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Joel on Software

Copilot OneClick for Macintosh
Fog Creek Copilot is an inexpensive, and very easy to use, remote tech support system that allows you to remote-control someone else’s computer over the Internet without installing anything special. It’s perfect for ad-hoc tech support, and used extensively by helpdesks, software companies providing telephone support, and people helping their friends and families with computer problems. At Fog Creek, we even use it to conduct coding interviews for programmers.

The new Copilot OneClick feature lets you preinstall the software on all the computers you connect to frequently, so every time your dad calls up needing help with the accounting software running his Ponzi scheme, you just click one link and you’re logged onto his computer.

As usual, it works through all kinds of firewalls, proxies, and NATs without any configuration, it’s protected by 128-bit SSL, and there’s never anything to configure.

Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.

Read about the team’s experience developing a Mac-based installer, then try the free trial! Bubble bath not included!

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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Another resume tip
Are you a software developer applying to a small company?

Here’s a tip from someone who has read thousands of resumes. When you’re applying to a startup, or a software company with less than, say, 100 employees, you may want to highlight the Banging Out Code parts of your experience, while deemphasizing the Middle Management parts of your experience.

When a startup CTO sees a resume that says things like:
- Responsible for $30m line of business
- Architected new ERP platform
- Managed team of 25 developers
- Optimized business processes
they think, “Spare me, that’s all we need, somebody running around trying to manage and optimize and architect when we just need someone who isn’t afraid to write code.” Here’s the stuff CTOs at startups want to see on a resume:
- Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service
- Contributes to OpenBSD file system in spare time
- Wrote almost 75% of the Python code running IsIt2009Yet.Com
If you’ve been in a large company for too long, you may feel that you put in your time, with all those years working your way up the hierarchy from the $50,000 coder jobs to the $250,000 Senior Vice President in Charge of Long Meetings With Other Senior Vice Presidents, and you’re kind of enjoying the nice parking space and the personal assistant and stuff, and coding? not so much, so now you’ve found a cool startup or small company, and you’re thinking, maybe now’s the time to jump ship? So you send your resume with your ERP stuff and SAP stuff and Vice President stuff to the startup, and it gets tossed.

Those VP jobs just don’t exist at startups, and the few VPs they have are the founders and a key early hire or two. Not you. And startups certainly don’t need extra middle managers. To a startup founder, middle managers just seem like added expense without more code getting written, and the only thing we REALLY need is
- code to be written, and
- customers to be called on the telephone.
Now, there’s a lot of resumes I see where, actually, I suspect that the candidate may have been (ahem) slightly overemphasizing the management/leadership/“architect” parts of the job, and slightly underemphasizing the banging out of code. And that’s fine if you’re looking to jump to a management position at a big company that, inexplicably, doesn’t have anyone to promote from within.

But for startups, everything about your resume has to scream getting your own hands dirty. Otherwise your resume makes you look like you’re looking for the kind of job where you can call meetings that take people away from coding all day long, which, to a startup, is about as useful as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.

(More resume tips, and, if you’re really looking for a job, don’t forget the job board).

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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Animoto
Tom suggested that I use Animoto to jazz up the slideshow of Fog Creek pictures. Here’s what came out of that:

Animoto is very simple: you give it a bunch of pictures and choose a soundtrack, and it gives you a video presentation. The part I liked best was how easy it was to get your pictures... you just point it at one of the five most popular online photo sharing services, and it shows you a list of your albums on that service. One click and all your pictures are imported:

The service is free for 30 second videos (about 15 pictures worth). For longer videos, it’s $3.00, which gets you a low res version. To upgrade to high res is another $5. There are all kinds of packages available if you plan to make a lot of videos. I was pretty impressed by the simplicity of the whole thing. It does take quite a while to render the video, though, so unless you have all day, you can’t make very many adjustments before you get tired of fooling around.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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The new Fog Creek office
Remember the Bionic Office? Fog Creek moved in there in 2003. After a couple of years we had outgrown the first office so we expanded to take over the whole floor. By the time our lease ran out in 2008 we had about 25 people in a space built for 18 and we knew we had to move. Besides, the grungy midtown location, perfect for startups, was starting to get us down after five years. We had a little bit more money, so we were looking for a place with about twice the space that cost about four times as much.

It bears repeating that at Fog Creek our goal is building the best possible place for software developers to work. Finding a great space was not easy. Our ideal of giving every developer a private office is unusual, so it’s almost impossible to find prebuilt office space set up that way. That means we didn’t have much choice but to find the best raw space and then do our own interior construction.

