Podcasts about fog creek software

Jason Rosoff, CEO and Co-founder of Radical Candor, joins Brad Sugars on The Big Success Podcast for an enlightening conversation on building relationships and nurturing growth through candid feedback. With degrees from NYU and experience leading teams at pioneering companies like Fog Creek Software and Khan Academy, Jason has dedicated himself to fostering cultures of open communication. He believes radical candor, caring personally while also challenging directly, is the key for organizations to develop trust, facilitate progress, and achieve collaborative success.In this episode, Jason unpacks why ruinous empathy and obnoxious aggression both fumble teamwork, how leaders must first model accepting criticism, the nuances of praise in motivating improvement, and plenty more juicy insights! You'll learn about the cornerstones of constructive feedback, balancing compassion with direct challenges , the growth mindset shift for novices facing critiques, and strategies to nurture each person's potential. If you want to have more meaningful conversations, lead with courage, and get the best from your team, this dynamic chat with Jason will open your eyes and move you forward! Please click here to learn more about Jason Rosoff. About Brad SugarsInternationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Brad Sugars is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and the #1 business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30-year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9+ companies and is the owner of the multimillion-dollar franchise ActionCOACH®. As a husband and father of five, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business. That's why, Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you – so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. But if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone.Please click here to learn more about Brad Sugars: https://bradsugars.com/Learn the Fundamentals of Success for free:The Big Success Starter: https://results.bradsugars.com/thebigsuccess-starter

Our guest is Glitch CEO and writer Anil Dash. There are pizza headlines and our topic is Jeff Bezos' two-pizza rule.Anil Dash is an influential writer and technology entrepreneur. He is the founder of many tech companies. Currently, Anil is the CEO of Glitch (formerly known as Fog Creek Software). In 2022, he won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award. Oh, and he is a Prince fanatic and scholar.Anil talks about the evolution of social media discourse on pizza, tech's influence on how we order and make pizza, and whether Prince has any connections to pizza. This podcast is brought to you by Ooni Pizza Ovens. Go to Ooni.com for more information.Follow us for more information!Instagram: @pizzapodparty @NYCBestPizza @AlfredSchulz4Twitter: @PizzaPodParty @ArthurBovino @AlfredSchulzTikTok: @thepizzapodpartyThreads: @pizzapodparty @NYCBestPizza @AlfredSchulz4

This is part 1 of a two-part episode with John Hunter. John Hunter's background includes two areas of focus: management improvement and information technology program management. His experience is in improving the performance of organizations. For the last 15 years, his focus has been on management improvement with a concentration on using technology to aid this process. LinkedinCurious CatJohnhunter.comHere are some links John sent me. Sales Commissions  https://deming.org/eliminate-sales-commissions-reject-theory-x-management-and-embrace-systems-thinking/  (including why Fog Creek Software got rid of sales commissions) Why ThoughtWorks Eliminated Sales Commissions https://deming.org/why-thoughtworks-eliminated-sales-commisions/ https://deming.org/eliminating-sales-commissions-at-air-force-one/The System of Profound Knowledge Applied to Sales and Marketing (presentations at Deming Institute)   https://deming.org/the-system-of-profound-knowledge-applied-to-sales-and-marketing/Related Material: https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/01/28/the-trouble-with-incentives-they-work/The Existing Management Conditions Limit How Effective New Strategies Will Be  https://deming.org/the-existing-management-conditions-limit-how-effective-new-strategies-will-be/ (with related links including ) https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/12/08/building-adoption-of-management-improvement-ideas-in-your-organization/ )

This is part 2 of a two-part episode with John Hunter. John Hunter's background includes two areas of focus: management improvement and information technology program management. His experience is in improving the performance of organizations. For the last 15 years, his focus has been on management improvement with a concentration on using technology to aid this process.LinkedinCurious CatJohnhunter.comHere are some links John sent me.Sales Commissions  https://deming.org/eliminate-sales-commissions-reject-theory-x-management-and-embrace-systems-thinking/ (including why Fog Creek Software got rid of sales commissions)Why ThoughtWorks Eliminated Sales Commissionshttps://deming.org/why-thoughtworks-eliminated-sales-commisions/https://deming.org/eliminating-sales-commissions-at-air-force-one/The System of Profound Knowledge Applied to Sales and Marketing (presentations at Deming Institute)   https://deming.org/the-system-of-profound-knowledge-applied-to-sales-and-marketing/Related Material:https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/01/28/the-trouble-with-incentives-they-work/The Existing Management Conditions Limit How Effective New Strategies Will Be https://deming.org/the-existing-management-conditions-limit-how-effective-new-strategies-will-be/(with related links including )https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/12/08/building-adoption-of-management-improvement-ideas-in-your-organization/ )

