle area is beautiful, and green, and clean, and possesses great coffee, and I understand that there are even a couple of grocery stores open late now. But I’m staying in New York, because it’s the greatest city in the world.

  I gave up the search, and decided to start a company with my buddy Michael Pryor. Making a nice place to work was our primary objective. We had private offices, flew first class, worked 40 hour weeks, and bought people lunch, Aeron chairs, and top of the line computers. We shared our ingenious formula with the world:

  

  The tagline was “building the company where the best software developers want to work.” It was, to say the least, awkward. It didn’t make for a good elevator pitch. It didn’t really have the right format. “Abercrombie and Fitch: building the apparel store where the hottest teenagers will want to work.” Who cares? Not the hot teenagers, I’ll tell you that.

  Anyway we accomplished that goal. Cross it off the list. What’s next? We needed a new mission statement.

  And it has to be something of the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING.”

  Bells went off. Everything we’ve done successfully has one thing in common: It’s all about helping software developers be awesome at making software.

  That includes Joel on Software, Stack Overflow, all the books I’ve been writing, the conferences like DevDays and Business of Software, the Jobs Board and Stack Overflow Careers.

  It includes our flagship product, FogBugz, which is all about giving developers tools that gently guide them from good to great. It’s the software implementation of the philosophy I’ve been writing about for a decade, lacking only one thing: the feature to replace exceptions with return values, while adding Hungarian prefixes to all variable names. THAT IS A JOKE, PEEPLE. Put DOWN the bazooka.

  Helping you make more awesome software is why I write endlessly about what we’re doing at Fog Creek, despite the fact that people accuse me of shilling. I’m not writing to promote our products. You don’t have to buy our products to get the benefit of reading about my experience designing them and building them and selling them. I’m writing to share some of my experiences in case they can help you make better software.

  Our focus on helping developers explains why one of our early products, CityDesk, flopped: it had nothing to do with software developers. And it explains why another of our products, Fog Creek Copilot, only found a market in the niche of software developers doing tech support.

  So, here you go, the new tagline: “We help the world’s best developers make better software.”

  Going through this exercise made it easy to figure out what belongs in future versions of FogBugz and what doesn’t. In particular, we’re adding source control and code review features to FogBugz, using Mercurial, the best open-source distributed version control system. Everything that helps developers make better software belongs in FogBugz: project planning, project management, bug tracking, and customer service.

  It took almost ten years, but I think we finally got the mission for the next ten nailed.

  Optional Advertainment: If you’ve got a moment, check out this 4½ minute trailer for Make Better Software, a new video training series we’ve been working on for more than a year. It’s the video edition of Joel on Software and fits perfectly with our agenda of helping developers make great software.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Adam Bosworth on standards

  Posted: October 31st, 2009, 10:50pm MDT

  Adam Bosworth: “All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.” Required reading.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  What Startups Are Really Like

  Posted: October 28th, 2009, 1:39pm MDT

  "People just don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Capstone projects and time management

  Posted: October 26th, 2009, 6:36pm MDT

  It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

  Where are students supposed to learn about version control, bug tracking, working on teams, scheduling, estimating, debugging, usability testing, and documentation? Where do they learn to write a program longer than 20 lines?

  Many universities have managed to convince themselves that the more irrelevant the curriculum is to the real world, the more elite they are. It’s the liberal arts way. Leave it to the technical vocational institutes, the red-brick universities, and the lesser schools endowed with many compass points (“University of Northern Southwest Florida”) to actually produce programmers. The Ivy Leagues of the world want to teach linear algebra and theories of computation and Haskell programming, and all the striver CS departments trying to raise their standards are doing so by eliminating anything practical from the curriculum in favor of more theory.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At least they’re replacing Java with Scheme, if only because “that’s what MIT does.” (Too late!) And they are teaching students to think a certain way. And given how much the average CS professor knows about real-world software engineering, I think I’d rather have kids learn that stuff at an internship at Fog Creek.

  Greg Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, gave a talk at the StackOverflow DevDay conference in Toronto, which was entertaining, informative, and generally just a huge hit. We got to talking, and he told me about his latest brainchild, UCOSP, which stands for “All The Good Names Are Taken.”

