Ask HN: What stock trading API do you use or recommend? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking of playing with stocks (small amounts just for fun). But I do want to do real money. What are some of the stock trading APIs that folks here at HN recommend ? Ideally I would create an application that can place orders for the stocks that are pre-selected and mostly do buy/sell. I guess the idea is that I want to play with my own custom algorithm for fun to see if I can make some money through my stocks using some type of automated way (not talking about HFT or anything too serious). <comment><USER2> For data, IEX serves free stock api that supports websockets

[https://iextrading.com/developer/](https://iextrading.com/developer/)

To research and backtest strategies, check out the Quantopian community. You can perform your analysis right in an IPython Notebook and share it with really smart people.

[https://www.quantopian.com/notebooks/survey](https://www.quantopian.com/notebooks/survey)

Will Robinhood ever release an "official" API for commission-free algo trading? They may have their hands full with all the inexperienced options traders getting their first margin calls last week. In the meantime there's plenty of room for competition:

Alpaca | Algo Trading Commission Free With REST API

[https://alpaca.markets/](https://alpaca.markets/)

Best of luck and research your risks before using real money ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi I am a founder of Alpaca, but please try out [https://alpaca.markets/](https://alpaca.markets/) . We built this commission- free trading API for tech developers in mind (simple REST API).

We also wrote up articles wrt market data and any algo-trading related applications here as well!

Algo trading application list [https://hackernoon.com/9-great-tools-for-algo- trading-e0938a...](https://hackernoon.com/9-great-tools-for-algo- trading-e0938a6856cd)

Data vendors list [https://blog.alpaca.markets/blog/2018/7/24/data-data- data-11...](https://blog.alpaca.markets/blog/2018/7/24/data-data- data-11-great-financial-datavendors)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently using MetaTrader software[1] and their language MQL ( MetaQuotes Language ), which is basically C++ with some trading functions/libraries.

Most of my code is written in Python, so I only use the C++ part to place orders. Everything else is done with Python.

The 2 main advantages that I see with MetaTrader is that:

\- I can change brokers without having to rewrite anything or learn a new API. I just need to enter the server + login information in MetaTrader. At least in my country, almost all brokers have MetaTrader support.

\- I can run and store the code locally. If you use something like quantopian.com, the code is run and stored in their servers. This brings a series of limitations like outdated/missing libraries or slow backtesting since they have to limit CPU/memory resources.

[1] [https://www.metatrader5.com/](https://www.metatrader5.com/)

<comment><USER5> Hey - can you email me please (in my profile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm using Tradier and like it. But I use it more for stock data than actual trading. It is free if you open an account and fund it. [https://brokerage.tradier.com/](https://brokerage.tradier.com/)

For trading I prefer [https://www.motifinvesting.com/](https://www.motifinvesting.com/) which lets me name a given strategy, purchase up to 30 stocks, and they will track returns. It is manual, not API driven but the returns tracking and public track record is worth it for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interactive Brokers

</comment><comment><USER8> Robinhood has a reverse engineered API. You could probably use that for trading, though I'm not sure.

Interactive Brokers has an advanced API as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interactive Brokers is very good. It has the benefit of having a very good python interface and a decent R interface. If Python or R is your analytics engine, IB can be a great choice.

<comment><USER10> I've always wanted to use IB, but once I saw that I couldn't use special characters in my password on signup, I decided it was a no-go, haha.

<comment><USER9> Never realized that ... very strange! But, I have very little confidence in passwords these days. I prefer 2FA much more. Thankfully .. in India .. most things of value need a second authentication via an SMS OTP code

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TD Ameritrade has a decent API, if you ask them nicely.</comment>


Keeptempo: an alternative to rescuetime? - <AUTHOR> http://keeptempo.com/ <comment><USER2> I think it looks like a slick app, but it is decidedly a different app than RescueTime... Near as I can tell, it's timesheets with some spruced up data entry.

On a related note-- from the splash site to the app, these guys are taking some serious cues from 37s (from language to layout). Not a bad thing-- it just really jumped out at me.

<comment><USER3> At least they flipped around take a tour and sign up free.</comment></comment>


The lockdown death of a 20-year-old day trader - <AUTHOR> https://www.weekdaytimes.com/business/2020/07/02/the-lockdown-death-of-a-20-year-old-day-trader-free-to-read <comment><AUTHOR> Syndicated from [https://www.ft.com/content/45d0a047-360f-4abf-86ee-108f43601...](https://www.ft.com/content/45d0a047-360f-4abf-86ee-108f436015a1)</comment>


Ask HN: How to invest 100k? - <AUTHOR> What would you do if you had 100k to invest? I'd like to see what people would do with that much money. I know this has been asked quite a bit.
Would you: 1. Invest into real estate and rent 2. Invest in a franchise/business 3. Invest into wall street such as stocks, mutual funds, options or futures.
I'm just wondering what you would do. If you would split it up and put it here or there or all into one thing.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I invest in antiques toys, watches and watch parts and some metal by buying antique silver coins and gold coins. With advent of ebay, antiques have become quite liquid. However, just as with any other investment vehicle, antiques require due diligence and knowledge of the market. I have almost doubled the investment in current year. This year's home run was three sets of Rolex Submariner 6536 watch parts sold for $6000 which were bought for $400.

My biggest loss was a Rolex Moonphase Watch I bought on ebay for $14000 last year, which turned out to be a very good fake and even confused a couple of Christies Specialists. So I learned my biggest lesson, if it is too good to be true walk away. Rolex Moonphase in Steel Case with Black Dial usually goes for > $250000 and I should have known better before paying $14000 for it.

Here is my advice on investing your money, start slow, study your market, keep a diverse portfolio, target 10-15% per year return, if you reach that you are already ahead of inflation and increasing your networth. With practice you will get better at it.

Getting good at investing takes time and effort, but its well worth it, for me antiques were a hobby which turned into good investments, for you it might be stocks, land, startups, commodities etc. But same principles apply to all of them, you have to be passionate about your investments, know your market, learn from your mistakes, never put all eggs in one basket and walk away if its too good to be true.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion, 100k is too little for real estate/rent.

I would put 60k in risky, short-term investments such as early-stage startups and some Wall Street funds. The rest 40k would go into long-term safe bets.

<comment><USER4> How can I make short-term investments in early stage startups?

<comment><USER5> Meet people in the startup community

Or sign up for AngelList - <http://angel.co/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When do you plan on using the money? The answer will be different if you need to spend it in 2 years or if this is saving for your retirement in 30 years.

What is your risk tolerance?

What other sorts of investments do you already have?

If it was me, and it was a long term investment, I'd put it in a S&P 500 Index fund.

[https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FundsSnapshot?FundId=0540&#... (this fund has a 0.07% expense ratio)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, i dont have any of the money now, but soon i will get a job to where i am hoping to save around 180k. I was thinking of investing the 80+ into some kind of index and the rest will be for more risky investments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Today,I would keep it liquid, in safe banks, possibly SOME in actual gold (no I'm not a gold freak). A foreign bank with better reserve policies might not be a bad idea. Maybe some Euros or some other currency as a hedge, but that's it. Not to sound too paranoid - just put it in a bank or two that have decent financials, within FDIC limits.

Stay out of the risk game for a bit.

Then plan to spend the next 48-36 months watching and studying the real-estate market, and stay out of debt. When the shit hits the fan and prices hit rock bottom, those with liquidity will be king.

Right now is not the best time on dumping money into risky investments (unless you really are prepared to take that risk - dumping 60k into really risky startups is more likely to cause you to lose 60k than anything else. it's called risk for a reason)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd split it to create a diverse portfolio of investments, some high risk high return, some low risk but long term. If I couldn't get a return exceeding the cost I'm paying on the mortgage, I'd put the cash into the mortgage to lower my outgoings, then take the difference and invest that instead.

The rationale behind that approach is that you'll save money by not paying interest, the amount you save is largely dependent on what you owe and the interest you're paying, but you're probably paying more mortgage interest than what you'd get out of most savings.

I'd also buy some precious metals (Gold, Silver etc.) and a safe. Not a gold bug, but it'd be good to fall back on if I need the funds, plus it will appreciate over time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe use a core satellite approach.

The large chunk (70-80%) goes into the core-part, which consists of Exchange- traded (index) funds, such as MSCI World. If you live in the US, I would not invest everything in S&P 500, as you already have enough of US exposure living there. Maybe 30% US, 30% Emerging Markets (MSCI emerging markets), 30% Europe, 10% something else.

Then with the satellite (20-30%), you can gamble a bit. Like investing in a startup, or in special market, (a index tracker in a special sector or in an emerging market for example).

</comment><comment><USER10> I would say with 100k you can looking at investing in startups. Think YC also invest some 13k on each startup entrepreneur, I guess you can work along that line.

