July 2007 - Posts

• Year-end chaos

  Liz and I have been working to get ready for the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour , in which I travel from city to city (accompanied by a programmer) giving demos of all the cool features in the upcoming version. This is basically about the same logistical complexity... Posted Jul 25 2007, 02:22 PM by Joel on Software

• The universe aligns to prove my point

  Clay : “...the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’”... Posted Jul 20 2007, 08:25 AM by Joel on Software

• Learning from Dave Winer

  Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it's worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn't allow them). "...to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression... Posted Jul 19 2007, 08:59 PM by Joel on Software

• Open house today

  Reminder! The annual Fog Creek open house is today (Thursday), so if you're in New York, I'd love to meet you in person and show you around. Come on by between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm to see our offices and meet the Fog Creek team including this years'... Posted Jul 18 2007, 06:01 PM by Joel on Software

• Gearing up

  I'm still working ferociously on getting ready for the FogBugz World Tour. We won't have the final list of cities until we can get hotel meeting rooms confirmed in each city, but it looks like the first round will hit about 20 cities in the US... Posted Jul 16 2007, 02:01 PM by Joel on Software

• Vesting

  Steve from Richmond, VA, wrote in to ask a couple of questions: “With software development, is it better to get something out there with customers and then continually improve or build the best wiz-bang software and then start marketing?”... Posted Jul 16 2007, 10:53 AM by Joel on Software

• Business of Software Conference

  The Business of Software conference coming up at the end of October is new this year, but it's got a pretty phenomenal line-up of speakers: Guy Kawasaki practically invented the field of high tech evangelism working at Apple in the 1980s, and has... Posted Jul 13 2007, 08:38 AM by Joel on Software

• Why we reimplemented SQL Server Mirroring

  Our systems administrator Michael Gorsuch explains it : “So, yes, even though the SQL Server Mirroring technology sounds like an ideal fit at first, it is easy to see how it doesn’t really suit our needs.” Back in 2001, I wrote : “When... Posted Jul 12 2007, 07:23 AM by Joel on Software

• Fog Creek Open House

  We do it every summer... an open house at the Fog Creek offices in New York City. Come on by next Thursday, July 19, 2007, between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm to see our offices and meet the Fog Creek team including this years' interns, a.k.a. the caribou... Posted Jul 12 2007, 05:01 AM by Joel on Software

• Craftsmanship

  Maxim Shemanarev : “The amazing thing is there is no rocket science! Nothing to patent! All information is publicly available and/or deducible from what we see. You only need to use a bit of your engineering intuition plus common sense. So, it goes... Posted Jul 10 2007, 04:20 PM by Joel on Software

• Mixed environment

  Mike P. asks: “On your recent post you mention that FogBugz is now going to be hosted and that you hired a sysadmin who converted your systems from NetBSD to Linux. Then you go on to say that you bought a Dell server, W2K3 and W2K5 SQL Server. I... Posted Jul 10 2007, 03:37 PM by Joel on Software

• Announcing FogBugz On Demand

  I’m happy to announce that FogBugz On Demand is now available. This is a professionally-hosted version of FogBugz 5.0, previously only available as a download. Selling web software has always been a slightly strange aspect of the way Fog Creek operates... Posted Jul 09 2007, 11:09 AM by Joel on Software

• From the "interesting, but ultimately useless facts" department

  There's a scene in the movie 1408 that features a stack of Joel on Software (the book) along with John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board : Great software jobs, great people. Read More... Posted Jul 02 2007, 08:26 AM by Joel on Software

• Announcing the Business of Software Wiki

  The Business of Software Wiki : “The point of this wiki is to bring under one roof as much useful, quality information as possible about the business of software, whether it's microISVs selling desktop software, Web 2.0 sites or even the big... Posted Jul 02 2007, 05:40 AM by Joel on Software