  It’s a consortium of 15 universities, mostly in Canada, which are organizing joint senior-year capstone projects. They’re setting up teams of a half-dozen undergraduates from assorted universities to collaborate on contributing to an open source project, for credit and for a grade. As soon as I heard about the program I volunteered to sponsor a team to make a contribution to Mercurial. Sponsoring a team consists of offering to pay for a trip to Toronto for all the undergrads to get organized, and providing a programmer to mentor the team.

  Browsing around the UCOSP blog, I was reminded of why student projects, while laudatory, frequently fail to deliver anything useful. “One of the points of this course is to give you a chance to find out what it’s like to set and then meet your own goals,” Greg wrote. “The net result is pretty clear at this point: in many cases, students are doing less per week on this course than they would on a more structured course that had exactly the same content.”

  College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute. Until you’re a senior in college, you’re very unlikely to have ever encountered an assignment that can’t be done by staying up all night.

  The typical CS assignment expects students to write the “interesting” part of the code (in the academic sense of the word). The other 90% of the work that it takes to bring code up to the level of “useful, real-world code” is never expected from undergrads, because it’s not “interesting” to fix bugs and deal with real-world conditions, and because most CS faculty have never worked in the real world and have almost no idea what it takes to create software that can survive an encounter with users.

  Time management is usually to blame. In a group of four students, even if one or two of the students are enterprising enough to try to start early in the term, the other students are likely to drag their heels, because they have more urgent projects from other classes that are due tomorrow. The enterprising student(s) will then have to choose between starting first and doing more than their fair share of the work, or waiting with everyone else until the night before, and guess which wins.

  Students have exactly zero experience with long term, team-based schedules. Therefore, they almost always do crappy work when given a term-length project and told to manage their time themselves.

  If anything productive is to come out of these kinds of projects, you have to have weekly deadlines, and you have to recognize that ALL the work for the project will be done the night before the weekly deadline. It appears to be a permanent part of the human condition that long term deadlines without short term milestones are rarely met.

  This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum. Once a week, the team gets together, in person or virtually, and reviews the previous week’s work. Then they decide which features and tasks to do over the next week. FogBugz would work great for tracking this: if you’re doing a capstone project and need access to FogBugz, please let us know and we’ll be happy to set you up for free. We can also set you up with beta access to kiln, our hosted version of Mercurial, which includes a code review feature.

  I’ve been blaming students, here, for lacking the discipline to do term-length projects throughout the term, instead of procrastinating, but of course, the problem is endemic among non-students as well. It’s taken me a while, but I finally learned that long-term deadlines (or no deadlines at all) just don’t work with professional programmers, either: you need a schedule of regular, frequent deliverables to be productive over the long term. The only reason the real world gets this right where all-student college teams fail is because in the real world there are managers, who can set deadlines, which a team of students who are all peers can’t pull off.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem

  Posted: October 8th, 2009, 8:20pm MDT

  Why does WiFi work so poorly at tech conferences?

  
  Marcus GriepI assume that WiFi wasn’t really designed to handle a big ballroom with 2000 people, all trying to connect with their laptops and cell phones at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I’m lucky if it works in my apartment. So I never thought it was even possible to get it to work at a large, technically-savvy conference. At Stack Overflow DevDays, yesterday in Boston, the bandwidth seemed OK but the DHCP server ran out of addresses. This didn’t seem to be something that anyone could fix. The conference organizers (er, me and Greg) were incredibly busy trying to, you know, organize the conference, so spending time tracking down the mysterious ISP and making them fix their router was impossible.

  It’s almost getting boring to read the conference reports complaining about this. Almost every conference, even the ones put on by fancy tech companies, has trouble. I never assume WiFi is going to work whenever I’m in a room with that many techies.

