Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/ <comment><USER2> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool. Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments but lets get back and look at this event. The folks at Fog Creek brought us FogBugz, Stackoverflow, Trello.

We should celebrate their success because its events like this that create the motivation for some of us to go create something that "stands on their shoulders" or competes with them or creates some new paradigm of how tasks can be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and then the later blogs about SO and Trello.

Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this. Would love to see more of it.

0.2c

<comment><USER3> Hmm... How long does a company have to be around until it's no longer considered a start-up?

<comment><USER4> Plus Fog Creek is more on an anti-start-up since it explicitly did not want to grow fast at all costs. That's why Trello was spun off.

<comment><USER5> Do all start ups have to grow at all costs? I know it's standard for most start-ups to accept as much VC money as possible and find ways to spend it, but there are also young companies that don't need VC money and are successful. Don't know why those shouldn't be start-ups.

<comment><USER6> Because we already have the terms "small business" and "ISV" to refer to small companies which are happily making small profits and not trying to take over the world.

<comment><USER7> Like Trello was?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it is increasing its overall ecosystem here.

Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.

Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub (which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.

<comment><USER9> It makes sense mainly because Trello is a competitor to Atlassian and its best to kill it now before it takes too much market share.

edit: Yes right now there might not be an exact competitor but in a few years it could easily match everything Jira does.

<comment><USER10> Is Trello really a competitor though? JIRA and Trello couldn't be more different.

I'd think Trello and Asana are much closer competitors. JIRA is like an over engineered spaceship with more features than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Comparatively Trello functions more like a Prius. Priuses and spaceships don't compete.

<comment><USER11> We don't view JIRA and Trello as competitors.

JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable processes across a number of people.

Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.

In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks, HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.

Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc semi-structured data.

In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.

Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick, or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get started.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

<comment><USER12> This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those folks (perhaps myself included right now).

But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be configured to such ridiculous detail.

The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that JIRA is bad at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great acquistion for both parties.

1\. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.

2\. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.

TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).

Edit: typos

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity)

<comment><USER14> $10M in funding implies a valuation of $50-100M, which means a 4-8x return not a 40x return.

<comment><USER15> Also, I'm pretty sure that investment wasn't for 100% ownership, so it's not like that $10 million turned into $400 million. The return would have to be proportional to ownership percentage.

<comment><USER16> yes that's exactly what the parent is saying. 10M at a 100M post money valuation is 10% of the company. 10% of 400M is 40M - a 4x return

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Open letter to Atlassian:

Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists = stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards = tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to manage.

Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general. Please.

<comment><USER18> Thank you for the kind words.

I promise you Atlassian understands why Trello is so successful. You described Trello's core strength perfectly - and this one of the reasons they are committed to keeping it as a standalone service.

(disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Trello)

<comment><USER11> I want to add to what Michael said above.

In meeting with Michael, and discussing how we could work together, Michael could not be more clear that Trello's success is predicated on is breadth and its appeal to many different use-cases.

This is most clearly displayed in their inspiration page, that includes many, many use-cases:

      https://trello.com/inspiration

Keeping this strength alive will be key to Trello's long-term success.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

<comment><USER19> Hello, you received a reply in another comment about adding more time tracking and reporting to Trello.

This goes right to the core of all of the issues/conflicts bundled into this acquisition from UX details up through to target users and culture clash.

Time tracking is a manager-oriented feature, not a producer-oriented feature. The users producing the work usually resent things like fine grained time tracking and comparitive producer reporting because it distracts from actual work, treats creative or complex processes as though they are part of an assembly line, encourages micro-management, pits quality against time, and emphasizes wage servitude.

Managers can use Trello to stress out their employees too, but not to the extent that JIRA-ish tools enable.

The problem is you are selling to managers who love to micromanage their employees and have nothing better to do than fiddle with configuration, reports, or have meetings with the people they hired to do that.

This is why developers who are smart will probably try to protect themselves by pre-emptively replacing Trello with one of the dozens of free or inexpensive clones before you can start corporatizing it and their company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a big fan of Trello but I dread using Atlassian products. I do not have a good feeling about this.

Hopefully Atlassian can learn from what makes Trello so wonderful instead of JIRA-ifying it into oblivion.

<comment><USER21> Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst option for running a project at any team size.

<comment><USER22> Fogbugz (also created by Fog Creek) is actually a pretty good alternative to JIRA.

<comment><USER23> Fogbugz seems to really be pushing their cloud stuff though, so I basically ruled it out instantly when I was researching options - it's unacceptable to have to host our code and tracker off-premises on hardware we don't control. Whereas even a small team can run JIRA or GitLab on their own hardware for a very reasonable price.