</comment><comment><USER11> Invest in what you understand the best.</comment>


Ask HN: I'd like to make a 30-second screencast. Where do I start? - <AUTHOR>

So I've a product prototype that I'd like to pitch about in 30-45 seconds, in animation of some form. I'd love to have something along the lines of Common Craft's "Twitter in Plain English (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o), but the problem is I've very limited knowledge of Flash or other similar tools.
Where could I get help in working with someone on coming up with a 30-45 second short on the product?
And to all those entrepreneurs who've done this before...did you come up with the videos in-house, or was it outsourced? <comment><USER2> We work with the Common Craft folks quite a bit. Knowing the amount of time they spend doing each video, I would advise doing a screencast rather than the live action cut-out style that they do.

For screencasts, nothing beats Screenflow. All of the videos on our site (<http://wistia.com>) were produced using Screenflow. It costs $99, but given that your video will be an integral part of you marketing, it is well worth it.

In terms of production, start by coming up with a script. This will possibly take longer than the actual recording and editing, but will make a major difference in terms of the quality of your video. Keep it short and punchy...people won't watch things they aren't interested in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jing is decent, and either free or dirt-cheap depending on which version you get.

<http://www.jingproject.com/>

The main advantage of the paid version ($14.95/year) is that it lets you save to MPEG-4 video as well as Flash SWF (much easier to edit using iMovie, upload to YouTube, etc.). Also the paid version doesn't slap a Jing logo on your video.

Just Windows and OS X, unfortunately -- no Linux version.

It's not as sophisticated as some of the others, but it's definitely usable for basic work. Maybe try the free version to see if it's good enough, then move on to the spendy stuff (Screenflow, Camtasia, etc.) if it's not.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it a web-app, where the client is a browser, or a desktop app with a Linux client? If so, and you have a Linux box handy, it's dead simple to record screencasts in Linux... just use XVidCap. <http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/>

If it's a desktop app for Win or Mac, I'm not sure what the best option is, but vnc2swf might work for ya. <http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Everyone seems to be suggesting screen capture applications, after looking at your reference, it seems <http://goanimate.com/biz> might be more what you're looking for, with options for DIY and outsourced. Disclaimer: I have not used any service like this just googled for "make your own animation", any video productions I've been part of have been application screencaps with vnc2swf or Camtasia.

</comment><comment><USER6> You could use Animoto <http://animoto.com/> using some screenshots of your app.

</comment><comment><USER7> I searched for hours with the exact same requirements. I simply wanted to post a screencast of my product on my website.

I am using recordmydesktop/ubuntu and was able to find all the info needed in this video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHrFY7vli5k>

</comment><comment><USER8> I've heard nothing but praise for ScreenFlow. <http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm>

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://screenr.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> What OS?

<comment><AUTHOR> The OS doesn't matter. The screencast is just a clip that I'm looking to upload on YouTube that I can then send to potential clients.

<comment><USER10> I was going to point you to something that's dead simple to use but ok.

<comment><USER11> I've tried CamStudio for recording webinars but would like to hear your suggestion for Windows, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The world is mutable (and consequences for system design) - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/RealWorldIsMutable <comment><USER2> I don't see how the threats (a court telling you to stop) are different for a compiled language vs a jit language</comment>


MasterClass is seizing its moment - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/style/masterclass-secrets.html <comment><USER3> MasterClass is using celebrity and production value as an attractant, but accomplishment in a field does not necessarily equate to expertise and certainly doesn't imply any significant teaching ability.

MasterClass brings you close to recognized greats, but to an extent your learning will be more about _them_ and only tangentially about the field of interest. There are some MasterClass episodes conveying very practical knowledge - typically the cooking ones - but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking (theory, law, etc).

Systemically understanding a field of interest is a different endeavor requiring more rigor. The Great Courses product is probably the more rigorous (categorically similar) educational tool in comparison to MasterClass. It has less production value (though more than sufficient) and the lectures are from obscure though academically recognized authorities rather than curated celebrities.

_IF goal is to:_

Really learn a new field or skill during the pandemic = The Great Courses.

Watch autobiopic on recognized authority = MasterClass.

For the record, I have both and am affiliated with neither.

<comment><USER4> One of the biggest things I learned from the Photography with Annie Liebowitz MasterClass is that Annie very seldomly presses the shutter or even looks through the viewfinder - she has an assistant that does camera operation, hooked up to a monitor. Then she has a digital editor that does all the post- processing and editing.

She'd more accurately be referred to as a creative director. In the class, she even says, "I don't even know what camera or lenses I use." You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important, but unless exaggerated for effect, this says something.

"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".

<comment><USER5> There is a lesson there, even if it's unintentional: successful photographers don't obsess over the technical details. Photography is sometimes better thought of as 'image-making with a camera' than 'pointing a camera and pressing shoot.'

<comment><USER6> Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.

Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post- processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.

<comment><USER7> World famous guitarists have guitar tech assistants to tune, fix, and customise their guitars.

World-class racing drivers don't maintain their own cars.

Michelin star chefs don't do their own veg prep.

Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chris Voss' negotiation class has easily justified the $100 per year subscription. Kasparov's chess class is valuable, but it wouldn't be worth it on its own. Paul Krugman's economics class is interesting but pedantic. It only serves as a basic introduction, but does so in a field in which the introduction is barely useful. Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution University course fills the gap between beginner and intermediate economics for free.

<comment><USER9> What does Voss' class have that's not in his book?

<comment><USER8> Live demonstrations

The book was too abstract for me. Seeing Voss in the act allowed me to imitate him.

<comment><USER10> I'll have to check it out then. I liked the book, but so much of negotiation is body language and tone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought this thread on MasterClass's coordinated distribution strategy was interesting and worth reading: [https://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool/status/126538262872474009...](https://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool/status/1265382628724740098)

The fact MasterClass ranks first in Google for "what is a shallot?" is pretty surprising.

<comment><USER12> How many people who don't know what a shallot is are going to drop $80 or whatever on a Gordon Ramsay masterclass?

<comment><USER13> If you're Googling "what is a shallot," it means you don't know much about cooking and are trying to learn more. Seems like the perfect target market for an online cooking class.

<comment><USER14> I agree with GP though, if you don't know what a shallot is, it's not likely you have sufficient _interest_ to _pay money_ to learn about cooking.

Obviously it's regional, but from my UK perspective shallots are not exotic.

I'm not aware that they even suffer from multiple names as do spring/salad/green onions/scallions. Echalions of course, but that's a subcategory.

If shallots are unfamiliar, again, UK, you've spent little time even in supermarket vegetable aisles or restaurants and, surely, are therefore unlikely to actually part with cash a cooking class?

<comment><USER15> Pretty sure this is what search analytics is for... and it's not about whether a particular phrase is the best signal, but the _cheapest_ signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> MasterClass is somewhat paradoxical in my opinion. They're attempting to reach a wide audience (people who aren't technically proficient in the respective fields of say cooking or music) but they're framing it as a "masterclass" which is a class given by a master of a topic to students who are proficient in their topic. Seems like more entertainment than an actual masterclass which I would prefer

<comment> crooked-v > but they're framing it as a "masterclass" which is a class given by a master > of a topic to students who are proficient in their topic

But they're not?

They're using the word as a trademark, sure, but the actual service is obviously intended for people of a variety of skill levels, as thematically connected by being taught by well-known 'masters' (such as the Penn and Teller magic lessons).

In other words, when I buy an Apple computer and it doesn't include any apples in the box, that's not 'paradoxical'.

<comment><USER17> I don't think that's quite the same. Apples are very obviously not computers, while MasterClass's offering is extremely similar to what a "masterclass" is, which leads me to read it as meaning "we offer a service that maps to what our name is".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Every MasterClass series I've watch (I've watched about half a dozen), they seem to be more of an entertainment thing than a professional class. There is a general lack of rigor and details that just can't be conveyed in a single course.

<comment><USER19> I really do not think the Chris Hadfield series on Space Exploration will help you become an astronaut.

<comment><USER18> Yea! I watched it on a plane and thought it was more of Educational Entertainment than anything else. It had a place but not as a source of learning.

<comment><USER20> SNL take on the MasterClass lampooned it perfectly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U31rKSYX07E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U31rKSYX07E).

Having said that, I watched a couple of Neil Gaiman's lectures and because I love Neil's work, I loved what he had to say.

<comment><USER21> (That's a great John Mulaney impression.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Masterclass is such a brilliant business model.

They're charging close to the same fees as Netflix, yet their production costs are very little. They don't need to bet millions on some show or pilot and become a flop.

They can quickly churn out classes with very limited budget compare to Netflix's budget and keep their paying customers happy.