  At the smaller conferences, the ones with, say, 300-1000 people, the trouble is that internet access is something of a black box. If you’re a conference organizer, your first priority is finding a space—any space—because there usually aren’t a lot of options. For example if you want to put on an event for 500 people in Seattle, there are probably 20 hotels that can accomodate you and maybe 10 other non-hotel venues. For the date you want, 3/4s of them are booked. You end up choosing between three options, if you’re really lucky. The venue with the best Internet access would be nice, but there are so many other considerations that you don’t really think about this when you’re booking the space. Besides, all the venues tell you they have fantastic, soo-perb A-number-1 internet access. When you try to ask complicated questions and explain that your conference has a lot of techies, they say, yes, we understand, we have A-number-1 internet access, no problem very good. When you say, “Yeah, but have you configured your DHCP server so that it has more than the default 254 IP addresses available to hand out,” they have no idea what on earth you’re talking about, and of course it turns out that they had some vendor, a company you’ve never heard of, provide their internet access. And half the time, that vendor installed a DSL line from the local telco and hooked it up to a LinkSys WRT54g they got at Costco, then installed some kind of crappola welcome-screen software just to make it even worse, and then disappeared.

  
  Marcus GriepThere are steps that can be taken. Here’s an interesting study [PDF] done by Intel about making WiFi work at large conferences. The best idea I got from that was that there should be as many hardwired network access points as possible, to get the heavy users off the air, because ethernet has way more bandwidth. There are companies that specialize in making WiFi systems that will support large conferences: one that I found is called Meraki; I don’t know much about them but their website sure makes it seem like they understand the issues at least.

  At the very least, though, a venue should be able to tell you how many access points they actually have (if it’s just one, you’ve got problems), whether they are managed access points or not, whether dedicated ports with higher priority can be provided for the speakers and for journalists that do not share bandwidth with the audience, how many IP addresses the DHCP server can provide, the total number of people that can be online at once, and the amount of bandwidth available to the entire site. If you can’t get good answers to these questions before the conference begins, you have to assume that they’ll be running a single, consumer router connected to a DSL line and that’s about all you get.

  What are some of the best practices for conference organizers? What questions should they ask the conference venue or ISP to know, in advance, if the WiFi is going to work? What are the most common causes of crappy WiFi at conferences? Are they avoidable, or is WiFi simply not an adequate technology for large conferences? I thought I’d ask on ServerFault, so if you have any ideas, have at it!

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  The Duct Tape Programmer

  Posted: September 23rd, 2009, 7:58pm MDT

  Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.

  When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but it’ll sure as hell fly.

  I just read an interview with Jamie in the book Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel. Go buy it now. It’s a terrific set of interviews with some great programmers, including Peter Norvig, Guy Steele, and Donald Knuth. This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading. Like I said, go buy it.

  Go! I’ll wait.

  Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritance from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM. And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he does go away, he’s just going back into his office to write more of his clever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritance from templates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

  And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

  You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.

  Here’s what Zawinski says about Netscape: “It was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time.”

  Later, he wrote an email client at Netscape, but the team that was responsible for actually displaying the message never shipped their component. “There was just this big blank rectangle in the middle of the window where we could only display plain text. They were being extremely academic about their project. They were trying to approach it from the DOM/DTD side of things. ‘Oh, well, what we need to do is add another abstraction layer here, and have a delegate for this delegate for this delegate. And eventually a character will show up on the screen.’”

  Peter asked Zawinski, “Overengineering seems to be a pet peeve of yours.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”

  My hero.

  Zawinski didn’t do many unit tests. They “sound great in principle. Given a leisurely development pace, that’s certainly the way to go. But when you’re looking at, ‘We’ve got to go from zero to done in six weeks,’ well, I can’t do that unless I cut something out. And what I’m going to cut out is the stuff that’s not absolutely critical. And unit tests are not critical. If there’s no unit test the customer isn’t going to complain about that.”

  Remember, before you freak out, that Zawinski was at Netscape when they were changing the world. They thought that they only had a few months before someone else came along and ate their lunch. A lot of important code is like that.

  Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

  One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

  Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a shit what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.

  One thing you have to be careful about, though, is that duct tape programmers are the software world equivalent of pretty boys... those breathtakingly good-looking young men who can roll out of bed, without shaving, without combing their hair, and without brushing their teeth, and get on the subway in yesterday’s dirty clothes and look beautiful, because that’s who they are. You, my friend, cannot go out in public without combing your hair. It will frighten the children. Because you’re just not that pretty. Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick. They have to be good enough programmers to ship code, and we’ll forgive them if they never write a unit test, or if they xor the “next” and “prev” pointers of their linked list into a single DWORD to save 32 bits, because they’re pretty enough, and smart enough, to pull it off.