About AnilAnil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders collaborate to create and share millions of web apps. He is a recognized advocate for more ethical tech through his work as an entrepreneur and writer. He serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and The Markup, the nonprofit investigative newsroom that pushes for tech accountability. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world's largest community for coders, and today advises key startups and non-profits including the Lower East Side Girls Club, Medium, The Human Utility, DonorsChoose and Project Include.As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, written for publications like The Atlantic and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology now known as NFTs, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Obama Foundation Summit to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.Links: Glitch: https://glitch.com Web.dev: https://web.dev Glitch Twitter: https://twitter.com/glitch Anil Dash Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildash TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest is a little bit off the beaten path from the cloud infrastructure types I generally drag, kicking and screaming, onto the show. If we take a look at the ecosystem and where it's going, it's clear that in the future, not everyone who wants to build a business, or a tool, or even an application is going to necessarily spring fully-formed into the world from the forehead of some God, knowing how to code. And oh, “I'm going to go to a boot camp for four months to learn how to do it first,” is increasingly untenable. I don't know if you would call it low-code or not. But that's how it feels. My guest today is Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch. Anil, thank you for joining me.Anil: Thanks so much for having me.Corey: So, let's get the important stuff out of the way first, since I have a long-standing history of mispronouncing the company Twitch as ‘Twetch,' I should probably do the same thing here. So, what is Gletch? And what does it do?Anil: Glitch is, at its simplest, a tool that lets you build a full-stack app in your web browser in about 30 seconds. And, you know, for your community, your audience, it's also this ability to create and deploy code instantly on a full-stack server with no concern for deploy, or DevOps, or provisioning a container, or any of those sort of concerns. And what it is for the users is, honestly, a community. They're like, “I looked at this app that was on Glitch; I thought it was cool; I could do what we call [remixing 00:02:03].” Which is to kind of fork that app, a running app, make a couple edits, and all of a sudden live at a real URL on the web, my app is running with exactly what I built. And that's something that has been—I think, just captured a lot of people's imagination to now where they've built over 12 or 15 million apps on the platform.Corey: You describe it somewhat differently than I would, and given that I tend to assume that people who create and run successful businesses don't generally tend to do it without thought, I'm not quite, I guess, insufferable enough to figure out, “Oh, well, I thought about this for ten seconds, therefore I've solved a business problem that you have been needling at for years.” But when I look at Glitch, I would describe it as something different than the way that you describe it. I would call it a web-based IDE for low-code applications and whatnot, and you never talk about it that way. Everything I can see there describes it talks about friendly creators, and community tied to it. Why is that?Anil: You're not wrong from the conventional technologist's point of view. I—sufficient vintage; I was coding in Visual Basic back in the '90s and if you squint, you can see that influence on Glitch today. And so I don't reject that description, but part of it is about the audience we're speaking to, which is sort of a next generation of creators. And I think importantly, that's not just age, right, but that could be demographic, that can be just sort of culturally, wherever you're at. And what we look at is who's making the most interesting stuff on the internet and in the industry, and they tend to be grounded in broader culture, whether they're on, you know, Instagram, or TikTok, or, you know, whatever kind of influencer, you want to point at—YouTube.And those folks, they think of themselves as creators first and they think of themselves as participating in the community first and then the tool sort of follow. And I think one of the things that's really striking is, if you look at—we'll take YouTube as an example because everyone's pretty familiar with it—they have a YouTube Creator Studio. And it is a very rich and deep tool. It does more than, you know, you would have had iMovie, or Final Cut Pro doing, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, incredibly advanced stuff. And those [unintelligible 00:04:07] use it every day, but nobody goes to YouTube and says, “This is a cloud-based nonlinear editor for video production, and we target cinematographers.” And if they did, they would actually narrow their audience and they would limit what their impact is on the world.And so similarly, I think we look at that for Glitch where the social object, the central thing that people organize around a Glitch is an app, not code. And that's this really kind of deep and profound idea, which is that everybody can understand an app. Everybody has an idea for an app. You know, even the person who's, “Ah, I'm not technical,” or, “I'm not really into technology,” they're like, “But you know what? If I could make an app, I would make this.”And so we think a lot about that creative impulse. And the funny thing is, that is a common thread between somebody that literally just got on the internet for the first time and somebody who has been doing cloud deploys for as long as there's been a cloud to deploy to, or somebody has been coding for decades. No matter who you are, you have that place that is starting from what's the experience I want to build, the app I want to build? And so I think that's where there's that framing. But it's also been really useful, in that if you're trying to make a better IDE in the cloud and a better text editor, and there are multiple trillion-dollar companies that [laugh] are creating products in that category, I don't think you're going to win. On the other hand, if you say, “This is more fun, and cooler, and has a better design, and feels better,” I think we could absolutely win in a walk away compared to trillion-dollar companies trying to be cool.Corey: I think that this is an area that has a few players in it could definitely stand to benefit by having more there. My big fear is not that AWS is going to launch stuff in your space and drive you out of business; I think that is a somewhat naive approach. I'm more concerned that they're going to try to launch something in your space, give it a dumb name, fail that market and appropriately, not understand who it's for and set the entire idea back five years. That is, in some cases, it seems like their modus operandi for an awful lot of new markets.Anil: Yeah, I mean, that's not an uncommon problem in any category that's sort of community driven. So, you know, back in the day, I worked on building blogging tools at the beginning of this, sort of, social media era, and we worried about that a lot. We had built some of the first early tools, Movable Type, and TypePad, and these were what were used to launch, like, Gawker and Huffington Post and all the, sort of, big early sites. And we had been doing it a couple years—and then at that time, major player—AOL came in, and they launched their own AOL blog service, and we were, you know, quaking in our boots. I remember just being kind of like, pit in your stomach, “Oh, my gosh. This is going to devastate the category.”And as it turns out, people were smart, and they have taste, and they can tell. And the domain that we're in is not one that is about raw computing power or raw resources that you can bring to bear so much as it is about can you get people to connect together, collaborate together, and feel like they're in a place where they want to make something and they want to share it with other people? And I mean, we've never done a single bit of advertising for Glitch. There's never been any paid acquisition. There's never done any of those things. And we go up against, broadly in the space, people that have billboards and they buy out all the ads of the airport and, you know, all the other kind of things we see—Corey: And they do the typical enterprise thing where they spend untold millions in acquiring the real estate to advertise on, and then about 50 cents on the message, from the looks of it. It's, wow, you go to all this trouble and expense to get something in front of me, and after all of that to get my attention, you don't have anything interesting to say?Anil: Right.Corey: [crosstalk 00:07:40] inverse of that.Anil: [crosstalk 00:07:41] it doesn't work.Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's brand awareness. I love that game. Ugh.Anil: I was a CIO, and not once in my life did I ever make a purchasing decision based on who was sponsoring a golf tournament. It never happened, right? Like, I never made a call on a database platform because of a poster that was up at, you know, San Jose Airport. And so I think that's this thing that developers in particular, have really good BS filters, and you can sort of see through.Corey: What I have heard about the airport advertising space—and I but a humble cloud economist; I don't know if this is necessarily accurate or not—but if you have a company like Accenture, for example, that advertises on airport billboards, they don't even bother to list their website. If you go to their website, it turns out that there's no shopping cart function. I cannot add ‘one consulting' to my cart and make a purchase.Anil: “Ten pounds of consult, please.”Corey: Right? I feel like the primary purpose there might very well be that when someone presents to your board and says, “All right, we've had this conversation with Accenture.” The response is not, “Who?” It's a brand awareness play, on some level. That said, you say you don't do a bunch traditional advertising, but honestly, I feel like you advertise—more successfully—than I do at The Duckbill Group, just by virtue of having a personality running the company, in your case.Now, your platform is for the moment, slightly larger than mine, but that's okay,k I have ambition and a tenuous grasp of reality and I'm absolutely going to get there one of these days. But there is something to be said for someone who has a track record of doing interesting things and saying interesting things, pulling a, “This is what I do and this is how I do it.” It almost becomes a personality-led marketing effort to some degree, doesn't it?Anil: I'm a little mindful of that, right, where I think—so a little bit of context and history: Glitch as a company is actually 20 years old. The product is only a few years old, but we were formerly called Fog Creek Software, co-founded by Joel Spolsky who a lot of folks will know from back in the day as Joel on Software blog, was extremely influential. And that company, under leadership of Joel and his co-founder Michael Pryor spun out Stack Overflow, they spun out Trello. He had created, you know, countless products over the years so, like, their technical and business acumen is off the charts.And you know, I was on the board of Stack Overflow from, really, those first days and until just recently when they sold, and you know, you get this insight into not just how do you build a developer community that is incredibly valuable, but also has a place in the ecosystem that is unique and persists over time. And I think that's something that was very, very instructive. And so when it came in to lead Glitch I, we had already been a company with a, sort of, visible founder. Joel was as well known as a programmer as it got in the world?Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: And my public visibility is different, right? I, you know, I was a working coder for many years, but I don't think that's what people see me on social media has. And so I think, I've been very mindful where, like, I'm thrilled to use the platform I have to amplify what was created on a Glitch. But what I note is it's always, “This person made this thing. This person made this app and it had this impact, and it got these results, or made this difference for them.”And that's such a different thing than—I don't ever talk about, “We added syntax highlighting in the IDE and the editor in the browser.” It's just never it right. And I think there are people that—I love that work. I mean, I love having that conversation with our team, but I think that's sort of the difference is my enthusiasm is, like, people are making stuff and it's cool. And that sort of is my lens on the whole world.You know, somebody makes whatever a great song, a great film, like, these are all things that are exciting. And the Glitch community's creations sort of feel that way. And also, we have other visible people on the team. I think of our sort of Head of Community, Jenn Schiffer, who's a very well known developer and her right. And you know, tons of people have read her writing and seen her talks over the years.And she and I talk about this stuff; I think she sort of feels the same way, which is, she's like, “If I were, you know, being hired by some cloud platform to show the latest primitives that they've deployed behind an API,” she's like, “I'd be miserable. Like, I don't want to do that in the world.” And I sort of feel the same way. But if you say, “This person who never imagined they would make an app that would have this kind of impact.” And they're going to, I think of just, like, the last couple of weeks, some of the apps we've seen where people are—it could be [unintelligible 00:11:53]. It could be like, “We made a Slack bot that finally gets this reporting into the right channel [laugh] inside our company, but it was easy enough that I could do it myself without asking somebody to create it even though I'm not technically an engineer.” Like, that's incredible.The other extreme, we have people that are PhDs working on machine learning that are like, “At the end of the day, I don't want to be responsible for managing and deploying. [laugh]. I go home, and so the fact that I can do this in create is really great.” I think that energy, I mean, I feel the same way. I still build stuff all the time, and I think that's something where, like, you can't fake that and also, it's bigger than any one person or one public persona or social media profile, or whatever. I think there's this bigger idea. And I mean, to that point, there are millions of developers on Glitch and they've created well over ten million apps. I am not a humble person, but very clearly, that's not me, you know? [laugh].Corey: I have the same challenge to it's, effectively, I have now a 12 employee company and about that again contractors for various specialized functions, and the common perception, I think, is that mostly I do all the stuff that we talk about in public, and the other 11 folks sort of sit around and clap as I do it. Yeah, that is only four of those people's jobs as it turns out. There are more people doing work here. It's challenging, on some level, to get away from the myth of the founder who is the person who has the grand vision and does all the work and sees all these things.Anil: This industry loves the myth of the great man, or the solo legend, or the person in their bedroom is a genius, the lone genius, and it's a lie. It's a lie every time. And I think one of the things that we can do, especially in the work at Glitch, but I think just in my work overall with my whole career is to dismantle that myth. I think that would be incredibly valuable. It just would do a service for everybody.But I mean, that's why Glitch is the way it is. It's a collaboration platform. Our reference points are, you know, we look at Visual Studio and what have you, but we also look at Google Docs. Why is it that people love to just send a link to somebody and say, “Let's edit this thing together and knock out a, you know, a memo together or whatever.” I think that idea we're going to collaborate together, you know, we saw that—like, I think of Figma, which is a tool that I love. You know, I knew Dylan when he was a teenager and watching him build that company has been so inspiring, not least because design was always supposed to be collaborative.And then you think about we're all collaborating together in design every day. We're all collaborating together and writing in Google Docs—or whatever we use—every day. And then coding is still this kind of single-player game. Maybe at best, you throw something over the wall with a pull request, but for the most part, it doesn't feel like you're in there with somebody. Certainly doesn't feel like you're creating together in the same way that when you're jamming on these other creative tools does. And so I think that's what's been liberating for a lot of people is to feel like it's nice to have company when you're making something.Corey: Periodically, I'll talk to people in the AWS ecosystem who for some reason appear to believe that Jeff Barr builds a lot of these services himself then writes blog posts about them. And it's, Amazon does not break out how many of its 1.2 million or so employees work at AWS, but I'm guessing it's more than five people. So yeah, Jeff probably only wrote a dozen of those services himself; the rest are—Anil: That's right. Yeah.Corey: —done by service teams and the rest. It's easy to condense this stuff and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. To my mind, a big company is one that has 200 people in it. That is not apparently something the world agrees with.Anil: Yeah, it's impossible to fathom an organization of hundreds of thousands or a million-plus people, right? Like, our brains just aren't wired to do it. And I think so we reduce things to any given Jeff, whether that's Barr or Bezos, whoever you want to point to.Corey: At one point, I think they had something like more men named Jeff on their board than they did women, which—Anil: Yeah. Mm-hm.Corey: —all right, cool. They've fixed that and now they have a Dave problem.Anil: Yeah [unintelligible 00:15:37] say that my entire career has been trying to weave out of that dynamic, whether it was a Dave, a Mike, or a Jeff. But I think that broader sort of challenge is this—that is related to the idea of there being this lone genius. And I think if we can sort of say, well, creation always happens in community. It always happens influenced by other things. It is always—I mean, this is why we talk about it in Glitch.When you make an app, you don't start from a blank slate, you start from a working app that's already on the platform and you're remix it. And there was a little bit of a ego resistance by some devs years ago when they first encountered that because [unintelligible 00:16:14] like, “No, no, no, I need a blank page, you know, because I have this brilliant idea that nobody's ever thought of before.” And I'm like, “You know, the odds are you'll probably start from something pretty close to something that's built before.” And that enabler of, “There's nothing new under the sun, and you're probably remixing somebody else's thoughts,” I think that sort of changed the tenor of the community. And I think that's something where like, I just see that across the industry.When people are open, collaborative, like even today, a great example is web browsers. The folks making web browsers at Google, Apple, Mozilla are pretty collaborative. They actually do share ideas together. I mean, I get a window into that because they actually all use Glitch to do test cases on different bugs and stuff for them, but you see, one Glitch project will add in folks from Mozilla and folks from Apple and folks from the Chrome team and Google, and they're like working together and you're, like—you kind of let down the pretense of there being this secret genius that's only in this one organization, this one group of people, and you're able to make something great, and the web is greater than all of them. And the proof, you know, for us is that Glitch is not a new idea. Heroku wanted to do what we're doing, you know, a dozen years ago.Corey: Yeah, everyone wants to build Heroku except the company that acquired Heroku, and here we are. And now it's—I was waiting for the next step and it just seemed like it never happened.Anil: But you know when I talked to those folks, they were like, “Well, we didn't have Docker, and we didn't have containerization, and on the client side, we didn't have modern browsers that could do this kind of editing experience, all this kind of thing.” So, they let their editor go by the wayside and became mostly deploy platform. And—but people forget, for the first year or two Heroku had an in-browser editor, and an IDE and, you know, was constrained by the tech at the time. And I think that's something where I'm like, we look at that history, we look at, also, like I said, these browser manufacturers working together were able to get us to a point where we can make something better.