<comment><USER22> They still offer an on-premises version though. IIRC, their on-prem version price was fairly reasonable (that was almost 10y ago though)

<comment><USER24> (I'm the CEO at Fog Creek.) We've updated the on-premise version of FogBugz to be completely in sync with the hosted version, so all the latest features are on both now.

<comment><USER23> If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small, self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so.

We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.

<comment><USER24> Our pricing is here, you can check it out for yourself: [http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing](http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing)

In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate, add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_ happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't want to be too spammy here.

<comment><USER23> Just want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This saddens me, and I suspect the future Trello will be a much different animal from what it is today. It could be better, but my gut says not.

<comment><USER26> I'm optimistic in that there may finally be a self-hosted version of Trello.

<comment><USER27> Whilst not as well produced as Trello, [https://kanboard.net/](https://kanboard.net/) is self hostable.

<comment><USER28> If we're going for OS Trello clones, Wekan [1] is another choice.

[1] [https://wekan.io/](https://wekan.io/)

<comment><USER29> Yep wekan + sandstorm is a fantastic combo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's an open source clone of Trello that you can self-host: [https://wekan.io/](https://wekan.io/)

<comment><USER31> Gitlab also recently made their issues-UI very Trelloish. And Gitlab is opensource too.

<comment><USER32> Github also added "Projects" (basically Trello with integration to your issues etc) in September 2016.

[https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe- ann...](https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-announcing- new-tools-forums-and-features)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for 5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users investments. And these are just recent.

I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they got their money out up front.

My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they count on.

<comment><USER34> I love their response to open issues like: we'd like to be able to delete pull requests.

Response: what a silly notion, no

Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through earth.

Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we do. (aka the non committal middle finger)

It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final 20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.

<comment><USER35> We appreciate the frank feedback, but I have to disagree with the interpretation.

I really hate that we can't say yes to every feature suggestion, and what we _are_ able to talk about seems to come across as non-committal to some. The fact that a suggestion is open means we think it has merit too (we close "silly notions"), it then becomes a matter of priorities.

\- Roger, Bitbucket Server PM

<comment><USER34> That may be the case. However when such tickets are open for 6-7 years with no update the general viewpoint everyone I know that uses Bitbucket has is that it will never be a priority to Atlassian.

Adding things like large file storage support is cool, I guess, but when you never use it its rather a case of appearing to prioritize certain market segments over others.

I know I've read the article that states how you prioritize, with a major one being usage patterns. But I wonder just how accurate a metric that is given in my specific group, we've started to avoid using the review tooling in bitbucket because its almost impossible to use to accomplish the goal.

Unless the idea is for Bitbucket to have a completely minimal set of features and for anything useful to pay license fees for plugins I can't quite make sense of how the priorities are decided.

<comment><USER35> I think you've hit on a really important point. In isolation, a particular suggestion might be something of a papercut with a workaround. An unwanted pull request, for example, isn't going to stop others from getting their work done. But, if there are enough of these things that happen to affect a team together, it all adds up. It sounds your team is in that boat, and people not wanting to use the review functionality is a serious concern. Whether or not that's uniquely the case, I'd love to discuss further to make sure I properly understand your experience. If you're willing, please email me (rbarnes atlassian com) and we can set up a call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that they make that doesn't suck.

<comment><USER18> The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up.

Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview.

"During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn't ruin Trello." [http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my- bel...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-beloved- trello-for-425-million/)

(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

<comment><USER37> To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play out tens of times with beloved software. It _always_ starts out this way. "The original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay the same" yadda yadda yadda.

1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with Atlassian.

I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you have an uphill battle :)

<comment><USER38> I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile acquisitions that played out this way.

I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its "feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0.

Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.

<comment><USER39> This is a minority sample of companies that survived post acquisition. There is a vast example of companies that doesn't.

<comment><USER40> I mean, it's a minority of companies that survive period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products (i.e. software development teams).

So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?

<comment><USER42> Just to add my 2 cents, I've worked with a dev team that used Trello for project coordination.

<comment><USER43> I'm a data scientist and I've been using it as an informal Kanban board because JIRA is way too complicated-looking for me want to even try to learn. Trello is about as dead-simple as it can get. There's already too much in my brain.

<comment><USER44> Bingo... that's the whole idea here. Small teams within larger companies and small companies can use Trello. When they grow up (or need to interact with the rest of the company) they use JIRA. In fact I would expect JIRA integrations that make it trivial to convert a Trello card to a JIRA task, probably with an option to automatically convert a checklist into subtasks.

