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Painless Software Management

GoalsYesterday

Seth Godin reminded me about having goals. “Having goals is a pain in the neck,” he says, but “the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact... those people have goals.”

OK, good point. Here are Fog Creek Software’s goals for 2009, in no particular order:

Ship FogBugz 7.0 for all platforms
Ship Copilot Desktop for all platforms
Release the next documentary about software development
Build a kick-ass new product from the ground up with the summer interns, and get the first dollar of customer revenue before they go back to school
Put on a fantastic Business of Software conference
Relive the glory days with another FogBugz World Tour

I like what Seth said about how “if you don't have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it.”

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Copilot OneClick for MacintoshJanuary 7

Fog Creek Copilot is an inexpensive, and very easy to use, remote tech support system that allows you to remote-control someone else’s computer over the Internet without installing anything special. It’s perfect for ad-hoc tech support, and used extensively by helpdesks, software companies providing telephone support, and people helping their friends and families with computer problems. At Fog Creek, we even use it to conduct coding interviews for programmers.

The new Copilot OneClick feature lets you preinstall the software on all the computers you connect to frequently, so every time your dad calls up needing help with the accounting software running his Ponzi scheme, you just click one link and you’re logged onto his computer.

As usual, it works through all kinds of firewalls, proxies, and NATs without any configuration, it’s protected by 128-bit SSL, and there’s never anything to configure.

Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.

Another resume tipJanuary 2

Are you a software developer applying to a small company?

Here’s a tip from someone who has read thousands of resumes. When you’re applying to a startup, or a software company with less than, say, 100 employees, you may want to highlight the Banging Out Code parts of your experience, while deemphasizing the Middle Management parts of your experience.

When a startup CTO sees a resume that says things like:

Responsible for $30m line of business
Architected new ERP platform
Managed team of 25 developers
Optimized business processes

they think, “Spare me, that’s all we need, somebody running around trying to manage and optimize and architect when we just need someone who isn’t afraid to write code.” Here’s the stuff CTOs at startups want to see on a resume:

Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service
Contributes to OpenBSD file system in spare time
Wrote almost 75% of the Python code running IsIt2009Yet.Com

If you’ve been in a large company for too long, you may feel that you put in your time, with all those years working your way up the hierarchy from the $50,000 coder jobs to the $250,000 Senior Vice President in Charge of Long Me

AnimotoJanuary 2

Tom suggested that I use Animoto to jazz up the slideshow of Fog Creek pictures. Here’s what came out of that:

Animoto is very simple: you give it a bunch of pictures and choose a soundtrack, and it gives you a video presentation. The part I liked best was how easy it was to get your pictures... you just point it at one of the five most popular online photo sharing services, and it shows you a list of your albums on that service. One click and all your pictures are imported:

The service is free for 30 second videos (about 15 pictures worth). For longer videos, it’s $3.00, which gets you a low res version. To upgrade to high res is another $5. There are all kinds of packages available if you plan to make a lot of videos. I was pretty impressed by the simplicity of the whole thing. It does take quite a while to render the video, though, so unless you have all day, you can’t make very many adjustments before you get tired of fooling around.

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The new Fog Creek officeDecember 29 2008

Remember the Bionic Office? Fog Creek moved in there in 2003. After a couple of years we had outgrown the first office so we expanded to take over the whole floor. By the time our lease ran out in 2008 we had about 25 people in a space built for 18 and we knew we had to move. Besides, the grungy midtown location, perfect for startups, was starting to get us down after five years. We had a little bit more money, so we were looking for a place with about twice the space that cost about four times as much.

It bears repeating that at Fog Creek our goal is building the best possible place for software developers to work. Finding a great space was not easy. Our ideal of giving every developer a private office is unusual, so it’s almost impossible to find prebuilt office space set up that way. That means we didn’t have much choice but to find the best raw space and then do our own interior construction.

We knew it was going to take a while. After the first office, I knew that you should always plan on ten months from the day you start looking at space until the day you move in. And I also knew that if I wasn’t intimately involved in every detail of the construction, we’d end up with the kin