<comment><USER23> I bet most of their creators sell their services as part of a profit sharing agreement too. Gordon Ramsey already creates content for YouTube, because he has to in order to stay relevant. For him, Masterclasses are (probably) just better paying YouTube videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> MasterClass in the past has benefited from famous/accomplished people feeling they want to "give back" to the world some lessons they've learned.

The standard model is something like $100k up front + 30% of sales. If someone's net worth is in the dozens of millions or more, this really isn't moving the needle, so the major incentive has to be the altruism.

However, will people continue to choose to be altruistic on this platform, when it is turning the creators into the ultra wealthy? One might be less inclined to altruism if you're actually giving a +1 to the world but a +50 to a random company who hosts a website. Many of the people that have done Masterclasses could make an arbitrary individual wealthy and famous (e.g. Spielberg could just say "<random no-name filmmaker> is my protege and all films I work on will be co-directed by them"). The question is how many people are going to make that choice for Masterclass when they could just as well host it on their own website, or put it on their own channel on youtube, etc.

<comment><USER24> I don't actually think the celebrities are contributing purely out of an altruistic desire to 'give back'. I think that's _great_ marketing by Masterclass, but the primary thing celebrities get by associating themselves with Masterclass is helping continue to build their own brand. Masterclass has positioned its self as "the best in the world teaching their craft", so by agreeing to be on their platform a celebrity is getting publicity that reinforces the idea that they're the best in the world at that thing, and that they're still socially/culturally relevant.

<comment><USER25> Not purely. But there are 1000 things they could be doing. Taking the time to create thoughtful instructional videos is hard. I admire them for sharing what they know.

<comment><USER3> Well, remember it's their agent that's managing the brand. It's not as if the celebrity is picking it over 1000 other things. Their agent thinks that out of a 1000 avenues for strengthening the celebrity's brand, Masterclass would hit the right demographic and get the best return on effort (and it's their job to make those determinations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting article worthy of a discussion. But I also have a selfish motive – I've been really intrigued by some of the teasers and I'm wondering if people have done any of the courses and have an opinion on whether or not it was worth the money.

<comment><USER26> Depends on what you want to get from the class and what that amount of money means to you.

For example, the violin class by Perlman that I took. Judging by the content alone, I wouldn't say it's worth $90, since it's not that deep, and a lot of the information is online for free already.

On the other hand, I can comfortably afford it. I'll happily pay that 90+ bucks just to hear Perlman talk about violin for a few hours, regardless of the depth.

I'd say the same for the writing courses. Not deep, no special secrets, not going to make you a master. But if you just want to hear them talk about their own crafts and processes, it's also a bearable price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I took Gordon Ramsay's MasterClass on cooking and it helped me in some small but surprisingly useful ways. The knife skills part helped me be safer and faster in the kitchen, for example. It was also a good refresher on certain ingredients. In some ways, I learned more basic and fewer skills than I expected, and there was some random stuff in there that you won't really need unless you plan on opening a restaurant. Yet, at the same time, it was refreshing to have a high quality, practical course that I could pause, rewind, and re-watch until I had mastered all of the little details. My cooking has definitely improved because of it and it was worth the cost.

<comment><USER28> For knife skills, I enthusiastically recommend this free online course. It was recommended to me by a professional chef, and I'd bet most professional chefs would get something (or many things) out of it: [https://shop.mybluprint.com/cooking/classes/complete- knife-s...](https://shop.mybluprint.com/cooking/classes/complete-knife- skills/35338)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I learned a lot about writing better _software_ and product development from David Mamet's masterclass on writing _screenplays_.

He has a no-bullshit, get to the point, approach that I liked. He has points on what should a story accomplish, where the responsibilities of a character end, and the nature of the job being to entertain, not inform or lecture. It can directly be transferable to feature creep, single responsibility, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Celebrity teaching such as Masterclass reminds me of unsubstantiated self-help teaching promises. It's all about marketing, about luring customers with supposedly easy-to-achieve results such as "Rewire your brain in 7 days" or "Learn how grand master chess players think in 12 easy lessons". Or - <USER2> forbid - "Teach yourself expert Go/Rust/Python/C++ programming in 21 days".

Problem is: It is never easy to achieve a high level, at anything.

And that in turn leads one to Peter Norvig's (posted here many times) excellent Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years blog post [https://norvig.com/21-days.html](https://norvig.com/21-days.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> What I don't understand is just because someone is highly skilled at something (Ron Howard) doesn't make them as good a teacher of said something. Maybe Masterclass is helping them put their teaching information together? But they sell it like they're putting together the best of the best teachers, and I don't know if that's the case.

</comment><comment><USER32> Chapo Trap House had an interesting take of MasterClass. In their view it's basically a way of alleviating imposter syndrome. It's real function is to give people some sort of credential, and thus permission. Watch a MasterClass on photography, now you have permission to be a photographer.

</comment><comment><USER33> I had a chance to watch ~half of Kasparov's class on Masterclass. For casual player (1850 lichess in blitz and bullet, 77 percentile), it was close to useless. Too high level and pretty unstructured.

<comment><USER34> My experience watching carlos santana's class on guitar was similarly disappointing. He just keeps talking about "finding your sound" then plays a few notes. Not really helpful.

<comment><USER35> Same with Hans Zimmer. Useless.

However Tom Morello's was cool. Both technical and nerdy as well as inspirational. And I'm not a big Rage against the machine fan or anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The fact that they chose Dan Brown of all people to do a writing workshop does not inspire confidence.

<comment><USER37> Why? He is an extremely successful author (whose success is not due to gimmicks but literally because of his books being read and loved by millions).

I'd love to learn from him.

<comment><USER36> Fine, learn how to sell books from him. Just don't learn how to write.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not quite the right place for this comment, but it's timely, and I wanted to share it. Over the long weekend, I started bookmarking and closing my months- long collection of browser tabs. The number of "to read" and "to watch" links _vastly_ outnumbered the "to _dos_ " (I don't mean that like it's a chore, but related to an activity). I accidentally focused too much on learning over doing.

Don't watch these classes just to watch these classes. Watch them to enrich an active part of your life.

</comment><comment><USER39> Will admit to bing one of those that watch some of the adverts to the end. It's certainly compelling and engaging filmmaking.

The content is good. Criticisms that the content is often shallow and more about the person than the topic are fair and valid. Your won't really learn much actual skills apart from maybe the cooking ones. It's interesting and inspiring content regardless.

You can find comparable stuff on YouTube if you know where to look and are willing to filter though things (lots of great biographic speeches on there and such) but I get their biz model and it makes sense. It's basically super premium YouTube. They've attracted a very diverse and impressive mix of talent too.

</comment><comment><USER40> FWIW, I learned quite a bit from deadmau5' MasterClass, in terms of "general approach", "inspiration", and "very specific, immediately applicable techniques that I probably wouldn't find elsewhere". Maybe he's an outlier?

I had been producing music for 12 years when I took the class, and I had 30+ years of musical and recording experience to draw from. Also, I use the same software (Ableton Live) as deadmau5 did in the tutorial, so most of the technical elements were immediately usable.

</comment><comment><USER41> The Kevin Spacey one is genuinely brilliant. They've taken it down, but older accounts like mine still have it.

<comment><USER42> What was it about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've nearly subscribed multiple times to MasterClass, then I watch a demo again.

We all have different needs for affirmation to information. My fear from what I've seen is that MasterClass is too heavy on affirmation. I already know I can do it, that's not what I need.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd like to see how much they're paying the actors and how they make the courses

</comment><comment><USER45> You should be familiar with "survivor bias" before paying for their service.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why on earth does the headline on NYTimes say "only school left" as if there are no other online schools running.

<comment><USER47> >It's the Year 2120. MasterClass Is the Only School Left.

It's a joke prediction about the year 2120, not 2020.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would have thought that MasterClass would struggle because of the cultural "anti-expert" zeitgeist we have right now. Glad i'm wrong.

<comment><USER48> What happens when an immovable "anti-expert" zeitgeist meets an unstoppable "pro-celebrity" culture?

<comment><USER49> You get the Kardashians

<comment><USER34> That's less of a cross between expert/celebrity and more pure celebrity (pure in the sense that they are famous because they are famous).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Fogbugz lost to Jira - <AUTHOR> http://movingfulcrum.com/why-fogbugz-lost-to-jira/ <comment><USER2> Having mainly done line of business applications my entire life, I have a slightly different take.

Jira won because it was not opinionated. You can use it however you want. FogBugz had the philosophy to make bug entry super easy above anything else. Jira will let a manager define new custom fields and make them all compulsory. It perfectly fits how manager at big companies think.

FogBugz provides Completion Date Probability Distribution chart and Burn Down Chart [2]. Anyone who has worked for big companies knows that these two are USELESS for them. They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it.

