FogBugz Road Trip 2007
Debbie and I made the road trip up to Seattle today for Fog Creek's FogBugz World Tour. It was a good roadie, even while both of us were pretty sick. Debbie's at the end of her cold while I'm at the beginning of mine. Still, Joel Spolsky is the most exciting person I've met since Gabe Newell, who I met a few years ago at Valve.
Hearing Joel talk was a good experience, I learned a lot from the talk, and FogBugz 6.0 looks pretty impressive. After he was finished, I waited around and talked to one of the programmers, Brett, about working at Fog Creek. He seems really happy there and I hope to get Adaptavant to the point where programmers are this content with their jobs. In fact, one of the reasons I went was to try to find out what the secret is. I don't know that I necessarily found it, but Joel and Brett both provided some good clues. Oh that's right! I also hung around to personally meet Joel. He was nice enough to talk to me for a few minutes while he cleaned up. Oh, and one thing I noticed about the demonstration was that there was not any kind of check-in or registration system. Also, there were several seats open if you looked hard enough. So if you're on a waiting list and it's not too far out of your way, it might be worth just showing up.
The demo was pretty short, it ran about an hour and then the QA session lasted about as long, but I got a lot out of it. And although FogBugz may not be right for our company right now, hearing about its features and the questions that came up taught me a lot. For instance, Joel mentioned that Fog Creek doesn't do automated testing; we don't either and I wondered if that was a problem. It didn't seem like it would work very well for our projects but I thought maybe I was missing something because I've never done it before. Hearing that Fog Creek doesn't do it gives me some assurance that it's not a requirement for making good products.
Anyway, aside from the World Tour, Debbie and I had a good enough time in Seattle. We visited Waterfall Garden Park, the birthplace of the United States Parcel Service, which was interesting. And we ate at Il Terrazzo Carmine, which was probably a bit more authentic than I care for (on the other hand, I've never been to Italy so I couldn't say for sure) but a nice change from the normal Olive Garden/Spaghetti Factory menu.