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I do have a question for you about the nuts and bolts behind the scenes of Glitch and how it works. If I want to remix something on Glitch, I click the button, a couple seconds later it's there and ready for me to start kicking the tires on, which tells me a few things. One, it is certainly not using CloudFormation to provision it because I didn't have time to go and grab a quick snack and take a six hour nap. So, it apparently is running on computers somewhere. I have it on good authority that this is not just run by people who are very fast at assembling packets by hand. What does the infrastructure look like?Anil: It's on AWS. Our first year-plus of prototyping while we were sort of in beta and early stages of Glitch was getting that time to remix to be acceptable. We still wish it were faster; I mean, that's always the way but, you know, when we started, it was like, yeah, you did sit there for a minute and watch your cursor spin. I mean, what's happening behind the scenes, we're provisioning a new container, standing up a full stack, bringing over the code from the Git repo on the previous project, like, we're doing a lot of work, lift behind the scenes, and we went through every possible permutation of what could make that experience be good enough. So, when we start talking about prototyping, we're at five-plus, almost six years ago when we started building the early versions of what became Glitch, and at that time, we were fairly far along in maturity with Docker, but there was not a clear answer about the use case that we're building for.So, we experimented with Docker Swarm. We went pretty far down that road; we spent a good bit of time there, it failed in ways that were both painful and slow to fix. So, that was great. I don't recommend that. In fairness, we have a very unusual use case, right? So, Glitch now, if you talk about ten million containers on Glitch, no two of those apps are the same and nobody builds an orchestration infrastructure assuming that every single machine is a unique snowflake.Corey: Yeah, massively multi-tenant is not really a thing that people know.Anil: No. And also from a security posture Glitch—if you look at it as a security expert—it is a platform allowing anonymous users to execute arbitrary code at scale. That's what we do. That's our job. And so [laugh], you know, so your threat model is very different. It's very different.I mean, literally, like, you can go to Glitch and build an app, running a full-stack app, without even logging in. And the reason we enable that is because we see kids in classrooms, they're learning to code for the first time, they want to be able to remix a project and they don't even have an email address. And so that was about enabling something different, right? And then, similarly, you know, we explored Kubernetes—because of course you do; it's the default choice here—and some of the optimizations, again, if you go back several years ago, being able to suspend a project and then quickly sort of rehydrate it off disk into a running app was not a common use case, and so it was not optimized. And so we couldn't offer that experience because what we do with Glitch is, if you haven't used an app in five minutes, and you're not a paid member, who put that app to sleep. And that's just a reasonable—Corey: Uh, “Put the app to sleep,” as in toddler, or, “Put the app to sleep,” as an ill puppy.Anil: [laugh]. Hopefully, the former, but when we were at our worst and scaling the ladder. But that is that thing; it's like we had that moment that everybody does, which is that, “Oh, no. This worked.” That was a really scary moment where we started seeing app creation ramping up, and number of edits that people were making in those apps, you know, ramping up, which meant deploys for us ramping up because we automatically deploy as you edit on Glitch. And so, you know, we had that moment where just—well, as a startup, you always hope things go up into the right, and then they do and then you're not sleeping for a long time. And we've been able to get it back under control.Corey: Like, “Oh, no, I'm not succeeding.” Followed immediately by, “Oh, no, I'm succeeding.” And it's a good problem to have.Anil: Exactly. Right, right, right. The only thing worse than failing is succeeding sometimes, in terms of stress levels. And organizationally, you go through so much; technically, you go through so much. You know, we were very fortunate to have such thoughtful technical staff to navigate these things.But it was not obvious, and it was not a sort of this is what you do off the shelf. And our architecture was very different because people had looked at—like, I look at one of our inspirations was CodePen, which is a great platform and the community love them. And their front end developers are, you know, always showing off, “Here's this cool CSS thing I figured out, and it's there.” But for the most part, they're publishing static content, so architecturally, they look almost more like a content management system than an app-running platform. And so we couldn't learn anything from them about our scaling our architecture.We could learn from them on community, and they've been an inspiration there, but I think that's been very, very different. And then, conversely, if we looked at the Herokus of the world, or all those sort of easy deploy, I think Amazon has half a dozen different, like, “This will be easier,” kind of deploy tools. And we looked at those, and they were code-centric not app-centric. And that led to fundamentally different assumptions in user experience and optimization.And so, you know, we had to chart our own path and I think it was really only the last year or so that we were able to sort of turn the corner and have high degree of confidence about, we know what people build on Glitch and we know how to support and scale it. And that unlocked this, sort of, wave of creativity where there are things that people want to create on the internet but it had become too hard to do so. And the canonical example I think I was—those of us are old enough to remember FTPing up a website—Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: —right—to Geocities, or whatever your shared web host was, we remember how easy that was and how much creativity was enabled by that.Corey: Yes, “How easy it was,” quote-unquote, for those of us who spent years trying to figure out passive versus active versus ‘what is going on?' As far as FTP transfers. And it turns out that we found ways to solve for that, mostly, but it became something a bit different and a bit weird. But here we are.Anil: Yeah, there was definitely an adjustment period, but at some point, if you'd made an HTML page in notepad on your computer, and you could, you know, hurl it at a server somewhere, it would kind of run. And when you realize, you look at the coding boot camps, or even just to, like, teach kids to code efforts, and they're like, “Day three. Now, you've gotten VS Code and GitHub configured. We can start to make something.” And you're like, “The whole magic of this thing getting it to light up. You put it in your web browser, you're like, ‘That's me. I made this.'” you know, north star for us was almost, like, you go from zero to hello world in a minute. That's huge.Corey: I started participating one of those boot camps a while back to help. Like, the first thing I changed about the curriculum was, “Yeah, we're not spending time teaching people how to use VI in, at that point, the 2010s.” It was, that was a fun bit of hazing for those of us who were becoming Unix admins and knew that wherever we'd go, we'd find VI on a server, but here in the real world, there are better options for that.Anil: This is rank cruelty.Corey: Yeah, I mean, I still use it because 20 years of muscle memory doesn't go away overnight, but I don't inflict that on others.Anil: Yeah. Well, we saw the contrast. Like, we worked with, there's a group called Mouse here in New York City that creates the computer science curriculum for the public schools in the City of New York. And there's a million kids in public school in New York City, right, and they all go through at least some of this CS education. [unintelligible 00:24:49] saw a lot of work, a lot of folks in the tech community here did. It was fantastic.And yet they were still doing this sort of very conceptual, theoretical. Here's how a professional developer would set up their environment. Quote-unquote, “Professional.” And I'm like, you know what really sparks kids' interests? If you tell them, “You can make a page and it'll be live and you can send it to your friend. And you can do it right now.”And once you've sparked that creative impulse, you can't stop them from doing the rest. And I think what was wild was kids followed down that path. Some of the more advanced kids got to high school and realized they want to experiment with, like, AI and ML, right? And they started playing with TensorFlow. And, you know, there's collaboration features in Glitch where you can do real-time editing and a code with this. And they went in the forum and they were asking questions, that kind of stuff. And the people answering their questions were the TensorFlow team at Google. [laugh]. Right?Corey: I remember those days back when everything seemed smaller and more compact, [unintelligible 00:25:42] but almost felt like a balkanization of community—Anil: Yeah.Corey: —where now it's oh, have you joined that Slack team, and I'm looking at this and my machine is screaming for more RAM. It's, like, well, it has 128 gigs in it. Shouldn't that be enough? Not for Slack.Anil: Not for chat. No, no, no. Chat is demanding.Corey: Oh, yeah, that and Chrome are basically trying to out-ram each other. But if you remember the days of volunteering as network staff on Freenode when you could basically gather everyone for a given project in the entire stack on the same IRC network. And that doesn't happen anymore.Anil: And there's something magic about that, right? It's like now the conversations are closed off in a Slack or Discord or what have you, but to have a sort of open forum where people can talk about this stuff, what's wild about that is, for a beginner, a teenage creator who's learning this stuff, the idea that the people who made the AI, I can talk to, they're alive still, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're not even that old. But [laugh]. They think of this is something that's been carved in stone for 100 years.And so it's so inspiring to them. And then conversely, talking to the TensorFlow team, they made these JavaScript examples, like, tensorflow.js was so accessible, you know? And they're like, “This is the most heartwarming thing. Like, we think about all these enterprise use cases or whatever. But like, kids wanting to make stuff, like recognize their friends' photo, and all the vision stuff they're doing around [unintelligible 00:26:54] out there,” like, “We didn't know this is why we do it until we saw this is why we do it.”And that part about connecting the creative impulse from both, like, the most experienced, advanced coders at the most august tech companies that exist, as well as the most rank beginners in public schools, who might not even have a computer at home, saying that's there—if you put those two things together, and both of those are saying, “I'm a coder; I'm able to create; I can make something on the internet, and I can share it with somebody and be inspired by it,” like, that is… that's as good as it gets.Corey: There's something magic in being able to reach out to people who built this stuff. And honestly—you shouldn't feel this way, but you do—when I was talking to the folks who wrote the things I was working on, it really inspires you to ask better questions. Like when I'm talking to Dr. Venema, the author of Postfix and I'm trying to figure out how this thing works, well, I know for a fact that I will not be smarter than he is at basically anything in that entire universe, and maybe most beyond that, as well, however, I still want to ask a question in such a way that doesn't make me sound like a colossal dumbass. So, it really inspires you—Anil: It motivates you.Corey: Oh, yeah. It inspires you to raise your question bar up a bit, of, “I am trying to do x. I expect y to happen. Instead, z is happening as opposed to what I find the documentation that”—oh, as I read the documentation, discover exactly what I messed up, and then I delete the whole email. It's amazing how many of those things you never send because when constructing a question the right way, you can help yourself.Anil: Rubber ducking against your heroes.Corey: Exactly.Anil: I mean, early in my career, I'd gone through sort of licensing mishap on a project that later became open-source, and sort of stepped it in and as you do, and unprompted, I got an advice email from Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, he invented VisiCalc, and he had advice and he was right. And it was… it was unreal. I was like, this guy's one of my heroes. I grew up reading about his work, and not only is he, like, a living, breathing person, he's somebody that can have the kindness to reach out and say, “Yeah, you know, have you tried this? This might work.”And it's, this isn't, like, a guy who made an app. This is the guy who made the app for which the phrase killer app was invented, right? And, you know, we've since become friends and I think a lot of his inspiration and his work. And I think it's one of the things it's like, again, if you tell somebody starting out, the people who invented the fundamental tools of the digital era, are still active, still building stuff, still have advice to share, and you can connect with them, it feels like a cheat code. It feels like a superpower, right? It feels like this impossible thing.And I think about like, even for me, the early days of the web, view source, which is still buried in our browser somewhere. And you can see the code that makes the page, it felt like getting away with something. “You mean, I can just look under the hood and see how they made this page and then I can do it too?” I think we forget how radical that is—[unintelligible 00:29:48] radical open-source in general is—and you see it when, like, you talk to young creators. I think—you know, I mean, Glitch obviously is used every day by, like, people at Microsoft and Google and the New York Timesor whatever, like, you know, the most down-the-road, enterprise developers, but I think a lot about the new creators and the people who are learning, and what they tell me a lot is the, like, “Oh, so I made this app, but what do I have to do to put it on the internet?”I'm like, “It already is.” Like, as soon as you create it, that URL was live, it all works. And their, like, “But isn't there, like, an app store I have to ask? Isn't there somebody I have to get permission to publish this from? Doesn't somebody have to approve it?”And you realize they've grown up with whether it was the app stores on their phones, or the cartridges in their Nintendo or, you know, whatever it was, they had always had this constraint on technology. It wasn't something you make; it's something that is given to you, you know, handed down from on high. And I think that's the part that animates me and the whole team, the community, is this idea of, like, I geek out about our infrastructure. I love that we're doing deploys constantly, so fast, all the time, and I love that we've taken the complexity away, but the end of the day, the reason why we do it, is you can have somebody just sort of saying, I didn't realize there was a place I could just make something put it in front of, maybe, millions of people all over the world and I don't have to ask anybody permission and my idea can matter as much as the thing that's made by the trillion-dollar company.Corey: It's really neat to see, I guess, the sense of spirit and soul that arises from a smaller, more, shall we say, soulful company. No disparagement meant toward my friends at AWS and other places. It's just, there's something that you lose when you get to a certain point of scale. Like, I don't ever have to have a meeting internally and discuss things, like, “Well, does this thing that we're toying with doing violate antitrust law?” That is never been on my roadmap of things I have to even give the slightest crap about.Anil: Right, right? You know, “What does the investor relations person at a retirement fund think about the feature that we shipped?” Is not a question that we have to answer. There's this joy in also having community that sort of has come along with us, right? So, we talk a lot internally about, like, how do we make sure Glitch stays weird? And, you know, the community sort of supports that.Like, there's no reason logically that our logo should be the emoji of two fish. But that kind of stuff of just, like, it just is. We don't question it anymore. I think that we're very lucky. But also that we are part of an ecosystem. I also am very grateful where, like… yeah, that folks at Google use Glitch as part of their daily work when they're explaining a new feature in Chrome.Like, if you go to web.dev and their dev portal teaches devs how to code, all the embedded examples go to these Glitch apps that are running, showing running code is incredible. When we see the Stripe team building examples of, like, “Do you want to use this new payment API that we made? Well, we have a Glitch for you.” And literally every day, they ship one that sort of goes and says, “Well, if you just want to use this new Stripe feature, you just remix this thing and it's instantly running on Glitch.”I mean, those things are incredible. So like, I'm very grateful that the biggest companies and most influential companies in the industry have embraced it. So, I don't—yeah, I don't disparage them at all, but I think that ability to connect to the person who'd be like, “I just want to do payments. I've never heard of Stripe.”Corey: Oh yeah.Anil: And we have this every day. They come into Glitch, and they're just like, I just wanted to take credit cards. I didn't know there's a tool to do that.Corey: “I was going to build it myself,” and everyone shrieks, “No, no. Don't do that. My God.” Yeah. Use one of their competitors, fine,k but building it yourself is something a lunatic would do.Anil: Exactly. Right, right. And I think we forget that there's only so much attention people can pay, there's only so much knowledge they have.Corey: Everything we say is new to someone. That's why I always go back to assuming no one's ever heard of me, and explain the basics of what I do and how I do it, periodically. It's, no one has done all the mandatory reading. Who knew?Anil: And it's such a healthy exercise to, right, because I think we always have that kind of beginner's mindset about what Glitch is. And in fairness, I understand why. Like, there have been very experienced developers that have said, “Well, Glitch looks too colorful. It looks like a toy.” And that we made a very intentional choice at masking—like, we're doing the work under the hood.And you can drop down into a terminal and you can do—you can run whatever build script you want. You can do all that stuff on Glitch, but that's not what we put up front and I think that's this philosophy about the role of the technology versus the people in the ecosystem.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to, I guess, explain what Glitch is and how you view it. If people want to learn more about it, about your opinions, et cetera. Where can they find you?Anil: Sure. glitch.com is easiest place, and hopefully that's a something you can go and a minute later, you'll have a new app that you built that you want to share. And, you know, we're pretty active on all social media, you know, Twitter especially with Glitch: @glitch. I'm on as @anildash.And one of the things I love is I get to talk to folks like you and learn from the community, and as often as not, that's where most of the inspiration comes from is just sort of being out in all the various channels, talking to people. It's wild to be 20-plus years into this and still never get tired of that.Corey: It's why I love this podcast. Every time I talk to someone, I learn something new. It's hard to remain too ignorant after you have enough people who've shared wisdom with you as long as you can retain it.Anil: That's right.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Anil: So, glad to be here.Corey: Anil Dash, CEO of Gletch—or Glitch as he insists on calling it. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me how your small team at AWS is going to crush Glitch into the dirt just as soon as they find a name that's dumb enough for the service.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Today, I've asked Elizabeth (Liz) Hall, Chief People Officer at Splash, to give us her thoughts on recruiting talent in a virtual environment.  Obviously, this topic has been at the forefront of TA during the pandemic era, and we don't see it leaving center stage anytime soon.Prior to joining Splash, Liz was VP of People Operations at Cadre where she built the People function from scratch. Previously, she was VP of People at Trello, and before that, she led People Operations at Fog Creek Software for over a decade.  Splash is known as the easiest platform created exclusively to market live and virtual events and has been heavily used for recruiting events during COVID.The big questions today: How do we keep the human element when recruiting talent in a virtual environment? What small things can you do during the recruiting process to help even rejected candidates feel appreciated? Why transparency is key in DEI efforts.

