Remus

Time to step aside.

There are moments in life when you have to draw a line, let the past behind you and take a turn hoping that the new road will take you into the right direction ...

Continue Reading October 29th, 2005

The power of simplicity

I cannot point my finger on what exactly I like about Joel, but ideas like this and a perfect implementation are a good hint.

Taking four interns (three in development and one in marketing) and putting together a product from the beginning to the end is just, hm, how to say this a brilliant idea! Or maybe I’m absolutely wrong it’s the right idea.

Just think about it, if you want a new product, it has to be fresh. How do you get fresh ideas? Definitely not from tired, locked on statistics and technologies brains but rather from fresh and young minds. How do you pull a product from beginning to the first launch in 3 or 4 months if not with fresh and young people fully charged with energy and eager to prove themselves?

I was rather sceptic about their first two products, a bug management system (issue tracking) and web editor in a saturated market with both free and commercial products. I still think that if you remove Joel from Fog Creek they would remain with two 20$ shareware products. But this one sounds great, and not because of the technology since it is nothing new, Unix had it since the beginnings of X, VNC is out there from some time and it’s even free, and every version of Windows XP Pro ships with it, yet still they found the market to it, made it a bit simpler (not that it was too complicated) and definitely know how to present it.

As a matter of fact I know now what I like about Joel, he’s cult for simplicity and doing what feel right no matter what anybody else is used to do.

July 9th, 2005

I want my company to be …

I want my company to be...

• somewhere people can innovate.
• somewhere that big and small ideas count
• somewhere Open Source isn't just a bunch of free tools to make use of
• somewhere that doesn't just make software - rather someone obsessed with making damn fucking good software
• somewhere developers don't feel they are wasting their time keeping up with the bleeding edge
• somewhere extensive knowledge of Ruby, Perl, Cocoa, Linux, HTML, CSS, Crypto, Jini, Jabber, Technology X... doesn't seem useless
• somewhere developers look at each other's work and think "I'm glad that exists"
• somewhere that developers talk to clients, clients talk back and both gain from the experience
• somewhere everyone makes money, and has fun doing it
• somewhere that all the staff enjoy each other's company enough to go out for a few beers on a Friday night
• somewhere developers do more than taking stuff out of a database and show it on a screen, then take stuff from a form and put it in a database
• somewhere developers aren't forced to be managers, do sales or answer the phone
• somewhere developers don't feel that in ten years time they'll be the next generation of COBOL programmers
• somewhere where quality counts for something
• somewhere that people are proud to work
• somewhere people would still come to work if they never had to work another day in their lives

(adapted from Charles Miller's The Desktop Fishbowl and here are the ones I'm not sure about for different reasons)

• somewhere 90% of the company isn't old and married
• somewhere that owning a copy of Stevens Unix Network Programming Volume 1 doesn't make you feel like an weirdo

[rebelutionary]

He he, welcome to my company and don't look at the site yet, it will be revamped when the work of the last year and half will go public (as in Apache license).

July 3rd, 2002