Joel on Software

Year-end chaos

Liz and I have been working to get ready for the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour, in which I travel from city to city (accompanied by a programmer) giving demos of all the cool features in the upcoming version. This is basically about the same logistical complexity as planning a family trip to DisneyLand, times 32.

Very little has been finalized, but it looks like the first round will hit Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Waterloo, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Denver, San Francisco, Berkeley, Newark (CA), Mountain View, Santa Monica, Irvine, and San Diego. The second round will hit Auckland, Christchurch, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Munich, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, Cambridge, and Dublin. Whenever my squirt nephew decides to have his bar mitzvah, we'll come to Tel Aviv.

Given the cost of flights, hotels, rental cars, meals, catering (we'll serve refreshments), printing (we'll pass out brochures), FogBugz polo shirts, etc., it looks like the cost for this trip is going to come to about $64 per attendee... that is, it's costing us $64 to put on a live demo of FogBugz for each person who attends. Phew. No wonder people do those crappy webinar things instead. I still think it's worth it, though.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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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, co-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 bug tracking and software development tool, Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off if you’re stuck on Subversion, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.