Today we speak with Michael Pryor, co-founder, CEO and current Head of Product for Trello at Atlassian. Trello was acquired by Atlassian in 2017 for $425M and stands as Atlassian's largest-ever acquisition. Trello is one of many products developed by Fog Creek Software, a company Michael co-founded with Joel Spolsky back in 2000. Michael's co-founder pitched Trello at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2007 with the lofty goal of attracting 100 million users. Now, 13 years later, over 50 million people are signed up for Trello and that goal doesn't seem so lofty anymore.In addition to the birth and growth of Trello, this episode also focuses on how to effectively work remotely. Two thirds of Trello's workforce is remote, so Michael shares his tested strategies for how to build, manage, and grow a remote workforce.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, we speak with Glitch's CEO Anil Dash and James Turnbull, vice president of engineering, about how Glitch could help developers remove much of the pain associated with installing and accessing application code and how it serves as an extension of GitHub. Glitch, which was originally called Gomix created under the Fog Creek Software umbrella — along with Stack Overflow and Trello — has served as the platform for over five million apps, according to Dash. Glitch can potentially take some of the pain out of application development since developers can begin working directly on abstraction layers while “taking away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said, who estimates about 80% of all code written is identical elsewhere. “Glitch provides people with a platform they can build on top of it without having to worry about installing this dependency or worrying about how this thing works,” Dash said. “That's the way that a lot of the world has been moving and how the abstraction layer is moving further up the stack.” TensorFlow, Google's machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) framework, serves as a good case study, Dash said. “Frankly, when TensorFlow first came out, I had tried to get it running on my dev environment and gave up after several hours of frustration — which made me feel dumb and was probably not their intended goal,” Dash said. Now, for access to the JavaScript framework for TensorFlow, Google has embedded examples of the code for TensorFlow with Glitch, similar to how YouTube code is embedded for video. “So, where you would embed a YouTube video, we've got an app running instead,” Dash said. “And it's showing you how to build a model around your ML libraries and how to actually get up and running.” For those seeking just to study how certain code and apps work, Glitch can “make it really easy for folks who are like journalists to go: ‘okay, I don't really understand how this AWS thing works, but I've got an example of someone using this Python app to to map all this data together,'” Turnbull said. “I can create a visualization from that. And I think that's an example of a strong use case framework-wise.” Ultimately, for the developer, the creative — or for many — the fun part of development work could potentially be more accessible. Applications are “built on top of the scaffold,” Dash said. “I think what we're seeing here is that we can provide that abstraction layer and we can take away the the kind of boring, repeatable part of being a developer,” Dash said. “We can provide people with a platform that they can take and build on top of it without having to worry about things like ‘I need to install this dependency or I need to worry about how this thing works, or I need to set up this framework or, or this template.'”