  Did you buy Coders at Work yet? Go! This was just the first chapter!

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Persuade or Discover

  Posted: September 22nd, 2009, 1:39pm MDT

  "I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words, and you have to choose one or the other. If you want to please people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You're always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  Post-Medium Publishing

  Posted: September 17th, 2009, 1:39pm MDT

  "What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  The List of N Things

  Posted: September 8th, 2009, 1:39pm MDT

  "Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Mainly because it's easier to read than a regular article. Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure. In a list of n things, this work is done for you."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Countdown challenge

  Posted: September 8th, 2009, 9:56am MDT

  This month we’re starting to get organized for StackOverflow DevDays, a series of one-day, mini conferences in ten different cities. Because of the packed schedule, keeping on time is very important, so I want to have a full-screen countdown application that we can run during intermissions warning people when we’re going to resume. We’ll put this up on the main screen and hopefully that will encourage people to sit down and be quiet on time. I thought this would be a great opportunity to showcase the StackOverflow community’s programming talent, so I posted a little contest over on meta.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Upcoming startup workshop in San Francisco

  Posted: September 2nd, 2009, 6:54pm MDT

  I’m organizing a half-day startup workshop in San Francisco. This would be a terrific event to attend if you’ve recently started a software company and feel dazed, confused, or just want to bounce ideas off of someone who’s been there.

  We’ll keep it small so everybody gets a chance to be heard. Space is extremely limited.

  It’s a bonus supplement to the Business of Software conference, which is Nov. 9-11 in San Francisco.

  Although the startup workshop itself is free, you do have to pay for for that conference, which is not free, in fact, it’s kind of expensive (but totally worth every penny!) I know it’s kind of expensive for very early stage startups, but trust me on this, it’s worth it.

  Here’s what happens. After the main conference finishes up on Wednesday, we’ll divide up into three groups. Each group will do three 90 minute workshops, moderated by:

  1. Neil Davidson and Simon Galbraith, the founders of Red Gate Software. Red Gate is a software company in Cambridge, England, founded in 1999, which has now grown to about 160 people. It was founded with no VC and little debt. In 2006 it was Cambridge News business of the year and has been in the Sunday Times top 100 places to work for the last three years running. They’ve recently launched Springboard, an amazing startup incubator that provides advice, office space, free lunch, and pocket money, and takes no equity in return.
  2. Joel Spolsky (oh wait that’s me) and Michael Pryor, the founders of Fog Creek Software.
  3. Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, a software platform for internet marketing. Previously he founded Pyramid Digital Solutions, a bootstrapped company acquired by SunGard. Most of you know him from his blog OnStartups.com or from the terrific talk [video] he gave at last year’s conference.

  The format is very open. It’s a chance to chat, bounce ideas around, ask questions, solve specific problems, get feedback, and learn from each other.

  After the workshops we’ll regroup with Jason Calacanis, who will do a live broadcast of his podcast This Week in Startups and take your questions live. Jason is on his third startup. The first, Silicon Alley Reporter, was the flagship magazine of New York City’s short-lived dot com boom; after the crash of 2000 it closed down. His second startup was Weblogs Inc, the first really serious commercial blog network, which sold to AOL for an undisclosed sum (let’s call it $25 million, shall we?) After turning netscape.com into a Digg clone, Jason spent some time at a fancy-pants VC firm, Sequoia Capital, where he hatched the idea for his current startup, Mahalo, which they funded. Anyway now he’s got this terrific podcast and he’ll be doing it live and we’ll be his audience, so you’ll have a rare chance to ask Jason questions in person and hear him pontificate.

  Here’s how to sign up.

  If you haven’t registered for BOS2009 yet, go do that. During the registration process, you’ll see a checkbox that says “I'd like to come to Joel's startup bootcamp”. It’s not a bootcamp, really. You won’t have to do pushups or work very hard. But check that box anyway.