At my current company, we are going for SOC1 compliance. This forces an amazingly complicated issue workflow and they implemented it very easily in Jira. I am looking at FogBugz documentation on workflows [1], and I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz.

I also feel that Jira has a better ecosystem for plugins and integrations then FogBugz.

[1] [http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and- workfl...](http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workflows)

[2] [http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project- management/](http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/)

<comment><USER3> _They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it._

Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Joel has argued[1] that the only schedule worth anything is the one set by the developers themselves. Management can set relative priorities (X is twice as important as Y), but trying to force a faster deadline on the developers is like trying to make your Linux box run faster by renice-ing every process to -20.

Now, the problem with developer-set schedules is that they tend to underestimate how long things will take. Hence, FogBugz figures out how much each developer underestimates on average, and builds bell curves for the realistic completion time.

[1] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html)

<comment><USER4> _Do you find that this really works out, in practice?_

No. Good luck persuading the management to try something else!

<comment><USER5> There may be a niche for enlightened managers or startup funders to promote such a thinking. If successful it will lead to a clear competitive advantage.

<comment><USER6> This is true. But there is no competitive advantage in going and broadcasting to all your competitors exactly how you achieved the advantage. So the development shops that succeed using this will keep it tight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fogbugz_lost_to_jira/)

<comment><USER8> An interesting point from that, since everyone likes to bash Wasabi:

> "If we hadn't done Wasabi, then we'd have had to rewrite all of FogBugz, and > that would've killed the company. Wasabi also gave us stuff that developers > are only now rediscovering, like code that executes on both client and > server (e.g. via server-side/client-side React), that even gave us a > development edge. I've written about this at length > ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133)) > and won't revisit it, but while I think that Wasabi targeting .NET may have > been a mistake, Wasabi itself was not a mistake."

<comment><USER9> What I always fail to understand about Wasabi: why did they keep the code in the source language and compile to CLR object code, instead of running the _same_ parser with a different codegen target, to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# _once_ , and then overwrite the codebase with that?

<comment><USER10> Do you really want to inherit autogenerated code? I doubt the autogenerated C# would be nearly as easy to understand or read as the original Wasabi code. I also think writing CLR object code, if it's anything like writing assembly, would be much easier to generate than C#.

<comment><USER9> Well, it _is_ what they eventually did, after ten years. With tons of tweaks to make it spit out natural-looking outputs. I just don't understand why they didn't go that way from the start.

<comment><USER10> I was unaware of that. I'm still betting they didn't go that way initially because of the inherent difficulties of autogenerating C# code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio.

Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight.

Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals.

Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)

<comment><USER12> I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use.

The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields.

I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.

<comment><USER13> Whoever designed JIRA's psuedo-markdown text format deserves a special place in hell.

<comment><USER14> The relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/277/](https://xkcd.com/277/)

<comment><USER15> Was that really the xkcd you wanted?

<comment><USER16> I actually misread the URL as [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) (having memorized that number like everyone else here, I'm sure) until I saw your comment. #277 is definitely not right.

<comment><USER17> #277 sure seems to me like a reasonable reply to "Whoever designed <such and such> deserves a special place in hell", which is what it was posted in response to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet, "Creating a JIRA task is like going to the fucking DMV."

[https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016](https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016)

<comment><USER19> Does the opposite kind of user exist? Has anyone ever met a fanatical JIRA lover?

In my experience there are only people that tolerate JIRA on one side of the spectrum and a bunch of people that hate JIRA on the other side.

<comment><USER20> I love JIRA and would absolutely advocate for using it over any other tracker.

With just a little tweaking (30 minutes or so on a fresh install), I can have it perfectly configured to match my ideal workflow.

<comment><USER21> Can you please elaborate on this configuration? What is the general nature of the configuration changes you're making? Or, how is your workflow affecting the product. I ask as I am in an organization right on the cusp of implementing JIRA, and I would love to steer the implementation team toward a more useful configuration than the clunky defaults, with which I've had prior experience.

<comment><USER20> The biggest things for me are:

* Setting up several statuses (more than in the default) to reflect backlog, selected, in progress, testing, deployed

* Creating an appropriate board which splits everything into columns by status and rows by user

* Setting up a few quick filters to find things like anything which has been in the backlog for more than 6 weeks or bugs which haven't seen activity in the last 48 hours

* Integrating GitHub. Being able to kick a ticket over to QA from your commit message is awesome.

Beyond that, I mostly focus on stripping out default things to make the workflow simpler. I don't need my software to enforce that I can't move a ticket to deployed straight from in progress, and stripping out those extra rules makes it easier to deal with.

<comment><USER21> Much appreciated. That's a great opener for a discussion with our impl. team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I brought Fogbugz into two organizations (100+ accounts) as a QA Engineer and it worked great -- when it came to bugs.

When we started doing agile (and then "Agile" ... ugh) development the entire process broke down. There were no (good) plugins that could do kanban and moving features from state to state to state dramatically increased the size of an items log. That, along with the friendly, and then suddenly not so friendly filtering lead to our team dropping the product and moving to Jira.

While Fogcreek's "Fastbugz" was a gallant effort in modernizing the application stack and speeding up page loading time, it fell short as it didn't functionality support feature _and_ bug management.

I should note, we had reached out to Fogcreek with all of our requests and critiques but they weren't interested in hearing us out passed the usual account or customer service manager.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way.

(creator of FogBugz, here)

FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games.

I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought around how software should be developed. Companies that scored high on the Joel Test[1] were almost unheard of.

The LAST thing I wanted to do was make another tool of oppression for management to impose gantt charts and deadlines and strict rules about who has to sign off on things.

I set out to make software development better for programmers by blogging[2] and by building a company that would be a great place to work[3].

In 2000 the only way to do that was to bootstrap it. With a team of four people we couldn't build anything complicated. We started with bug tracking software because at least we could touch one aspect of programmers' lives with our philosophy.

FogBugz was designed for smaller collegial teams of people that wanted to work together effectively and needed a clean and simple way to track issues using the smart workflows that small, professional teams like to use.

It was remarkably successful and profitable from 2000 to today. We've never stopped working on improving it, but we also have never abandoned the market of small collegial teams of smart people.

By contrast, Jira was designed as "Enterprise Software" with features to help managers impose specific workflows on teams. Selling Enterprise software is a lovely, profitable business and Atlassian has great success selling to large organizations who ignore FogBugz, but it's the opposite of what I wanted to do. Anyway Atlassian is going public with this enterprise software, good for them, I'm sure they're going to enjoy their well-earned private jets.

But FogBugz was the means, not the ends, and at Fog Creek our ambition was not to be the world's greatest bug tracker software company, it was to fix things for developers. So we kept plugging away at other ideas. Some of them were kinda dumb. Some were moderate successes.

Two of them, Stack Overflow and Trello, were huge hits and spun off into separate companies. Stack Overflow, thanks to Jeff Atwood's inspired leadership, has had more impact on making software development better for programmers than any bug tracker ever will. Trello has grown as popular in three years as Jira grew in 15 years.[4]

Neither of them would have been possible if we didn't have the cash cow of steady FogBugz profits. That's what bootstrapping is, folks! You build one thing and use it to build a bigger thing.

In the meantime I think the world has figured out that programmers are writing the script for the future that everybody is going to live in, so conditions have gotten better. In big cities employers are falling over themselves to invent new ways to pamper and delight their programmer employees, with the massages and the sushis and the dog yoga. We programmers built ourselves hundreds of amazing tools, from github to npm to ci tools, build tools, IDEs, code refactorers, etc. etc. that make programming a million times better than it was in 2000, and bug tracking is just a slice of that pie and not a particularly important or interesting one.

But that said, FogBugz is still very popular and very profitable and thousands of teams use it every day, and we're still reinvesting those profits in making it better and in developing new products to make the world better for developers, and even though it doesn't support pointy-haired micro-managers and doesn't allow you to create a custom workflow requiring that a VP-or- higher sign off on bug reports, there are still small, collegial teams of smart developers who have figured out that this is how they want to work.

[1] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)

[2] [http://joelonsoftware.com/](http://joelonsoftware.com/)

[3] [http://www.fogcreek.com/](http://www.fogcreek.com/)

[4] [https://goo.gl/hTXXPG](https://goo.gl/hTXXPG)

<comment><USER24> wow, $33,000 15 years ago? That really puts a spin on me making $36,000 6 months ago, working in 4 languages and 2 platforms to build a really complicated SPA web app and mac flash content player system. Glad I got out of that job!

<comment><USER25> From my own personal experience, things weren't bad in the late 90s up to the point of the .com crash. Starting salaries in valley were $45k-$55k. There was a lot of competition for strong candidates, and working conditions were pretty decent. I do commend Spolsky for providing good working conditions in a market like NYC where the current trend seems to be to jam as many people in a space as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It could be argued that Trello will eventually be larger than either of these products, so I don't think the story has been completely told. I've used Jira as a manager in both a large and a small installation and hated it both times. It feels like 90s bug tracking system with huge forms and intractable workflows.