I was extremely honored to be invited by friends at CSTA-NYC to help produce a live episode of the show on the topic of Tech and Ethics. We called the event "Code of Ethics" and my thanks in particular to the kind and hardworking folks in the Audio-Visual department at Microsoft, NY, who hosted the event. Anil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, formerly Fogcreek Software, and host of Vox Media's new show on Tech and Society, Function, and long-time advocate for a more socially-minded technology sector, it's engineers, leadership, and the policy that structures (or doesn't) decisions about what gets made.Natasha Singer is a reporter for the NY Times Business Section, who covers Tech and has a special focus on accountability. And Brenda is a NYC Public School student who dreams of becoming a software engineer. She is a 1st generation Dominican-American and passionate about women in tech. This conversation was a journey into some of the most serious issues that all of us should be grappling with during Computer Science Education week. Thousands of events, big and small, are being logged globally tying into CS Education, but what could be more important than a step back to think about what, in the course of the conversation, we refer to as tech's "downstream effects." Links from this episode:Function Podcast: https://www.voxmedia.com/about-vox-media/2018/10/30/18039366/vox-media-podcast-network-function-anil-dashGoogle Is Teaching Children How to Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model?Just Don’t Call It PrivacyWeaponized Ad Technology’: Facebook’s Moneymaker Gets a Critical EyeMicrosoft Urges Congress to Regulate Use of Facial RecognitionTech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’: Harvard, Stanford and Others Want to Address ItMaryland Schools May Tell Children When It’s Time to Log OffSenators Call for Federal Investigation of Children’s AppsDid you vote? Now your friends may know.Hudson High School of Learning Technologies: https://www.hudsonhs.nyc/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The pay gap goes way deeper than just men's and women's salaries—that's why just paying women more doesn't solve the problem. In this episode, Claire Suddath talks to Salesforce.com Inc., the San Francisco software company that began doing pay equity audits in 2015 and has found a pay gap every single year. Host Rebecca Greenfield looks at another software company, Fog Creek Software, Inc., and how radical pay transparency is helping equalize salaries. And Ellen Huet reports on Adobe Systems Inc., which says it's closed its pay gap but is still trying to tackle inequities around parental leave that can hold some women back.