  If you already registered for BOS2009, follow this link. Click on “Already Registered.” Log on, and look for the link that says Event Fees. Why does it say that? I don’t know. After you click on that link you’ll be able to check the box that says “I'd like to come to Joel's startup bootcamp”. It’s still not a bootcamp. Really. Bootcamp is where you run around in circles for 20 weeks without getting more than four hours of sleep a night while drill sergeants barely a year older than you foam at the mouth and berate you endlessly like that time Tom Hanks flips out at Bitty Schram in A League of Their Own. “There’s no crying in baseball!” Anyway, NOT THAT AT ALL. This will be more of a friendly conversation with successful software startup founders. Not bootcamp.

  Space is extremely limited: there will be three groups of 24 founders each. No more than two attendees per startup, please. See you in San Francisco!

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Being Number One

  Posted: September 1st, 2009, 8:13pm MDT

  At last year’s Business of Software conference, I gave a talk about designing products that are more than just adequate. How do you make a product that becomes a category-killer, number one, super hit? What is it that gives the Apple iPod 90% market share?

  Neil Davidson has the video of my talk online (it’s about 46 minutes).

  This year’s conference is going to be great. There are still a few tickets available. It’s November 9th-11th in San Francisco. This is a conference that’s all about terrific speakers: Geoffrey Moore, Don Norman, Paul Graham, Heidi Roizen, Jennifer Aaker, Michael Lopp (“Rands”), Ryan Carson, Paul Kenny, Dharmesh Shah, Kathy Sierra, Mat Clayton, and The Cranky Product Manager are all confirmed speakers. Register now before it’s too late!

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  New startup incubator in Cambridge, England

  Posted: August 13th, 2009, 12:53pm MDT

  Red Gate Software has launched a startup incubator in Cambridge. Free office space, internet access, room, board, advice, and pocket money. (I’m one of the people giving advice). For a first, it’s really free; Red Gate isn't taking stock in the companies it helps. “We think that getting to know smart people doing interesting things will, in the long term, be good for Red Gate. In the future, we might end up licensing your technology, investing in your company or maybe even buying it. Or maybe we won’t. Ultimately, all deals come down to relationships. So we want to build them.”

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Seth Godin at the Business of Software Conference

  Posted: July 31st, 2009, 9:17am MDT

  Seth Godin: “If you’re going to interrupt everybody with an ad, it better be something everybody wants to buy. So what do you end up with? Average products for average people.”

  If you’ve ever heard Seth speak, you’ve had your mind blown. Which is why, on the rare occasion, when he runs a one-day seminar, he charges $1650 to attend, and it sells out in seconds.

  At last year’s Business of Software conference, Seth’s keynote was the highlight of the show. Thanks to a very generous offer by Seth, you can watch the full hour online.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  MY POOR OLD BLOG'S JUST SITTING HERE...

  Posted: July 30th, 2009, 3:48pm MDT by Bill

  While I write this book.
  
  Meanwhile, however, try this:
  
  @GreatDismal
  
  I really do find microblogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.

Joel on Software

• 

  The Day My Industry Died

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 2:53pm MDT

  “Every single industry was going to be turned upside down! New industries would be created! Start-ups would make people rich! Which is really nice, because it's awesome to be rich! And, bonus: It'll never be winter again!”

  In this month’s Inc. column, The Day My Industry Died, I retell the first part of the Fog Creek story.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Web Startup Success Guide

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 2:44pm MDT

  Congratulations to Bob Walsh on publishing his Web Startup Success Guide (to which I wrote the foreword). His interview with GTD Guru David Allen, which is chapter 8, can be read online.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  EBS 2.0

  Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 2:41pm MDT

  Brett Kiefer describes Evidence Based Scheduling 2.0 on the FogBugz Blog: “EBS 2.0 gives you the vocabulary of strict dependencies and start dates. You can now say ‘No one can travel back in time until the Flux Capacitor is complete and the duped terror cell steals the plutonium.’”

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

  Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 1:39pm MDT

  "A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Gibson Blog

• 

  DUNCAN JONES' MOON

  Posted: July 20th, 2009, 12:39pm MDT by Bill

  My favorite sf on film usually consists of brief luminous moments in what are generally rather low-budget and often actually very bad movies. The outstanding big-budget exceptions of course being Alien and Blade Runner. Duncan Jones' Moon challenges my aesthetic of brilliant pebbles, though, because it's so tightly and consistently excellent. It does everything I want an sf film to do, and none of the things I don't want an sf film to do. How did *that* ever happen?

