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One of the most common reactions we keep getting to Fog Creek Copilot is, "Please don't tell my mom about this!"

Fog Creek Copilot is still in a limited beta. Yesterday we opened it to the first 50 beta testers and today we're adding another 100.

We're finding a lot of small bugs and making a lot of improvements. Over the last few days most of the bugs have been deployment issues. Since we're deploying the service on a web farm with two servers, and most of the development has been done on a single server, we found a few tiny details that needed to be fixed. Nothing major.

We're also putting a lot of work into features that it takes to make an online service with very high uptime. For example, when we upgrade the reflector part of the service, anybody still using the old reflector can continue to use it until they're done, while the new reflector picks up the new traffic; this is called "draining." And if one of the servers goes down, even while people are using it, the clients automatically reconnect to the other server.

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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