The pay gap goes way deeper than just men's and women's salaries—that's why just paying women more doesn't solve the problem. In this episode, Claire Suddath talks to Salesforce.com Inc., the San Francisco software company that began doing pay equity audits in 2015 and has found a pay gap every single year. Host Rebecca Greenfield looks at another software company, Fog Creek Software, Inc., and how radical pay transparency is helping equalize salaries. And Ellen Huet reports on Adobe Systems Inc., which says it's closed its pay gap but is still trying to tackle inequities around parental leave that can hold some women back.

The pay gap goes way deeper than just men's and women's salaries—that's why just paying women more doesn't solve the problem. In this episode, Claire Suddath talks to Salesforce.com Inc., the San Francisco software company that began doing pay equity audits in 2015 and has found a pay gap every single year. Host Rebecca Greenfield looks at another software company, Fog Creek Software, Inc., and how radical pay transparency is helping equalize salaries. And Ellen Huet reports on Adobe Systems Inc., which says it's closed its pay gap but is still trying to tackle inequities around parental leave that can hold some women back. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Maurice Cherry, Content Marketer at Fog Creek Software, and host of the award winning podcast Revision Path joins Gary Rozanc to discuss what he has learned over 5 years and 240 episodes of hosting Revision Path. From ways Design Educators can promote diversity into the classroom to the systemic problems facing black students Maurice shares his insights. In the second half of the conversation Maurice talks about his own design practice, how studying Math and English makes him a better designer and how much the industry have changed in the past 20 years.

