[mtlynch]

Author here. Cool to see your response here!

>I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.

I worded that poorly, you're right. I meant early-stage startups at the scale of Fog Creek when you started. I've updated the post.

>No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before saying a pile of profanity on camera.

Ah, thanks for the context!

I watched that scene over and over trying to figure out what happened. It sounds like a "shush" but it's also weirdly stretched out. Liz seems to have heard it as a shush, as she shushes herself after. It shows Michael look over at you, but it's not clear if he was reacting to the noise.

There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it. This is a much more satisfying answer.

I've updated the post to link to your comment here.

>I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.

How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there things you disliked about how it came out?

What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813987/trivia/?item=tr0602787&...

[anildash]

One other bit of trivia, Alexis Ohanian drew one of the versions of Fog Creek’s kiwi mascot that was featured on some t-shirts and merch, though never in any of the products.

[mtlynch]

Wow, I never expected to hear from so many Fog Creek folks!

Thanks for sharing that bit of trivia, Anil. How'd that happen?

[anildash]

At that time Alexis was drawing logos or art for products he advised or knew the founders of, including most notably Hipmunk. I’m not sure if Joel asked him to draw it, or he volunteered, but it happened and then early in my time at Fog Creek, Alexis and I were catching up about some other stuff and he told me that version of the kiwi was his.

[fsckboy]

logos aren't just trademarks, they are also themselves copyrighted, and if he never explicitly gave up the rights...

[borski]

He'd have to care, which I can pretty much guarantee he doesn't.

[mtlynch]

Great bit of trivia. Thank you for sharing!

[gecko]

    There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether 
    it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it. 
    This is a much more satisfying answer.

Liz thought I shushed her for a long time, but I didn't even know that until years later, at which point I apologized and explained what actually happened. So I guess there was disagreement in the sense that I didn't know she thought that, but we talked that through many years ago.

I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.

    How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that 
    you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just 
    the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there 
    things you disliked about how it came out?

On a personal level, there's a lot I dislike. There was a lot of pressure on us to have reality-TV-show-like conflicts, which we mostly just didn't have. As a result, I end up being the antagonist in quite a few scenes (the building jump experiment is the main one), where it looks like I'm a bit of an asshole due to how things got edited together. So, normal reality TV show stuff.

(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)

I also just kind of feel like it's a lousy movie. The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell. The interviews are usually not asking great questions, as much as rehashing Joel's and Paul's blogs via interviews. And there's the fact the movie is so close to being about reddit and Y Combinator right at their inception, but somehow, just...misses it.

I should tone down the "masochistic" comment so it doesn't sound like I'm bitter or hate the film. I don't. I just don't really know it's worth a watch in 2023.

    What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?

I learned a lot about tech, I got incredible freedom to work how I wanted on what I wanted, I had great coworkers, and I really believed in and used all of our products. They all brought me joy. That was all good. And it wasn't a grindstone like some of my friends went through at thefacebook and Google, so I had time to genuinely enjoy my hobbies and be with friends.

The dislikes are mostly just versions of me noting that working in an anarchistic environment is great only if you shout loudest and care more than the next person, but I will add that that company was so young in so many ways. We often were figuring out how to do things from base principles instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing, because we weren't sure if we knew how to tell that someone knew what they were doing. And when we started to hire our way out, we made Some Mistakes. So, things that fell out of those bits.

[mtlynch]

Thanks!

>(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)

Yeah, there were definitely lines where my first reaction was that the interns come across badly. But I was a year or two younger than you guys at the time, and I thought about how I'd probably sound if someone asked me to talk on camera about working on software. I'm thankful that nobody did.

>The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell.

Oh, yeah, that does explain the soundtrack.

While I was listening to it, I felt like it was written by someone who didn't know any programmers, but they were trying to write a song that would appeal to the geeky stereotype of a programmer.

[dylan604]

> I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.

I feel like Amazon treats IMDB user submitted data just like reviews on the retail site. They just don't care. Anything goes. I've tried to get data corrected on multiple occasions for it to fall on deaf ears. Much like wikipedia where changes are reverted to previously incorrect data because of editor fiefdom turf wars. So you can't win either way.

[alexgartrell]

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]

    (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]

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

[gecko]

    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

I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss.

[tedunangst]

I am always happy when I look back on the monobugz days. I think it was a formative experience in evaluating claims like well, of course it works, so many other people already use and depend on it. O RLY?

[kamens]

hi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me

[alexgartrell]

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.”

[anildash]

here’s a well-deserved upvote

[_ea1k]

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]

I dunno, I'm with Joel on this one. Not a Java fan.

[krallja]

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]

From memory and a little grepping of the Weekly Kiwi archives, I found: "Project Null Terminator", Aardvark, B??, Caribou, Dingo, E??, Flying Fox, Giganotosaurus, ??

[c17r]

> The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell

You can still listen to the soundtrack on Amazon Music :-)

I bought both the DVD and the soundtrack back in the day. While it's no Grammy winner, there are a couple of good ones in there