Joel on Software

• 

  Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here

  Posted: July 20th, 2009, 11:00am MDT

  A year ago today, FogBugz development was in disarray.

  
  The original roadmap was too complicatedWe had done this big offsite at a beach house in the Hamptons and came up with a complicated roadmap that involved splitting FogBugz into two separate products and two separate teams. We had done a lot of work on the architecture that made the product much more modular, but we had this goofy plan to do a major release containing virtually no new features, just to let the new architecture shake out, a plan which nobody was very excited about.

  So, on July 31, 2008, we reset our plans. We gave up on the idea of shipping a standalone Wiki product, and merged the Wiki team with the FogBugz team. And we nailed down a new vision for FogBugz 7 that’s a lot easier to understand and a much better product: something we could ship in one year.

  Then the development team shipped it. Exactly on schedule. Well, maybe a week or two early. They used Evidence Based Scheduling religiously on this large one year project and it worked amazingly well. Yes, they had to cut and trim features as they went along, but the accuracy of the estimates also gave them the confidence to add a couple of major features (like Scrum support) that you’ll love.

  One of the best things we did as a development team was to write a short, concise, comprehensible vision statement that got everybody exactly on the same page about what we were going to do over the course of a year. The vision statement made it easy to prioritize. Instead of just telling us what was in the product, it also gave us a way to know what was out.

  Here’s the vision statement, in its entirety, which is a pretty good description of what we are actually shipping today. Please excuse the tone of voice; remember that this was an internal document to galvanize the team.

  Fog Creek Confidential FogBugz 7

  As of August, 2008, the entire FogBugz and Weeble teams are working towards a single major new release of FogBugz that will blow away our customers (real and imaginary). When they see it they will grow weak in the knees. Competitors will shiver in fear at the monumental amount of win in this release. As customers evaluate the software, they will simply never find a reason not to use FogBugz to run their software teams. No matter what the grumpy people on their team come up with, they'll find that not only have we implemented it in FogBugz, we've done it in a FULL-ASSED way. No more HALF-ASSED features (I'm looking at you, logo customization in FogBugz 6.1).

  This release has three important focus areas with friendly catchnames.

  1. fruity treats
  2. customization
  3. supersonics

  If it's NOT ON THAT LIST it's NOT IN THE PRODUCT. Get used to it.

  fruity treats
  

  FogBugz 7.0 will include a long list of simple improvements that will make life dramatically easier for people trying to get things done, especially when they want to do things just a wee bit differently than we do here in the Land of the Fog. Every little feature will be a delight for somebody, especially that person who keeps emailing us because he can't believe that the feature he wants which is obviously only six lines of code hasn't been implemented in FogBugz 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, "4.5", or 6.0, and if we don't get it soon he JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS.

  Collectively, though, fruity treats will make FogBugz friggin' amazing, and they'll help us win more sales because we won't have so many showstopper reasons why people choose another so-called bug "tracker."

  What's a fruity treat? It must fit these three rules to get into the 7.0 orchard:

  1. It must be something customers and potential customers are asking about all the time
  2. There must not be a trivial, easy workaround in 6.1
  3. It must be relatively easy for us to implement. No big earth-shaking new features will sneak in.
  4. "Three rules," I said. Not four. Why is there a 4 here?

  Visit the shared filter FogBugz 7 Fruity Treats to see what's coming up.

  customization

  FogBugz 7.0 will include our smashingly powerful new plug-in archicture, which, combined with the FogBugz API, will give people complete confidence that if there's anything FogBugz can't do out of the FogBox, you can write it yourself. No more will we tell customers "you get the source code, so you can modify it!" That's BS. They know perfectly well that if they modify our source code, terribobble tragedies will occur the minute we release a service pack. From now on, we can say, "there's a great plug in architecture and a whole online cornucopia of righteous plug-ins available for download."

  So you can trick out your FogBugz installation like a lowrider or an off-road dune buggy. You can make it into a Cadillac or a space shuttle. It's up to you.

  supersonics
  

  Thanks to the newfangled, all-electronic compilation machine ("Wasabi") that we had installed at great expense, FogBugz will be running on the CLR and Mono for greatly improved performance and compatibility. Whiz zip blip! bleep! You'll be able to run 1000s of users on one server. Long queries will finish faster. Laundry will be brighter.

  and that is it.
  