Damian Sassower, Fixed Income Strategist for Bloomberg Intelligence, on whether we are reaching the bottom for EM. Elizabeth Nyamayaro, Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, and Head of the HeForShe Initiative, on the critical issues facing women around the globe.Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek Software, on how to make big tech more ethical and closing the gender pay gap.Max Nisen, Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering health care, on the Takeda-Shire deal. Broadcasting live from BLOOMBERG’s BUSINESS OF EQUALITY SUMMIT in the New York City corporate headquarters.

Maurice Cherry is a content marketer at Fog Creek Software, a company dedicated to creating products that enable every person and every team to make thoughtful, useful software. Maurice was formerly the principal and creative director at Lunch, a multidisciplinary studio in Atlanta, GA that helped creative brands craft messages and tell stories for their targeted audiences, including fostering relationships with underrepresented communities.  Maurice is a pioneering digital creator who is most well-known for the Black Weblog Awards and Revision Path Podcast.   http://mauricecherry.com/   StoryHinge http://storyhinge.com Where we amplify personal stories to consider more possibility and realize more potential and happiness in life.

Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Anil Dash, an entrepreneur, activist and writer recognized as one of the most prominent voices advocating for a more humane, inclusive and ethical technology industry. He is the CEO of Fog Creek Software,the independent New York City tech company that incubated landmark startups like Trello and Stack Overflow, and created Glitch, the friendly new community that helps anyone make the app of their dreams. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, and today advises major startups and non-profits including Medium and DonorsChoose.

In our final episode of season 1, we break from our usual format to host a big conversation. Recent events like the Charlottesville, VA rally have revealed the Internet’s role in helping spread IRL threats and violence. Leaders in the tech world have represented varying positions on both protecting free speech and also reducing hate speech online. Should tech companies regulate who says what on the Internet? Brandi Collins of Color of Change, Anil Dash of Fog Creek Software and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation address this question and more with Veronica Belmont. IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla. For more on the series go to irlpodcast.org. Freedom of speech is important, online and off. And, it’s also important that free speech not infringe on the freedom of others. Tell us: what can regular internet citizens do to address this issue? How can we all accelerate the pace of change for a more free, civil and healthy Internet? Leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts so we know what you think.

Anil Dash, CEO of FogCreek Software, entrepreneur, activist and writer, joins us on the show to discuss his Indian American identity and how he’s working to make the industry more humane and ethical. Anil talks about raising his son and the role of technology in his family across generations. He dives into how progress happens and the difference between people doing good versus simply wanting to be seen as good. Anil also pops by our Hella Asian segment and prepare yourselves: it’s a juicy one. We also debut a new game segment this week: Appropriation or Appreciation? katie has a personal kimono conundrum.

In this episode, Mary, Jason, and PJ sit down with the illustrious Anil Dash of Fog Creek Software to discuss interactions with people, why DevRel is so important yet misunderstood, and Anil's cool new project, Glitch.com.

In this episode, Mary, Jason, and PJ sit down with the illustrious Anil Dash of Fog Creek Software to discuss interactions with people, why DevRel is so important yet misunderstood, and Anil's cool new project, Glitch.com.

Anil Dash has done it all, except graduate from college. He's started companies, helped launch the social media revolution, served on President Obama's Office of Digital Strategy, uses Twitter prolifically, and is the CEO of Fog Creek Software. In this wide-ranging discussion, Anil talks about: how he first learned to sell (and overcome his distrust of sales reps) how he didn't learn to do marketing until much later (and what he did instead) how he tries to structure non-zero-sum incentives the critical concept of "bus-proofing" that's expected on the tech side, but not on the sales side of the house a simple way to encourage more diversity in hiring (and how this benefits the company) And much more...

Michael Pryor is the co-founder of Trello, the collaboration tool used by millions to organize and prioritize projects using boards, lists, and cards. He's also the co-founder of Fog Creek Software for Project Management; he currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. #PeakPerformers, Michael shares about @Trello on #TheEntrepYou today! Click To Tweet Show  Notes: If you were stranded on a desert island, what three items would you want to have with you? Snorkel fins as I'm not such a great swimmer, a dog to keep me company and a guitar which would take me a long time to learn. What is the Unique Selling Proposition of Trello? Persons were using sticky notes on their walls. Historically we had built a lot of tools for a much more structured project management and we were thinking about how easy it was for people to use these sticky notes. It helps them organize their thoughts. There is something about being able to see it in front of your face. We tried to map that. It's not like a digital sticky note but it is taking that metaphor into the software world. You create these boards, you put your digital sticky notes, you organize them into lists so people can see where you are, where you were and where you are going. It basically gives you a map for what you're working on. Did you know this would have been a winner? We spent a lot of time building software tools for other developers and this was one of the first tools we build where we wanted to build something for a much wider and broader audience. It was a big bat for us. We thought of building a software that 100 million people can use and it seemed ridiculous at the time. Now we've had 20 million people signed up to use Trello. At the time, we put it out there and we launched it Tech Crunch Disrupt. We told people about it at the competition that we came in second. The huge spike in sign-ups came from that. Those who knew us at the time weren't very technical in nature. People were writing blogs on how they use Trello to plan their wedding, run their marketing campaign and recruit people for their teams. These are examples that we hadn't thought of before-hand but were perfect examples of all the different ways that you could use this application. Persons were writing these blog posts on their own without us asking them to. That's when it started to click that we're on to something here. These people are so excited about what we are doing that they are willing to market to their own channels and tell their friends and the people that follow them about this product without us even getting involved. That's 20 million people have been word of mouth. What were the thoughts that went through your mind during the competition, recognizing you did not come in first place? This was about 5 or 6 years ago. We had a different story than just being at the completion. We had been making software and had a software company for 10 years before that and this was one of the products that we made. We were funding the development of Trello through the sales of some of the other products we were selling, unrelated to Trello. We weren't in a typical scenario where we had to win the competition in order to get the funds to continue the company. This happened much later in our lifecycle of our software development career. Trello and Stack Overflow were joint ventures with Fog Creek. Those super successful and well know products came much later in our history. We took a lot of the lessons learnt over the first decade and applied them. We made many different software products over the years. Some were the right product at the wrong time, or the right product marketed to the wrong people or the right idea but built in the wrong way. There were a lot of failures along the way. What seemed like an over-night success was actually a really long journey. What were some of the lessons learnt? If you've ever heard of Log Me In or Go To My PC,

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood discuss Gomix with Daniel X Moore. Daniel is a Software Developer at Fog Creek Software, and has been in the industry for 10 years. Their company currently offers an amazingly convenient way to build apps. Tune in to learn about it!

