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…

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 don’t generally reminisce much about that time, simply because that was a very different point in my life, back before I found fashion, yet after I figured out how to end up in front of cameras constantly. ![Jump, jump, jump…

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…

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, become these trite little soundbites that you parrot indefinitely until they just become a meaningless jumble of syllables—kind of like what happens if you just say the word “marmalade” about 40 times in a row. But that’s totally different from…

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…

I’m really proud of all the work that we’ve been able to pour into Kiln over the last two years. In March of 2009, we had nothing more than a prototype. By October, we had a beta. By January, we were shipping Kiln 1.0. And just a few months later, we followed with Kiln 1.2, which added a massive number of features and really paved the way to making Kiln feel like a well-rounded product. Well, we’re getting ready to launch Kiln 2.0, and we’re so psyched about it that we’re doing another World…

When I attended Open Source Bridge two weeks ago, I wanted something to hack on while I was there. The upcoming version of Kiln moves from relying on a combination of explicit threads and FogBugz’ heartbeat mechanism to using a very lightweight queuing system backed by Redis. The only problem is that Redis doesn’t run on Windows, and while that’s not a problem for Kiln On Demand, where we rely heavily on FreeBSD for key parts of Kiln’s infrastructure, the licensed version Kiln needs to run on…

I try not to throw too many out-and-out advertisements into this blog, but I’m very proud to announce that Kiln 1.2 is out. When Kiln 1.0 shipped back in February, it was awesome, but still very much a 1.0 product. While Kiln’s still under heavy development, we’ve tremendously improved a lot of the little things that make the difference between “functional” and “fun,” and I’m happy to say that Kiln’s increasingly strongly in the latter camp. Since our initial launch, we’ve: Added custom…

About once a week, I get an email in my mailbox that reads like this: Hey, Kiln looks neat, but Git is totally the bee’s knees, so why the fuck are you using Mercurial? Note that these emails are rarely (if ever) actually interested in why Kiln chose Mercurial; what they’re instead interested in is trying to piss me off enough that I get into a flamewar about why Mercurial is going to bring about Nirvana while Git causes people to eat babies using nothing but A1 sauce and a spork. This is…