  Nothing else. Go fix yourself an icy lemonade.

  The team got pretty excited. Having a sharp focused vision statement like that, and having the whole team working towards a single shared goal, really helped us get our house in order. We scrubbed through thousands of backlogged ideas, feature requests, and comments, and came up with a set of fruity treats that will eliminate virtually every customer objection that we hear during the sales process. We developed a comprehensive plug-in architecture that’s pretty amazing, and had interns develop a slew of slick plug-ins. And the fact that Wasabi is now a genuine .NET language made for substantial performance improvements over running on the VBScript “runtime.”

  I’ll let the team give you a comprehensive look at what’s new in FogBugz 7, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Subcases: organize your work hierarchically
  • EBS can track the schedule of developers who work on multiple projects
  • EBS also now has dependencies (work on X can’t start until Y is complete)
  • Scrum is fully supported, with project backlogs and EBS-powered burndown charts
  • Just about the slickest implementation of tags you’ve ever seen
  • Plug-ins, with comprehensive support throughout the product
  • Customizable workflow
  • Lots of visual improvements and small usability enhancements
  • A context menu in the grid saves steps
  • Easier case entry right from the grid
  • Auto complete in case fields, so you don’t have to remember case numbers
  • Custom fields (Yes. They tied me up in a closet.)
  • URL triggers (FogBugz will hit a URL you specify when certain events happen)
  • Easier administration, through an administrator dashboard, and a feature for cloning users and creating a list of new users all at once
  • Much better performance, including substantial caching that speeds up display of email, EBS calculations, and more

  Those are just the big-ticket items. FogBugz 7 is rife with little areas where the development team put a ridiculous amount of attention to detail. For example, the signup process, which is actually very complicated on the backend, became much simpler on the front end, due to a heroic amount of work that every user will only see once. If you do nothing else, check out the signup process to see the effort that went into making signup just a tiny bit faster. Another example: we completely replaced the entire email processing infrastructure, just because there were tiny corner case bugs that simply could not be solved with the commercial class library we had been using.

  
  Tyler Griffin Hicks-WrightI wish I could take more credit for it, but the truth is, Fog Creek has grown. We have a very professional team with testers, program managers, and developers, and I just sort of sit here agog at what a brilliant job they’re doing. All of the credit for this fantastic new product goes to them. I’m just the Michael Scott character who wastes everybody’s time whenever I venture out of my office.

  FogBugz 7 is shipping today for Windows servers and on our own, hosted infrastructure. The Mono version (for Macintosh and Linux) will be in beta soon. To try it, go to try.fogbugz.com.

  If you’re currently using FogBugz on Demand, you’re already using 7.0.

  If you run FogBugz on your own server and have an up-to-date support contract, the upgrade is free, otherwise, bring your support contract up-to-date and you’ll be good to go.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH

  Posted: July 17th, 2009, 1:56am MDT by Bill

  "Aleph" as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever.
  
  Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring:
  PingWire
  
  Because you can't step in the same river twice.
• 

  GOOD THING I'M NOT AN ACADEMIC

  Posted: July 15th, 2009, 10:41am MDT by Bill

  Had planned to sort through all the responses to my Orwell quote query and lay the result out here, but it turns out that I am a working novelist (among other things). So here's what I would tell you if you ran into me on the street and asked me about it: I doubt Orwell wrote it. It may have been cobbled together from a line in his essay on nationalism, and another, quoting Kipling, in his essay on Kipling. Weirdly, the very nearest thing to it is an authentic Churchill quote. As to how it became widely accepted as an Orwell quote, your guess is as good as mine. A great many of the people who most enjoy quoting it, I imagine, would actually be happier with it if it were a Churchill quote.
• 

  QUERY: RE THE AUTHORITARIAN'S FAVORITE ORWELL QUOTE

  Posted: July 12th, 2009, 9:06am MDT by Bill

  "People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
  
  Often this is given as "Good people..."
  
  I have been unable to source this back to a specific piece of GO's prose. Have encountered the opinion that it is not an actual GO quotation.
  
  Can anyone help? Thanks.