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood discuss Gomix with Daniel X Moore. Daniel is a Software Developer at Fog Creek Software, and has been in the industry for 10 years. Their company currently offers an amazingly convenient way to build apps. Tune in to learn about it!

On today's JavaScript Jabber Show, Aimee Knight, Cory House, and Charles Max Wood discuss Gomix with Daniel X Moore. Daniel is a Software Developer at Fog Creek Software, and has been in the industry for 10 years. Their company currently offers an amazingly convenient way to build apps. Tune in to learn about it!

(BONUS EPISODE FROM THE ARCHIVES)Learn about how Patrick McKenzie combined his technical skills with marketing/sales skills to launch & grow several successful internet businesses.Patrick is the creator of Bingo Card Creator. He learned marketing and sales to launch and grow Kalzumeus Software; He has worked with 37signals, Fog Creek Software, and is now in content & community at Stripe.Find Patrick on Twitter at @patio11 and listen to Patrick’s podcast here.Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.

Anil Dash is the CEO of Fog Creek Software. He also founded Makerbase, Activate, and the non-profit Expert Labs, a research initiative backed by the MacArthur Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which collaborated with the Obama White House and federal agencies. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anil Dash — Tech’s Moral Reckoning.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Alexia Ohannessian is originally from France and now makes her home in Brazil. She has lived and worked on three continents, speaks six different languages, and has helped many small and medium-sized companies create expansion strategies for Latin America. Currently, Alexia is the International Marketing Lead at Trello, a project-management app company that spun out of Fog Creek Software in 2014. Having joined the Trello team in 2015, she successfully launched the app in 21 languages through an innovative crowd-sourcing effort. Today, Trello has over 15 million users, with localized experiences available for Brazil, Germany and Spain. Besides her role at Trello, Alexia is also one of the three international marketing experts behind the recently-launched website Born To Be Global.   Links: Trello website Trello on Facebook ​Trello on Twitter Born To Be Global website Alexia on LinkedIn Alexia on Twitter

Daniel starts off by introducing himself and talking about the new product he developed for Fog Creek Software, HyperDev. He then talks about how he got started in web development and how he built a game for the Chrome App Store. Cecil then asks about Daniel's venture into building a game engine and what motivates him to learn. The show wraps up with Daniel talking about his orange grove and how he handles working from home. Links Daniel X on Twitter Daniel X's Blog HyperDev Contrasaurus Dwarf Fortress Pixie Engine Flash Punk Flixel Alfred Richie's Marvel Legendary dividers Bio Daniel X Moore ...

This we discuss the OS X ransomware spread via the Transmission app. We also follow up on how much to make an app. We discuss the challenges of pair programing for the introverted. Picks: Protocol-Oriented Programming with Swift, The Majestic Monolith & RWDevCon Episode 82 Show Notes: First OS X ransomware detected in the wild, will maliciously encrypt hard drives on infected Macs [Update: How to fix] Reamde: A novel In the Beginning Was the Command Line Seveneves a novel by Neil Stevenson Cryptonomicon Transmission WHAT DOES IT COST TO DEVELOP AN APP? Hockenberry on Making Twitterrific Hypercritical Fogcreek Software Episode 82 Picks: Protocol-Oriented Programming with Swift, by Jon Hoffman The Majestic Monolith RWDevCon

Michael is the CEO of Trello, the tool that helps entrepreneurs organize their businesses and lives. He’s also the Co-founder of Fog Creek Software, sits on the board of Stack Exchange, and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Scott talks to Jacob Krall from Fog Creek Software about how his team used the open source C# Roslyn compiler to bring their ancient VBScript-style language called "Wasabi" into the 21st century. They solved real-world problems in a systematic way with smart decisions and computer science.

Visit EOFire.com for complete show notes of every Podcast episode. Michael is the CEO of Trello, the tool that helps entrepreneurs organize their businesses and lives. He's also the Co-founder of Fog Creek Software, sits on the board of Stack Exchange, and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Michael Pryor is the CEO of Trello, a free app that makes working on group projects as easy as using sticky notes on a whiteboard. He is also the co-founder and President of Fog Creek Software, the makers of products such as FogBugz and Kiln. To date, Trello has raised over $10M in funding and is used by millions of people and companies of all kinds and sizes including Google, Adobe and The New York Times.Links & Resources MentionedTrelloFog CreekMichael Pryor - @michaelpryor | michael [at] trello [dot] comOmer Khan - @omerkhanEnjoyed this episode?Subscribe to the podcastLeave a rating and reviewFollow Omer on TwitterNeed help with your SaaS?Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support.Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue.Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Michael Pryor is the CEO of Trello, a free app that makes working on group projects as easy as using sticky notes on a whiteboard. He is also the co-founder and President of Fog Creek Software, the makers of products such as FogBugz and Kiln. To date, Trello has raised over $10M in funding and is used by millions of people and companies of all kinds and sizes including Google, Adobe and The New York Times. Links & Resources Mentioned Trello Fog Creek Michael Pryor - @michaelpryor | michael [at] trello [dot] com Omer Khan - @omerkhan Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Ben Kamens is the lead developer at The Khan Academy and was also a part of the storied Fog Creek Software. He's managing 12 summer interns at the Academy this year. Scott talks to Ben about the mentor relationship, how to manage code reviews, one on ones, preparing for their arrival and more. How can you get the MOST out of your interns?

Scott's in New York this week and he stops by the Fog Creek Software offices on Broadway and chats with Joel Spolsky. Why did they write their own compiler? How long have they used VBScript? What does Joel think about online community? All this and less in this episode!

Joel Spolsky first came on Venture Voice over three years ago to discuss his company which he launched in a very different way from most entrepreneurs. Rather than start with the big idea and pay lip service to building a great team, Joel focused on getting great programmers first.…

The listeners have spoken. Jason Fried of 37signals and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software have won Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards. They came in second and third place out of a pack of over 20 world-class entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed on the show (we’ll announce the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner next week).…

Download the MP3. The listeners have spoken. Jason Fried of 37signals and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software have won Venture Voice Entrepreneurial Achievement Awards. They came in second and third place out of a pack of over 20 world-class entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed on the show (we’ll announce the Venture Voice Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner next week). It was a close race and you gave us some really impassioned votes. In this show, Jason and Joel give us some hints about what their companies are launching this year. They don’t get to have all the fun -- we play some of your comments too.

While some entrepreneurs fret over new business ideas, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software focuses on hiring the best and brightest for his New York City-based software company, and then figures out how to make a profit with the products they create.…

Download the MP3. While some entrepreneurs fret over new business ideas, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software focuses on hiring the best and brightest for his New York City-based software company, and then figures out how to make a profit with the products they create. He bootstrapped his company to profitability and built a loyal following of fans along the way. While Joel developed Fog Creek's first product called FogBugz that tracks bugs, he let his 2005 summer interns develop their own product called Copilot that has already hit the market. Joel's out to prove he can put capital to work, scale his business, and maybe even revolutionize venture capital along the way. Update: Joel returned for a second interview on Venture Voiceover three years later in 2009.