With that said, Spolsky (although I think a lot of his writing is fantastic) rarely addresses his mistakes.

<comment><USER26> Trello doesn't really seem like a bug tracker. I haven't used it though—maybe I'm just missing something?

<comment><USER27> Agreed. I kind of don't get Trello. Always thought of it as kind of a lightweight "stack of cards" analogue best used for simple high-level planning along the lines of a Kanban board. Is that how people use it?

<comment><USER28> We used it recently as a kanbanish/scrumish board for a recent development cycle and it worked out pretty well. We had separate boards for each sprint, and a backlog board that contained some broad-swipe categories. It would definitely be nice if it had better integrations with fogbugz (which our team also uses) or other bug tracking platforms, but I imagine it would be challenging to do that and maintain its extreme ease of use/simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also Atlassian products are multi platform. Whereas fogbugz is windows only for the server side. That is a deal breaker for many.Additionally unlike Fogbugz Atlassian products are DB agnostic.

<comment><USER30> Huh? We've been running Fogbugz on a Debian server with a MySQL database for years and years. Fog Creek may encourage Windows now but it still runs on Linux just fine.

<comment><USER29> They are no longer selling Linux versions. Also only MySQL and mssql are supported. MySQL is not recommended. [http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz- system-requirements](http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz-system- requirements)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Slightly off topic here but since everyone's chiming in about their experiences with bug trackers, I figure somebody might find it useful.

I did a pretty intensive search involving trials of a couple dozen trackers about two years ago when we decided to ditch Jira due to some serious performance and UI issues. I tested pretty much every serious contender on the market.

I ended up going with YouTrack and it's been pretty fantastic. One of those by-developers, for-developers things with a lot of functionality out of the box and a decent API for more advanced stuff, and most importantly it has very good performance and a sane UI. It does what it's supposed to do and then gets out of the way, which is exactly what I wanted. I recommend taking it for a spin if you're looking for something along those lines.

</comment><comment><USER32> For me the main way in which FogBugz has "lost" is that they silently discontinued the "FogBugz for your Server" version. The plugin system was great and we have our own installation on our own systems (no cloud allowed). With the "performance upgrade" they seem to have forked FogBugz, thrown out all the plugins, Lucene search and redid the GUI. And stopped updates for the server version:

[http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release- notes](http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes)

And now just recently there was a little bit of activity, like that they now offer a VM of some kind with the new version. But I think we can't use that because it is the expensive, unlimited user license and they must install it somehow and plugins would still be gone, which we depend on.

And for all of this there is little to no communication.

The stop of "Kiln for your Server" was also done extremely quitely.

<comment><USER32> Here is the FAQ which outlines that plugins and the old FogBugz for your server has been discontinued:

[http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server- faq](http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server-faq)

Very sad

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".

<comment><USER34> They won because they allow managers to be in control and authoritarians. I've seen more than 2 managers who take over JIRA and lock down permissions and create custom workflows and _all_ of them insist on having swim lanes and 5+ columns. So to move one little ticket across the board took 4+ drags. If you have a heavy-weight process where people are actually signing off on things, then yes it makes sense. But otherwise it just irritates everyone.

They won because they appealed to the true buyer in the office; the CTO or VP of engineering, but they really appeal to the control-freak and micro-manager.

When I used Fogbugz in one office, it was the devs that pushed for its use and the project managers and other execs weren't able to screw it up; there was no obvious way of creating custom workflows or locking things down too much. Fogbugz let us get work done. JIRA in the hands of a micromanager makes me want to chew glass.

<comment><USER35> We were on Fogbugz for many years, but eventually left to Jira because the Agile workflow is absolutely horrid.

Micromanagers can screw anything up - you can invent some pretty insane workflows using the FogBugz workflow tool, if you want to :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was working at a large British bank in 2005 when Jira started to get adoption by several teams. The approved bug tracking product was ClearCase ClearQuest. If you think the Jira GUI is ropey you should see ClearQuest. Absolute nightmare. By contrast Jira was free to get started, and much nicer than corporate approved incumbents. They called it land and expand!

</comment><comment><USER37> This takes me back ten years to 2005. I was the QA lead at an open source company and we really wanted to use FogBugz. An operations engineer imported all of our bugzilla issues and we were starting to put FogBugz through its paces, but what we couldn't figure out was FogBugz licensing for all of our OSS community. In the en, I think Joel did get back to us and tell us their product was not a fit.

Another adviser replied to the thread below (oldest at the bottom) that Apache also uses Jira.

In the end we kept using Bugzilla.

      From: bizguy
      Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro?

I second FogBugz being unreachable. Also, Jira has a MUCH more impressive client list:

Cisco, Oracle, HP, NASA, JPL, CERN, MIT, CalTech, Cornell, HBO

      From: ceo
      Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro?

in view of the FogCreek people being unresponsive, and advisor's instant "don't use them" response, I'd like for us to do a bit more due diligence on Jira. I notice that they have per-server licensing ($4800), with unlimited users.

      From: me
      Subject: Re: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro?

jira is java based and requires running tomcat which can be a bit of a pig.

It is supportive of open source communities. That is about all I know about it right now... I will look at it more tonight.

      From: advisor
      To: ceo
      Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky intro?

      Avoid, use Jira...

      ceo wrote:
      >
      > Dear friends,
      >
      > I'm trying to get a hold of Joel Spolsky so we can work out some

      > arrangement for using their FogBugz bugtracking system.  Please let me
      > know if you know Joel and can help with an intro, since my blind email
      > isn't getting a response.

</comment><comment><USER38> A big thing with the pricing... If I'm an individual contributor and want a bug tracker, I can drop 10 bucks on a JIRA license (out of pocket) or convince someone from management that I need it and that they need to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Did Fogbugz really 'lose'? It's not as if bug tracking systems are a winner- take all market with strong network externalities. Granted, it did not 'win as much' as JIRA, but that's not necessarily a loss. One of the cool things about many businesses is that they are positive sum games. Maybe FogBugz works better in some niches and still generates a nice living for the people who work on it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wasbi had nothing to do with it. JIRA caters to micro-managing mangers and FogBugz didn't. That is the simple lesson in enterprise. Trying to give a technical explanation isn't really telling the story.

</comment><comment><USER41> Jira certainly is more popular, but I never viewed the two products as being in direct competition. I don't know about the inner working and finances of Fogcreek, but given that Fogbugz is still around they've may have lost anything.

Pricing would certainly be a knob Fogcreek could tweak, if they believed that they where losing to Jira in some shape or form. Given that they haven't lowered prices or expanded their free tier sales of Fogbugz could be on the precise path that Fogcreek want for the product. Maybe their selling extremely well in a marked that most HN readers just aren't in contact with. A marked that doesn't mind the added cost.

It's different approaches to sales, make a little money from a large pool of customers, or sell a more expensive product/service to a smaller market. Both strategies are completely valid, but due to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber and whatnot many will falsely assume that more customer is always better.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a terribly uninformed perspective on the monumental achievement of large success. If anything, fog bugz "lost" to stack exchange which, imo, is a more profound achievement than the over crowded project management category that still hasn't put out a product that has broad appeal.

</comment><comment><USER43> I had to use Jira at my last job. I could never figure out what it did that you couldn't do in github with less trouble and fuss.

I can't say that I would absolutely refuse to work at a place that uses Jira, but it is definitely something that would make me lean towards another offer.

</comment><comment><USER44> My Jira experience was absolutely terrible. We were an 8 person team at time and looking for something more robust than Trello and ended up settling on Pivotal Tracker.

I signed us up for an Atlassian Cloud trial and right away things weren't looking good. I was expecting to dive right in but instead had to wait 30 minutes until my instance was ready or whatever.

They only offer a 7-day trial. How am I supposed to properly evaluate something as fundamental as an issue tracker in 7 days? That's not long enough to learn to use it and then get the team to try it out for a small project.

Worst of all were the 5-10 second load times on each page. I contacted support to see what they could do but they weren't too helpful and I stopped using it 2 hours into the 7 day trial.

<comment><USER45> In my experience, most Atlassian products are slow as hell, with Bitbucket being among the faster ones. Confluence can maybe control a space shuttle with all its features, but it's slow to a point where it becomes unusable.

We evaluated JIRA as well, but it didn't work well for people like who are in many different projects at once and don't want to spend days trying to build a view for all those issues (that encompasses swim lanes and such). Also, as you've mentioned, it's pretty slow.

