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Michael Pryor reports: “Once you get Subversion set up and running, if you are on Windows, you will be amazed at how useful a good Subversion client can be. Steve King has created a fantastic piece of software, the TortoiseSVN client, and he has spent some time making sure that it works perfectly with FogBugz.”

Mystery from next door

We share the floor of our building with a contracting firm, White&Carr, who moved in shortly after we did. We were always on good terms with them, and they seemed like a generic, successful contracting company. They were talking about opening a new office in Philly.

The founder of the firm, Raymond White, often came by our office to chat and be neighborly. Some of you may have met him at our open house last year.

A few weeks ago, as I left the office, I noticed a woman banging on the door to the office. "Have you seen anyone from this company lately?"

I hadn't. But I told her that Raymond had an apartment down the street. "Did you check his apartment?"

"He's not there either," she said.

As the weeks went by we noticed nobody was coming or going, and we could see under the door that an awful lot of mail was piling up there.

The landlord told us they had stopped paying their rent. The building super told us that the workers stopped coming in to work because they weren't getting paid.

Weird.

I'll bet you think I'm going to tell you what happened. I don't know!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.