We knew it was going to take a while. After the first office, I knew that you should always plan on ten months from the day you start looking at space until the day you move in. And I also knew that if I wasn’t intimately involved in every detail of the construction, we’d end up with the kind of life-sucking dreary cubicle hellhole made popular by the utopian workplace in “Office Space.”

After a tedious search, we signed a lease for about 10,600 square feet on a high floor at 55 Broadway, almost all the way downtown, with fantastic views of the Hudson River, Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and Jersey City.

We found a landlord with his own construction crew who was willing to do the interior construction for us, at no charge. The only problem was that his idea of a nice office was a lot closer to Initech than Fog Creek. So we had to chip in about a half million dollars of our own to upgrade just about everything.

Building great office space for software developers serves two purposes: increased productivity, and increased recruiting pull. Private offices with doors that close prevent programmers from interruptions allowing them to concentrate on code without being forced to stop and listen to every interesting conversation in the room. And the nice offices wow our job candidates, making it easier for us to attract, hire, and retain the great developers we need to make software profitably. It’s worth it, especially in a world where so many software jobs provide only the most rudimentary and depressing cubicle farms.

Here are a few of the features of the new office:

Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).

Desks designed for programming. Long, straight desks include a motorized height-adjustable work surface for maximal ergonomics and comfort, and so you can stand up for part of the day if you want. Standard 30” monitors. Desks are straight instead of L-shaped to make pair programming and code reviews more comfortable. There are 20 electrical outlets behind every desk and most developers have small hubs for extra computers. Our standard-issue chair is the Herman Miller Aeron. Those guest chairs are the famous Series 7 by Arne Jacobson. The pedestal storage is on wheels and incorporates a cushion-top for additional guest seating.

Glass whiteboards. Easy to erase, look great, and don’t stain.

Coffee bar and lunchroom. There’s an espresso machine, a big fridge full of beverages, a bottomless supply of snacks, and delicious catered lunch brought in every day. We all eat lunch together which is one of the highlights of working here.

A huge salt water aquarium which brings light and color into the center of the office.

Plenty of meeting space. The lunch room has a projector and motorized screen (most frequently used to play Rock Band, thanks Jeff Atwood); there are several smaller meeting tables around, two conference rooms, and a big S-shaped couch.

A library, fully stocked with obsolete paper books and two reclining leather chairs, perfect for an after-lunch nap.

A shower (floor to ceiling marble), so you can bike to work or work out during the day.

Wood floors around the perimeter, so you can use scooters to get around. Carpet in the offices to make them quiet. Concrete in the lunch room because it’s bright and looks cool.

I can’t quite fit in enough pictures in this article to really give you a feel for the space, but I put a bunch of photos of the new Fog Creek office up on Picasa. If you’re interested in learning more about the rationale behind spending so much money on building a great workspace, read A Field Guide to Developers.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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Stack Overflow is a Wiki
Stack Overflow launched about three months ago, and is already serving 8.3 million page views per month. The growth has been incessant.

Most of the criticism I’ve heard of Stack Overflow reminds me of the early criticism of Wikipedia: “I went to this article and it was wrong.” By the time you read the criticism, the article has been fixed. There was that year, not last year, but the year before, when every traditional journalist wrote a funny thought piece in their newspaper about something they looked up in Wikipedia and just how wrong it was. By the time their column appeared in print, the Wikipedia article was corrected, making a liar out of the journalist. Eventually they learned to stop writing that story.

Stack Overflow works the same way. Voting is open forever. It’s a wiki, so anythin
Stack Overflow data from Google Analyticsg can be edited, and it is.

Most topics get most of their traffic not in the first few days, but by the Google traffic that comes in for people searching for the same exact problem. Search engines now account for 81% of Stack Overflow traffic: people searching for specific questions, not asking them directly. And that's where it's really working. Answers DO get better. If they don’t, it's a wiki: fix them. Instead of complaining about good answers with few votes, vote down the top answer and vote up the better answer.

My criterion for whether Stack Overflow works: when you type your question into Google, and you’re happy to see a Stack Overflow result rather than a result at another one of those Q&A sites where you have to sign up and pay a monthly fee to see the answer.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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From the Department of Badly Chosen Defaults
Alert reader Chris S. emailed me to point out this post by a developer at flickr about how to make IE scale images more smoothly. All you have to do is add

img { -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; }

to the stylesheet. It worked!

Note that all the other browsers use bicubic interpolation for scaling by default, because that’s the only thing that make sense, but IE requires a non-standard CSS extension. So, pictures on this site should be a little smoother for those of you determined to use Internet Explorer.

Happy Hannuka!

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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Future of Web Apps
Future of Web Apps, in Miami, the last week of February. If you’re going, and have any ideas for what I should talk about, drop me an email!
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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