We settled with Trello and are relatively happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The one feature of Fogbugz that I really like (and the reason I use it) is evidence based scheduling: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html)

It takes away a lot of pain associated with giving estimates, especially from a manager's point of view. Devs need to break their tasks down to subtasks of sufficient granularity, and estimate the number of hours/days it would take them to complete each of these subtasks. Fogbugz does everything else, and gives a nice probability distribution chart of completion date that you can share with the stakeholders.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't think it was Wasabi so much as Windows. You didn't have to use Wasabi to write plugins for FogBugz, but you did have to use .net. The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on *nix, and probably have some Java in their stack; if you give them a .war that runs on Tomcat then they know what to do, and if they don't know then there are plenty of open-source tutorials. If you're giving them a .net product to deploy on a windows machine, not so much.

I think the final chapter is yet to be written though. Trello is a joy to use, much better than Jira. And AIUI it's on a much more developer-friendly stack.

<comment><USER48> _> "The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on _nix, and probably have some Java in their stack"*

I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. The forums he kept for a while were overwhelmingly populated by people talking of VB and then .NET. StackOverflow was clearly dominated by .Net questions for the first few years.

His choice of platform, when it came to developing his own software, was never really in doubt. Note that FogBugz was not even the actual product he started the company for; that was a proto-blogging publishing platform called CityDesk, which was Windows-only and meant for the general public. FogBugz was an internal tool that he pivoted on, thanks in great part to the cred he had built by blogging candidly on software development matters (at a time when this was very rare).

If you now see his customers as "running on *nix", it's because the world has changed. Now the bugtracker is looked after by devops, people who started working after the wave of cheap Linux server that built the modern web had long settled.

<comment><USER37> > I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core > followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem.

What do you mean by core followers? You underestimate his influence.

I haven't worked in the MS ecosystem in my 15 year career across six companies. I've regularly seen his book around and his writing is referenced from time to time. I'd go so far to say some of those environments I've worked in and some of the people championing his work have been somewhat anti- microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Never used Fogz, but Atlassian products are so astonishingly bad that it is hard to find anything about them inspiring.

<comment><USER49> I think the fact that my useless inflammatory comment didn't get immediately downvoted to hell is proof that I'm right!

<comment><USER50> "bad" by itself doesn't mean much; the important thing is the relative goodness.

What were open source projects going to us instead? RequestTracker? Scarab? Bugzilla?

All of those were much worse than JIRA for development.

RT is fine for helpdesks but ugly as hell and no integration with SCMs.

Scarab never got to a satisfactory level of maturity.

Bugzilla? Just say no.

I've been a JIRA admin for 5 years now, and we seriously considered Fogbugz as well. I've never regretted our decision even though we've had plenty of issues( _) with JIRA.

_ free pun included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?

<comment><USER52> Nor true - we have been investing quite a lot on Bitbucket. Check out our most recent blog post: [http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-comp...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-companies- agree-bitbucket-is-the-git-solution-for-professional-teams/)

<comment><USER53> You're letting Mercurial die, though.

And for all that investing, you are not fixing the bugs that annoy people the most. You let them languish for _years_ :

[https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11813/allow- annotat...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11813/allow-annotate- blame-with-whitespace)

[https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5008](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5008)

[https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11864/ignore- whites...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11864/ignore-whitespace- toggle-in-the-ui-bb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have a question about raising VC money earlier. If you want to grow fast and push some free platform out to change the world, what is main danger in raising VC? I'm talking about the VCs these days who invest in companies that make open source like NGiNX, MySQL etc. And you need resources to grow, if you want to beat competitor platforms.

I mean logically, if they've already given you the money and there isn't any way they can take over governance of the company, then the only leverage I can think of is signaling in future rounds. And if you weren't even going to raise one VC round, then at that point you may as well raise exactly one and then signaling is irrelevant. Yes you've diluted yourself 20% and now you've got a board member that wants you to grow fast, but so do you. Of course, I'm assuming here that you failed to raise on Kickstarter, and you aren't making enough $ to hire people to do development/testing/security/evangelism/PR/marketing/operations/etc. anytime soon. Why waste years of your life when you can hand the project off eventually to a community you've built, and move on? If you want to retain control over the project forever, can always be BDFL of the community, at least until some better-funded company forks it. I just really want to understand, what is the reason that guys like DHH say VC can control you after you take their money?

<comment><USER55> Once you take money from investors, you have both a legal and a moral responsibility to them.

It's important to remember that selling equity is really selling something, just like selling a product. You can't sell something, take somebody's money, and then just not deliver. What you are selling to investors, generally, is return on investment.

The real problem comes in because founders and VCs have different understandings of "grow fast". There will come choices that have different levels of risk. VCs always want you to take the high-risk, high-reward path, because they have a portfolio company and are looking for the few really big winners. You, on the other hand, are trying to build something (team, community, product, etc), and so you will favor slower but safer growth.

I guess in theory you could sell VCs on a high-growth approach and then turn around and say, "Ha ha, fuck you, we're going to keep your money and try to grow modestly." But a) VCs are way better at their game than you are, so they're hard to fool, and b) then you're an asshole, which is bad on its own and also has consequences for future relationships (and future funding). Plus, if you're in a VC-fundable space, you'll probably have competitors who are also taking money, and they'll be able to outspend you on future rounds.

<comment><USER56> No, assuming you're not an asshole, just want to reduce risk or make your own decisions in good faith, how can they force you to make a decision you normally wouldn't make?

<comment><USER55> To get the money from VCs, one has to sell them on the notion that the company will to scale until it can swallow the moon. Suppose I take their money and say, "Sorry, now I want to reduce risk! Too bad, suckers!" I'd say that makes me an asshole.

If you've taken a small amount of their money, then maybe they can't legally force you to take more risk than you think is wise. (They can, however, make sure you're unlikely to get money from anybody else, either now or in the future.) But if you've taken a B round or more, then a founder probably doesn't have control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Has anyone had experience with Redmine [1]? It's quite easy to use and extend via its plugin system, but I don't see many people who have encountered it in the wild.

I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern.

[1] [https://www.redmine.org/](https://www.redmine.org/)

<comment><USER58> I've used Redmine. It's a _MUCH_ better Trac.

Out of the box, it's ugly, but -frankly- who cares? We're all programmers here, and value proper function much more highly than lacquered handles. :)

<comment><USER59> > Out of the box, it's ugly, but -frankly- who cares? We're all programmers > here

Uhh, humans? ;)

I find a better-looking tool to be more pleasant to work with, and Redmine was not-as-painful-but-almost as JIRA for me, for the experience being so poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> My guess is that Fogbugz is a cash cow without much new development effort. The focus of FogCreek's founders is on StackExchange and Trello now.

</comment><comment><USER61>
      This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java

I've never laughed so hard in my entire life.

</comment><comment><USER62> I am still not sure if fogbugz lost. In general simple systems are always hard to built.

In general while doing a project with fixed date approach Jira issue tracker is indeed not inline with the source code. So there is a discrepancy between what is in issue tracker and whats in the source tree. Moreover developers cutting corners to meet the fixed date is a technical debt for future and Jira promotes it.

Fogbugz with its probabilistic approach is better matched with the actual source code, since even though developers over or under estimate, its probabilistic distribution analysis puts standard deviation and means put in front of their eyes to do better. So in general fogbugz approach results in better source tree and less technical debt.

</comment><comment><USER63> Who is Prashant Deva and should I care about their opinion?

Did Fogbugz actually lose? Do they even have the same market (enterprise vs smaller)? Perhaps they just fine operating at a smaller volume.

Isn't the product being "too basic" a sign of focus? Perhaps the author needs/wants more features, but that can't be generalized for all of Fogbugz's audience.

I've heard just as many owners say "I don't want as many features as competitor X".

That all being said, there are some good things in there - perhaps Fogbugz could look into a partner ecosystem. Making your own language is probably a bad long-run choice.

However I get the feeling this is comparing apples to oranges.

</comment><comment><USER64> Won based on what criteria?

Atlassian has over 1,100 employees. When I was at Fog Creek we had ~30.

So if we're talking about profit per employee, I can assure you the people who built FogBugz don't feel like they've lost anything.

</comment><comment><USER65> What metric are we using to determine who "won" here?

Did Jira "win" just because OP likes it better?

Because both companies are private, we don't really know how much _profit_ either product has made.

<comment><USER66> In reality, it's a double-win relative to the goals each company was striving for - and acheived!

In the author's mind, Jira wins because it's OMG ENTERPRISE and going public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Couldn't disagree more on the integrated wiki point. Issue trackers with integrated documentation pages (wikis or otherwise) make it really straightforward to generate docs as a byproduct of working on tickets, or to resolve support requests by linking to the docs. Eventually you will want an external documentation tool, but Atlassian doesn't have one that's any good (Confluence is by far the worst wiki-like application I have ever used).

