6 ms·

I had an internship at Fog Creek and would add that it was probably the most friendly and harmonious place I worked, which made it very reality-show-incompatibl

I had an internship at Fog Creek and would add that it was probably the most friendly and harmonious place I worked, which made it very reality-show-incompatible (and very 21-year-old-me incompatible, I wasn't asked back lol). Certainly the representation of you as an asshole was ridiculous IMO. (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?

gecko 3y ago
(Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first? No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box. Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better. The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that. I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!
- alexgartrell 3y ago
  It was a joy to work with you as well :) It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a less capable team would have never landed on the "let's maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t. Wasabi. As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
  - kamens 3y ago
    hi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me
    - anildash 3y ago
      here’s a well-deserved upvote
    - alexgartrell 3y ago
      I still remember when I came to you with my “attachments shouldn’t live in the mssql database” plan and you said “yeah, probably, but doing it any other way would be a million times harder to maintain.” You were 100% right and I think of it often when I encounter someone who is about to do a similar dumb thing for “the right reasons.”
      - borski 3y ago
        wait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously I wasn't there don't have the clearly important context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if attachments didn't live in mssql?
        Throw10987 3y ago
        Not 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs to maintain an additional storage system along with all the associated costs, which is not just storage alone. Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of needing to configure storage for different tiers of access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of course if your blob data is stored in tables that have OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to separate it out. This is speaking from recent experience of having to manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that engineers have created rather than bothering to put in the main application data store.
        krallja 3y ago
        The punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because that’s how we shipped complete backups to customers!
- _ea1k 3y ago
  I never understood the disdain for Java that I'd hear from Spolsky. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly more cross platform than .net at the time.
  - codinghorror 3y ago
    I dunno, I'm with Joel on this one. Not a Java fan.
  - krallja 3y ago
    I was at the strategic offsite where we decided to go with .NET. Java wasn’t installed on Windows by default. The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was written in Java, by the intern in the class before Aardvark’d. It transpiled ASP to PHP. Every intern class was named after an animal with the next consecutive letter. I don’t remember any of them except Aardvark, and I was a “B????” intern!
    - blinkymach12 3y ago
      From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark, B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??

gecko 3y ago

(Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first? No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box. Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better. The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that. I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!

alexgartrell 3y ago
It was a joy to work with you as well :) It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a less capable team would have never landed on the "let's maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t. Wasabi. As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p
- kamens 3y ago
  hi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me
  - anildash 3y ago
    here’s a well-deserved upvote
  - alexgartrell 3y ago
    I still remember when I came to you with my “attachments shouldn’t live in the mssql database” plan and you said “yeah, probably, but doing it any other way would be a million times harder to maintain.” You were 100% right and I think of it often when I encounter someone who is about to do a similar dumb thing for “the right reasons.”
    - borski 3y ago
      wait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously I wasn't there don't have the clearly important context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if attachments didn't live in mssql?
      - Throw10987 3y ago
        Not 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs to maintain an additional storage system along with all the associated costs, which is not just storage alone. Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of needing to configure storage for different tiers of access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of course if your blob data is stored in tables that have OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to separate it out. This is speaking from recent experience of having to manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that engineers have created rather than bothering to put in the main application data store.
      - krallja 3y ago
        The punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because that’s how we shipped complete backups to customers!
_ea1k 3y ago
I never understood the disdain for Java that I'd hear from Spolsky. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly more cross platform than .net at the time.
- codinghorror 3y ago
  I dunno, I'm with Joel on this one. Not a Java fan.
- krallja 3y ago
  I was at the strategic offsite where we decided to go with .NET. Java wasn’t installed on Windows by default. The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was written in Java, by the intern in the class before Aardvark’d. It transpiled ASP to PHP. Every intern class was named after an animal with the next consecutive letter. I don’t remember any of them except Aardvark, and I was a “B????” intern!
  - blinkymach12 3y ago
    From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark, B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??