This acquisition makes total sense; Trello and JIRA target mostly non- overlapping market segments and there are some easy low-hanging integration fruits to be picked. I'll also bet Trello becomes a deal-sweetener going forward. License JIRA and for +15% you also get Trello for your whole company.

<comment><USER45> Very well said, the larger the company, the less flexibility it has in choosing the right software for the entire company. Smaller teams can move quicker, faster, and tend to find their own solutions within larger corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Good night sweet prince.

Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.

A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.

Too bad there aren't many alternatives.

And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Atlassian's blog post on it: [https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian- plus-trello/](https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/)

</comment><comment><USER47> I can only imagine it went something like this... [http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J](http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J)

<comment><USER48> Your link goes to a 404.

<comment><USER47> Oops, I was lazy... [http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J](http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So Fog Creek - makers of Fogbugz, which lost out bigtime to JIRA - have now sold Trello to Atlassian? Is there nothing left of Fogbugz?

<comment><USER50> They spin out each of their products (Stack Overflow, Trello) as separate corporations so Fog Creek didn't own Trello.

Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)

<comment><USER51> Stack was never owned by Fog Creek was it? I thought the only relation was that they shared Joel as a co-founder.

<comment><USER52> that was my understanding as well, although there has occasionally been stuff written that suggested more too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Here is a snapshot of what Bitbucket has launched over the last year: Server/Data Center: [http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year- rev...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year-review/)

Cloud: [https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket- cloud-5-mill...](https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket- cloud-5-million-developers-900000-teams/)

\- Merge checks \- Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in Bitbucket Cloud) \- 2FA \- Universal Second Factor (U2F) \- Improved SSH \- Support for multiple SSH keys \- Build status API \- Smart Mirroring \- Git LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows for better large file uploads) \- Smart Commits (allow repository committers to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages) \- reviewer status on pull requests \- Code search (Server only currently) \- 0 downtime backups \- code review at commit level \- default review in pull requests \- pull request merge strategies \- Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS \- iterative reviews for pull requests \- pull request focused dashboard \- Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean)

</comment><comment><USER54> Can we all start using Trello clones as the tutorial substance? So in case Atlassian screws it up, we have 100s of developers that know how to re-create it? :D

<comment><USER55> [https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com) for example. Really like it so far (not trying to run from Trello, as I don't use it much anyway)

<comment><USER56> Thanks so much for the mention, we're glad you like it! For anyone looking for more info about Zenkit & where we're headed, see here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Some of Atlassian's previous acquisitions have turned into products mostly shunned by the developer community (Hipchat, Bitbucket) - I hope they've learned what went wrong since then, but my gut says Atlassian isn't very good at integrating external teams and supporting their products. Hopefully Trello won't go down the same path.

<comment><USER58> Who is shunning Bitbucket and why? Something happened that I missed?

<comment><USER57> It never comes up in the same breath as GitHub and GitLab. The major differentiator for Bitbucket that's the primary reason many people I know have Bitbucket accounts - that they offered free unlimited private repos when nobody else did - doesn't differentiate them anymore.

<comment><USER58> GitHub neither offers _free_ private repos nor Mercurial support. For me and many others, Mercurial support is a big thing.

Bitbucket may still be less popular but I don't see it being shunned. That's what made me wonder. I wouldn't mind if you said that it was _not given enough attention_ or even that it was _being ignored_ (Although I'd still disagree). Maybe bad choice of words?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> _" In July 2014, Trello spins off from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc. naming Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor as its CEO. The company raises $10.3 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital and Index Ventures."_

Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello only raised $10 million.

<comment><USER60> All depends on what valuation they got in at. Trello was pretty well on it's way by July '14, so it's possible the valuation was already pretty high. Even so, I bet it was a 3-5x multiple, at least.

<comment><USER59> Assuming a $50 million valuation at the time of investment, quick back of the napkin is 8x return right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Anyone know a good simple trello competitor that I can import my trello boards to really quick.

<comment><USER62> I've heard wekan mentioned a lot (open source alternative).

Here's the migration docs: [https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating- from-Trello](https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating-from-Trello)

<comment><USER63> Wekan is really a copy of Trello, it's awesome. Installing it through Sandstorm.io makes it very easy, but I don't have production experience with Sandstorm.io.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I wonder how much revenue was Trello generating? It seems it was 10MM middle of last year [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello- get...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get-serious- about-big-businesses-as-it-passes-1-1-million-daily-users-and-triples- sales/#7b75d1376ce2)

</comment><comment><USER65> I like Trello, I use it often. $450M... for a todo list. Yes, I use it. Yes, I think is useful. Yes, I think this valuation is absolutely crazy.

<comment><USER66> "I like Facebook, I use it often. $365B... for a message board. