Update: VMware followed up with me this morning, and has done a great job getting me help and outlining how they’re planning to address a lot of the complaints I’ve had. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few months, but so far, VMware has convinced me that they get they have a problem and are going to try to fix it. Kudos, VMware. So about a week ago I decide to buy VMware Fusion. I really like VMware. They make awesome products, they have good support. They’re not perfect—the VMware...

At Fog Creek, we heavily use HipChat to handle quick internal communication. One thing we decided we wanted on the Kiln team was to get real-time notifications whenever anyone pushed to one of our main repositories. Thankfully, Kiln has a feature called webhooks that cause Kiln to broadcast repository events to a random web URL, and HipChat has a nice little API to post notifications in chat rooms. So I whipped up a little web service, called Squawker, to handle this kind of thing for us. You...

I’m really proud of all the work that we’ve been able to pour into Kiln over the last two years. In March of 2009, we had nothing more than a prototype. By October, we had a beta. By January, we were shipping Kiln 1.0. And just a few months later, we followed with Kiln 1.2, which added a massive number of features and really paved the way to making Kiln feel like a well-rounded product. Well, we’re getting ready to launch Kiln 2.0, and we’re so psyched about it that we’re doing another World...

When I attended Open Source Bridge two weeks ago, I wanted something to hack on while I was there. The upcoming version of Kiln moves from relying on a combination of explicit threads and FogBugz’ heartbeat mechanism to using a very lightweight queuing system backed by Redis. The only problem is that Redis doesn’t run on Windows, and while that’s not a problem for Kiln On Demand, where we rely heavily on FreeBSD for key parts of Kiln’s infrastructure, the licensed version Kiln needs to run on...

I try not to throw too many out-and-out advertisements into this blog, but I’m very proud to announce that Kiln 1.2 is out. When Kiln 1.0 shipped back in February, it was awesome, but still very much a 1.0 product. While Kiln’s still under heavy development, we’ve tremendously improved a lot of the little things that make the difference between “functional” and “fun,” and I’m happy to say that Kiln’s increasingly strongly in the latter camp. Since our initial launch, we’ve: Added custom...

About once a week, I get an email in my mailbox that reads like this: Hey, Kiln looks neat, but Git is totally the bee’s knees, so why the fuck are you using Mercurial? Note that these emails are rarely (if ever) actually interested in why Kiln chose Mercurial; what they’re instead interested in is trying to piss me off enough that I get into a flamewar about why Mercurial is going to bring about Nirvana while Git causes people to eat babies using nothing but A1 sauce and a spork. This is...

This article is a continuation of Kiln’s Evolution, Part 1: DVCS as Code Review. In the fall of 2008, Joel was getting increasingly adamant that FogBugz needed source control integration, and most people in the company seemed to think Subversion would probably be the best SCM to make that happen. Tyler and I disagreed, believing strongly that we should use a DVCS instead, and that our code review tool gave a really compelling example of why DVCS was better that any software shop would instantly...

As Kiln draws ever closer to release, I realized that we have long since passed the point where I should move all of my personal projects to it. So as of today, I have. If you’re interested in grabbing the most recent version of FogBugz Middleware, my fork of Kiln Backup, or any of my other public projects, they’re now all at https://bqb.kilnhg.com. Log-in with the user guest and the password anonymous, and you’ll have full read-only access to the entire site. Even if you’re not that interested...

Google’s motto is, “Don’t be evil.” I’ve always found that motto disturbing for two reasons. First, a company that can differentiate itself—successfully, no less—from its competitors merely by promising not to be evil implies that the average company is ridiculously corrupt. A person who announced, “My motto is, ‘don’t shoot people’” would be notable because no one thinks you should shoot people, making the promise weird and redundant—not because the promise represented some great sacrifice. Yet...

Whenever I browse the Android Marketplace, I’m utterly amazed by how many “app reviews” are nothing but spam. The problem is so pandemic that I have to conclude that Google has thus far done absolutely nothing to combat the problem. Shopping in the Marketplace ends up feeling like going through a dirty bazaar, surrounded by panhandlers and con artists looking to make a cheap buck. I don’t care how good the deals may be; if shopping ends up being an annoying experience that makes me feel dirty,...