Yesterday, JetBrains announced new pricing for their line of developer tooling. Previously, you could buy their products for anything from $50 (for WebStorm) to $675 (for ReSharper Ultimate), with lower prices in most cases for yearly upgrades. Yesterday, JetBrains changed that and announced JetBrains Toolbox. For $12/month, you can get access to one of their products, or for less than double that, $20/month (discounted to $150/year for current customers), you can get access to all of their…

Hello, world! A lot of you are on the last bits of your vacation this week. That is awesome. There is likely no better time you can take vacation. Your team has hopefully shipped all deliverables for 2014 Q4. You have likely planned out Q1. You almost certainly have no real bugs in production. Cthulhu willing, you have automatic regression and integration tests so that you can rest assured knowing that The Person Who Does Not Vacation can safely fix anything that does come up. You’re in…

For the past week, I have felt a wave of relief that we shipped Kiln Harmony, the first DVCS-agnostic source control system. Kiln Harmony’s translation engine ruled my life for the better part of a year, and, as the technical blog series is revealing, probably took some of my sanity with it. But we’ve received nearly universally positive feedback, and built a product that I myself love to use, so I can’t help but feel the project was an incredible success. A success that started with me…

I always travel ready to get stuck and be forced to work remotely. My tool of choice for that varies, but has recently been a third-generation iPad armed with my Nokia 800’s old folding keyboard, PocketCloud, and Prompt. With these four simple tools, plus Azure and AWS in a pinch, I can pretty easily get a good day’s work done anywhere. So when I got stuck in Los Angeles this past Saturday, I wasn’t worried: I knew I’d still be able to help Fog Creek get stuff done. You know what an iPad,…

Business of Software has long stood as a unique conference for me: while nearly every tech conference I attend focuses on the technological side of delivering a solution, Business of Software focuses on actually delivering the goods. How do you reach people? How do you know you’ve reached people? How, if you’ve reached people, do you turn that into profit so that you can keep making people’s lives better? These are insanely important questions, and ones that are far too easily glossed over…

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 both in Fog Creek’s hosted environment and in a gazillion ever-so-slightly-different on-site installations. We’d had all of a few months actually charging people, and were only just barely making a month-to-month profit, let alone having a…

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 of the teachers; they were actually awesome. But I consistently knew just enough to be bored, yet not enough to actually skip the class. At first, I tried to act like I was paying attention, which meant that my face had to be vaguely directed…

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. A stack with O(1) data access that also always knows its maximum, for example. Or perhaps a rudimentary mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It’s usually my favorite part of the interview: I get to see how the candidate thinks, how they…

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 flight time; I was made for doing something like this. In high school, I was in the NFL, which, sadly, means the National Forensics League, which means the National People Who Talk Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, and not the…

Update: VMware followed up with me this morning, and has done a great job getting me help and outlining how they’re planning to address a lot of the complaints I’ve had. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few months, but so far, VMware has convinced me that they get they have a problem and are going to try to fix it. Kudos, VMware. So about a week ago I decide to buy VMware Fusion. I really like VMware. They make awesome products, they have good support. They’re not perfect—the…