I’ve been coding full-time for only a few weeks, and already I’m going somewhat insane by people engaging in what I’d call cargo-cult debugging. Cargo cults were religions that developed when primitive societies, who’d had little exposure to any ...

Let’s set the scene. It’s the summer of 2010. Kiln had been launched into the wild for all of six months, after a grueling year-long, no-revenue sprint to turn my dinky prototype that ran only on my personal laptop into a shipping application that worked ...

I think the point of math class is probably to teach people math, but what many of the best developers I know actually learned in math class was how to program. Nearly every high school math class I took was really, really boring. Not through the fault ...

I should be in the middle of an interview right now. About fifteen minutes into it, in fact. About the part of my interview where we stop talking about awesome stuff the candidate has worked on in the past and start diving into writing some actual code. ...

I sincerely doubt that the statement “I like Mercurial” will catch anyone who reads this blog by surprise. I brought it to Fog Creek. I evangelized for it on the Fog Creek World Tour. I helped build a whole product around it. I’ve gone to a Mercurial ...

I remember, when we first launched Kiln, that I was desperately hopeful that it’d actually make a dent. I was honestly quite scared that we might end up in a situation where, after we’d put in all of this effort, spent all of this time designing and ...

I was thinking back last week on why I started working at Fog Creek. If you don’t know, I got started on this thing called Project Aardvark, which eventually ended up becoming Copilot, the project I worked on for my first couple of years at Fog Creek. I ...

Last fall, Joel came to me and said, “Congratulations! We’re doing another World Tour. Also, we want to teach distributed version control. That’s your job. Make it happen.” This sounded totally awesome. Not only would I get to one-up George Clooney in ...

So we’re making candidates nervous by using C, and we’re not gaining anything by using C. But are we losing anything by using C? Yes. We’re losing any ability to test for literacy. “Smart and gets things done” is a famous mantra, and one that I agree ...

The Guerrilla Guide. It is the be-all, end-all of how to look for candidates. Except for one paragraph. And I’ve come to realize that I agree with that paragraph; just not Fog Creek’s implementation of it. In The Paragraph In Question, Joel writes: I’ve ...