<comment><USER35> Really? Have you tried using the Fogbugz wiki? I will take Confluence any day over that slow bloated POS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> >> While most of these plugins didn't offer much in terms of functionality, for the person making a decision, it definitely helped to tip the scales in Jira's favor.

For me, this kinda encapsulates the problem with Jira. Jira is extremely impressive in the number of features, plugins, and customization opportunities it offers, and yet, I can't honestly say even half of the stuff is in any way helpful to me as a developer.

<comment><USER69> as always, a _different_ half is helpful to any particular user. add all the users together and you're back with the full feature set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I would like he to define lost. Fogbugz is still around and profitable.

I have always seen Fogbugz as a support tool first, bug tracking kindof it's what they built for Fogcreek's process(for Copilot support and development). If you did everything like them it probably was a great fit. Jira on the other hand I have always seen as bug tracker.

</comment><comment><USER14> A bit off topic, and I know I'm sounding like a condescending jerk here but I mean it: but why do people love bugs so much that they want to purchase an entire database program to track them? I mean, if you have more than 10 bugs that are highly important to keep track of, it seems to me that you have much larger problem than whether to purchase JIRA or FogBugz.

I mean, either a bug is important to you so prioritize fixing it, or it isn't important to you so you can just ignore it and see if it surfaces again.

 _Every single team_ I've seen that used a bug tracker ended up with hundreds of issues, status of 90% of which was unknown, maybe already fixed, maybe not relevant anymore because the entire component got overhauled the other day by Joe. What's the use of this stuff?

I got this from a blog post (by Ron Jeffries I believe, but I forgot), but basically his idea was that the moment you turn something that _you don 't want to have_ into a formalized process, people tend to bias towards getting more of it. If you are forced to choose between fixing a bug or forgetting about it, you're urged to fix it fast. If you can just "file the bug and go on with your work", the bug stays.

<comment><USER71> You've got more than 10 bugs. You just don't know it yet.

But really, "bug tracker" is just a colloquial expression for the more accurate "issue tracker" which can definitely include things like improvements, new features, A/B tests you want to run, etc.

<comment><USER72> It is possible that their software isn't large enough to have 10 bugs... they could be implementing FizzBuzz.

<comment><USER73> Where can one get a job as a professional FizzBuzz developer?

I think if a program is big enough to devote a software developer to it full- time, it's going to have at least 10 bugs. Maybe they are small or unimportant or so obscure that none of the users actually run into it, but they're in there somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Programmers hate being held accountable, yes. (This is logical given that they control so few of the risks.)

But in the end, accountability is the reason why you're being paid that salary, not knowledge of framework APIs or algorithms.

Embrace that responsibility and process, don't fight it.

</comment><comment><USER75> Surprised no mention of Kiln which was a really nice product when I first used it back in 2008. The ability to inline comments in a code review that then hooked back to the job in FB was fantastic.

GitStash is getting there now, but the Jira integration is still a little lacking.

</comment><comment><USER76> What about the name? He could have potentially left out the most important mistake Spolsky ever made, which is to name a product Fog Buzz. He might as well have named it Rain Smelt, or Lamp Shade. It sounds terrific once you use and like the product, but it doesn't sound remnisent of any kind of successful brand ever. Even the use of 2 words is a departure from the norm. Most of the big brands have 1-word names, and this is not s coincidence. Even Facebook was changed from The Facebook. Brand matters, and names matter.

To play devil's advocate with my own argument, 37 Signals is a bit different as well and people (perhaps more so in the tech community) loved the brand, but the thing is, they used "Basecamp" as their product name.

<comment><USER30> Possibly your most important mistake is not reading the name correctly. It's Fogbugz. One word.

<comment><USER76> Potatoemuffintrain. See what I did there. 3 words do not become 1 word, simply because the proper spaces are omitted.

I will say though, for many years I have thought the company was called Fog Buzz, (not Bugz).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> > Fogcreek invented their own language. This meant they couldn't use all of > the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java

Java? I believe that should be .NET.

<comment><USER29> Op means unlike Atlassian, which is mostly a java shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> > This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around > Java [...]

Does anyone else get the same confused feeling whenever they read things like this? Every experience I've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague. I can't believe I'm that much different than everyone else, but I see this often enough that it makes me wonder.

<comment><USER79> _Every experience I 've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague._

Nope, just the opposite here. The JVM ecosystem is hands-down my preferred environment for building / deploying pretty much anything.

"Different strokes for different folks" and all that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I not heard good things about Jira's ease of use

</comment><comment><USER81> 1\. Make a JIRA plug-in that turns JIRA into Fogbugz

2\. Profit

</comment><comment><USER82> I think the last bit about what _didn 't matter_ has a huge take away home value. It's ironic that so much crap we read today drives home these two things that we focus so much on:

1\. Content Marketing

2\. Sales Team

<comment><USER83> Joel on Software has 6 posts over the last 3 years. I'm not sure how long Jira has been winning (whatever that means), but it doesn't seem fair to say that Content Marketing doesn't work when the blog in question isn't actively updated.

<comment><USER84> They're actively marketing their blog on HN -

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com)

<comment><USER83> You're right, I hadn't even considered the Fog Creek blog, but the article specifically talks about Joel on Software.

And Atlassian's blog seems to be in the same ballpark as Fog Creek's: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I still can't believe they invented their own language... but #1 seems like it would have been enough.

I hate using JIRA, though, just like I hate using all Atlasssian products, so it would have been nice if FogBugz won.

<comment><USER40> Ericsson and Sun invented their own languages. If your a tool company, treating language as off-limits seems limiting.

<comment><USER85> You have a point, I guess I'm more flabbergasted by the particular language they chose to invent. Also, Fog Creek ain't exactly Ericsson or Sun.

<comment><USER40> Fog Creek probably had more resource than Yukihiro Matsumoto, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum did.

<comment><USER86> Ruby, Perl, and Python weren't meant to be in-house languages created to support a commercial product. Not to mention that in their infancies as hobby projects, they didn't have to hit sales deadlines.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Farewell from Waffle - <AUTHOR> https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from-waffle-%EF%B8%8F-794da4a72851 <comment><USER3> Oftentimes I see farewell posts like this, but the company website has already been mostly turned down. It would be helpful for folks like me who have never heard of Waffle to know what the service was. Having that tiny bit of context at the top of the article (or even just keeping the marketing site alive!) helps to put the shutdown in context.

And yes, I can search, but more often than not the first page of search results are news stories that the service is shutting down rather than resources that describes what it actually was.

<comment><USER4> In short: Trello, but with GitHub integration.

[https://help.waffle.io/getting-started/what-is- waffle](https://help.waffle.io/getting-started/what-is-waffle)

<comment><USER5> But trello has github integration.

<comment><USER6> Notice they're closing?

<comment><USER7> Trello's integration is an afterthought and I never found it as useful or simple as Waffle's; they'll be missed.

They're not "closing"; CA Technologies bought them a while back and now CA is selling to Broadcom, who's killing the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When people ask me whether my self-funded (bootstrapped) business is viable, I point out that a self-funded long-term stable business is more viable than a VC-funded startup.

In discussions, I ask customers to imagine which of the possible outcomes of a VC-funded startup would be good for them as customers (hint: none of the possible outcomes are good for customers, with the possible exception of a rare unicorn IPO).

My problem is that VC-funded startups have money to burn, so they artificially lower subscription software pricing.

<comment><USER9> It's not just lower subscription software pricing.

It's also faster time to market, because they're able to field entire teams of engineers to deliver what your tiny team is working on much faster. And they can do a lot more content marketing and advertisement that you've no time or budget to get done.

And then when they run out of money they post a blog post on a Friday morning to announce that you need to get your data out of their system _by the end of the day_. (Edit: in this case 2 months.)

On an off topic note, your site's FAQ says:

> So is this a one-man operation?

> Yes, for the moment it is. Which is actually a good thing, if you're > concerned about viability. This means that there are no investors, no burn > rate to speak of, no need to shut the company down because the money ran > out. It is a mature, long-term project.

FYI my own concern as a buyer would be what happens if you get hit by a bus. You really need to get some kind of partner, or an employee the moment you can afford one.

<comment><USER8> If I get hit by a bus, there is a list of people/companies that can take over the business and continue to develop/maintain it. And since it is a viable business, it will make sense for someone to take over.

Please note that getting hit by a bus should be considered in terms of probabilities: while possible, compare it to the near-certainty of "something" happening to a VC-funded business within 3 years, where none of the "somethings" are good for customers.

