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 ...

One of the things that I love about Fog Creek is that we give back. Kiln can only exist because of the amazing foundation provided by the Mercurial distributed version control system, so we try to help them out whenever we can. In the past, we’ve done ...

You know why I love working on Kiln every day? Because we’ve got a mission, dammit. Mission, not mission statement. The Kiln team doesn’t have a mission statement, and I’ll fight to keep it that way. Mission statements, no matter how well intentioned, ...

It was a lot of fun to vet dirty laundry in my last post on how one of our deployments went really wrong. But part of why that incident stuck out so strongly in my mind is that things so rarely go wrong. Why is that? I think it’s because we do a lot ...