Joel on Software

Countdown challenge

This month we’re starting to get organized for StackOverflow DevDays, a series of one-day, mini conferences in ten different cities. Because of the packed schedule, keeping on time is very important, so I want to have a full-screen countdown application that we can run during intermissions warning people when we’re going to resume. We’ll put this up on the main screen and hopefully that will encourage people to sit down and be quiet on time. I thought this would be a great opportunity to showcase the StackOverflow community’s programming talent, so I posted a little contest over on meta.

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 tracker designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, Kiln, which simplifies source control and code review, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop control easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.