<comment><USER9> Consider adding that first paragraph to your FAQ. It will go a _long_ way towards reassuring some of your prospects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If someone is looking for an alternative, we use:

[https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

I specifically like that it gives us estimates and a Kanban board approach. I also like that they are thinking about the project management workflow as a whole and trying to educate:

\- [https://www.zenhub.com/book/github-project- management](https://www.zenhub.com/book/github-project-management)

\- [https://www.zenhub.com/github-project- management.pdf](https://www.zenhub.com/github-project-management.pdf)

It's not perfect, but it's been serving our needs better than Redmine used to and GitHub alone was doing.

No affiliation, just a mostly satisfied customer.

</comment><comment><USER11> ZenHub Co-founder here. On behalf of the ZenHub team we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge all of the incredible work by the Waffle.io team (past and present) over the past four years. We have nothing but respect for the team and want to wish them all the best in their next adventures!

While Waffle and ZenHub are competing products in a way, we both share similar views on the importance of project management being developer-first. It's been a fun journey building in the space along side Waffle and we continue to remain excited about the future of project management in GitHub!

If anyone is interested, you can check out ZenHub here: [https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

<comment><USER12> Man, I don't know if I'm going to regret posting this tomorrow, but if folks at ZenHub are going to pop into this thread and promote themselves as a product developers are encouraged to switch to, as a blind developer, I wish they'd at least pay lip service to web accessibility best practices. As a blind screen-reader-using developer, I tried to use ZenHub as a contractor at my last gig and it was impossible. As in, I'm on my desktop doing a screenshare to my coworker across the country viewing my screen on his iPhone, and he's trying to tell me milimeter by milimeter how to move my mouse so I can dismiss _one_ of your onboarding popups which I couldn't dismiss via keyboard on several OS's screen readers, only to be presented immediately thereafter by another. I couldn't use your broduct at all on my own until a sighted coworker helped me to dismiss your onboarding popups, then I found it hard and unintuitive how to navigate the interface as a screen reader user.

Not upset, just frustrated that I couldn't do my job, and I wish you'd done some basic accessibility testing on your interface. If that's a gap in your development staff, I'm currently looking for work. Just sayin'. :)

In any case, kudos for creating a quality product that folks I respect enjoy using. I hope that one day I can be among them.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for this feedback ndarilek, I appreciate you taking the time to call it out. Candidly, you're absolutely right—this is an area that we need to be more considerate of as we continue to scale and I apologize that it lead to a less than ideal first experience for you.

We've started down the path of completing an accessibility audit, and are hoping to use those findings to drive highest priority areas of improvement moving forward. While I'm not certain on timelines , I definitely think there could be an opportunity to engage moving forward and would be happy to keep you involved if you're interested.

If you'd like, you can reach me directly firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER12> Thanks, super happy to hear that! If I sound harsh, please understand that it's from the perspective of someone who starts out excited about how the latest and greatest startup will disrupt my life, only to realize that half of their app is unusable to me. When I raise _any_ issues like this, the most I can usually hope for is "thanks for your comments, they made our day, unfortunately we have no intention of fixing these issues at this time." So when I encounter inaccessibility among developer-focused tools, and think about how unemployment among disabled folks hovers around 70%, it's hard not to be jaded, and frustrated about how making accessibility an afterthought makes employment a bigger challenge for some of us.

So I'm glad to hear that you're undergoing an audit, and I hope that I can someday count ZenHub among the developer tools I can use. FWIW, Slack isn't even in this group, which is shameful given they patted themselves on the back for such a keyboard-friendly interface when they killed off XMPP. No, I'm not bitter. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a comparable kanban project manager that uses github issues?

I would migrate to github projects, but last I'd checked some key features were missing from github projects:

1\. New issues are added to the backlog column by default.

2\. Epics, or anything that allows one issue to have multiple sub-issues.

3\. The ability to label one issue as blocking another by using keywords, eg: _blocks #123_ or _requires #321_.

Is there a simple way of solving these with probot or github actions?

[probot]: [https://probot.github.io](https://probot.github.io)

[github actions]: [https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions)

<comment><USER14> Zenhub is a great alternative, has all the features that you mentioned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it is _extremely_ positive that they built an export function to GitHub projects, and wish more startups did a "clean" exit in terms of customer data.

Kudos.

<comment><USER16> Presumably when you hit the point of shutdown, most companies don't want to (or realistically, can't) spend the money on what is a new feature (and potentially a pretty significant one)

(though a simple export to CSV would be better than what most companies do)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Farewell and good luck on your new adventure, loved your product and used it to our great advantage a few years ago.

<comment><USER18> Totally agree. I've used your product in the past, and I was quite happy with it. I think you can take pride in a job well done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unmentioned in comments so far: Waffle had the ability to consolidate issues from several Github repos at once.

We used one view that made issues from four repos appear as one.

This is a feature I'll really miss.

What other product does this? Looking for something.

<comment><USER11> Hey stblack - we have that same feature in ZenHub. Feel free to check out [https://www.zenhub.com/product](https://www.zenhub.com/product)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The "Rally product" mentioned here is atrocious. To discontinue Waffle and continue Rally is a tragedy.

<comment><USER21> I had the misfortune to use Rally for a few months about five years ago - <USER2> often laugh quietly to myself when I hear people complaining about Jira's UX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was sad and surprised until I realized it wasn't the waffles I care about.

<comment><USER23> I thought it was the WaffleJS in SF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really appreciated the candidness in this post - really feels like fresh air compared to how such posts are usually worded ([https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/))!

<comment><USER25> I wondered if they were consciously avoiding "journey"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hey all,

Always sad to see good products shutting down. Also a bit frightening as I'm about to enter this same market, hehe.

I want to mention what we're building in case anyone looks for alternatives in this thread.

It's called GitSpeak and it's a project management tool which prioritizes developers first. Our goal is to create a PM tool that devs actually enjoy working with, and which saves them time rather than eat time.

Some of our features include multi-repo views, boards, a rich text editor and a neat screencasting option for code reviews, docs, and onboarding. Plus, we are going to be the fastest one out there (we're using Imba.io to build the tool btw).

Check it out here if you're interested:

[https://gitspeak.com/](https://gitspeak.com/)

<comment><USER27> Are you trying to get users to sign up for the product that you say you are about to shutdown?

<comment><USER28> I don't think they're part of Waffle, but rather a new competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Instructive when using SAAS. >>In the summer of 2014, we accidentally deleted everyone's "In Progress" column from their board. And not just the ones in English either…. After 2 feverish hours of scripting, MongoDB ninjary, and Google Translating, the columns were back and we decided we should not attempt to ship anything else that day.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is why I find it really difficult to adopt smaller products. They quite frequently get shut down.

<comment><USER31> The primary issue is the cost of switching, and Waffle was actually very good at this. It was basically just a front-end for GitHub Issues. I always knew that if at any point Waffle shut down, I'd be no worse off than before I started using them, and I'd still have all my data.

I'm actually much more concerned about GitHub itself. I still haven't found a good way to back up my Issues. They used to point to joeyh's Haskell program, which is neat but has many severe limitations (like: doesn't support private repos at all). Their current recommendation seems to be a third-party service called "BackHub", whose cheapest plan is more expensive than GitHub Pro.

<comment><USER30> Maybe issues should just be built into Git itself. Can't really imagine software development without them.

<comment> xkcd-sucks If you track issues in a text file, sqlite DB etc -- they already are in git. (But I've never seem anyone do this)

<comment><USER31> SQLite files can't easily be merged. Putting one database in another database doesn't allow you to take advantage of the best features of either one.

Text files are a good idea, and I've done that for many of my own projects. You just need to figure out a filename scheme, and a file format (JSON? YAML?). It's great to be able to atomically commit a fix to the source code, and also close the bug report.

I'm not sure how well it would scale. (Mozilla has 1.5M bug reports in their Bugzilla!) At the least, you'd need a local client that could index the text files into a format more suitable for sorting/searching. It would only need to download the diffs, though.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Oh oops, there already exist bug trackers for a few decades :)

Take your favorite bug tracker and put its offline storage into a git submodule?? I imagine they are all better than GitHub issues which are literally just a forum of threads

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why did Broadcom buy waffle?

<comment><USER33> They didn't, exactly. Computer Associates bought Waffle, and then Broadcom bought CA. Not all of CA's priorities are going to be Broadcom's priorities, so.

<comment><USER34> It's even more far removed than that. A team of interns at Rally Software created Waffle.io in 2013. Then CA acquired Rally in 2015. Then Broadcom acquired CA in 2018. Waffle.io was not a material reason for either acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Used waffle.io for many years in my university years, however the market is very competitive and I understand why they shut down.

</comment><comment><USER36> what is the deal with these startup company names that have nothing to do with anything the company does? they are just random single words with a logo directly representing that random word in a "cute" way. why not name the company sensible? or is the mentality truly temporary?

<comment><USER37> Well, it does avoid them needing to rebrand if they decide to pivot...</comment></comment>