Joel on Software

• 

  Why Wolfram Alpha fails

  Posted: July 9th, 2009, 3:25pm MDT

  Mencius Moldbug: “They create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains. Of course, since the giant electronic brain is a million lines of code which is constantly changing, this is a painful, inadequate and error-prone task.”

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  The eternal optimism of the Clear mind

  Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 9:32pm MDT

  Clear just closed down.

  Here’s how it worked while it was in business. You paid $200 for a one-year membership. You underwent a big, complicated background check to prove that you were extra-super-trustworthy.

  In exchange, in a few big airports, you got to skip to the front of the TSA line for screening.

  Now, you didn’t skip the screening itself. You still went through the X-ray machine and had to remove your shoes, belt, pocket contents, laptops, and plastic quart ziplock bag of toiletries.

  You just got to cut to the front of the line.

  A few people signed up. In certain airports, it was, indeed, worth actual money to cut to the front of the line.

  This wasn’t Clear’s actual business plan. The actual business plan was that Clear would do detailed background checks on travellers, who would then be trusted to bypass security completely because they were extra-super-trustworthy.

  Now, the TSA doesn’t even trust pilots, who go through the same screening as the rest of us to make sure they’re not bringing something extraordinarily dangerous onto a plane like a 3.5 oz bottle of shampoo. Because, of course, with a little bottle of shampoo, they could make a bomb, which they could use to fly the plane they are piloting into a building, something that is impossible for mere pilots sitting at the controls of the jet.

  So as it turns out, the TSA never actually agreed to go along with this skipping-the-screening thing, and ultimately, all Clear was allowed to do was get you to the front of the line.

  At this point, and here’s the interesting part, at this point, a rational businessperson would say, “Well, does the Clear idea still make sense if we can’t actually let you skip the screening?”

  OK, maybe it still makes sense to charge to skip to the front of the line. Maybe there’s a business model in that.

  In that case, though, why did they still do background checks? It doesn’t make any sense.

  The environment changed. It turns out that Clear’s business model of prescreening wasn’t going to be possible. But they kept doing it anyway. What kind of organizational dysfunction does it take to completely ignore the changed circumstances and keep at a money-losing business?

  What’s even funnier is that Clear could probably have been profitable if they had just skipped the one unnecessarily stupid part of their business model: the detailed background checks on all their customers.

  Nobody at Clear did any thinking. They had a business model, the business model wasn’t actually possible, everybody knew it, and they still plugged away at it. Thoughtless optimism. I don’t know whether to salute ‘em or laugh.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE

  Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 3:46am MDT by Bill

  'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?'
  
  -- Ta-Nehisi Coates
• 

  "LAWFUL INTERCEPT FUNCTIONALITY"

  Posted: June 21st, 2009, 1:03pm MDT by Bill

  Nokia Siemens Networks on the job in Iran.
• 

  FRANZ KAFKA, MEN'S OUTERWEAR DESIGNER

  Posted: June 18th, 2009, 2:45pm MDT by Bill

  He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for.
  
  "Who are you?" asked K., sitting half upright in his bed.
  
  --The Trial
• 

  FESTO AIR JELLY

  Posted: June 10th, 2009, 4:06pm MDT by Bill

  I have become a huge fan of all things Festo .

Joel on Software

• 

  Platform vendors

  Posted: June 10th, 2009, 1:45pm MDT

  Dave Winer (in 2007): “Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.”

  iSmashPhone: 15 Apps Rendered Obsolete By The New iPhone 3GS

  When independent software developers create utilities, add-ons, or applications that fill a hole in their platform vendor’s offering, they like to think that they’re doing the vendor a huge favor. Oh, look, the iPhone doesn’t have cut and paste,  they say. Business opportunity! They might imagine that this business will be around forever. Some of them even like to daydream about the platform vendor buying them up. Payday!

  The trouble is that only a tiny percentage of iPhone users are going to pay for that little cut and paste application. With any kind of add-on, selling to 1% of the platform is a huge success.

  For Apple, that’s a problem. That means that the cut and paste problem isn’t solved for 99% of their customers. They will solve it, if it’s really a problem. And you’ll be out of business.

  Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller.

  A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for dentists. Zero.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.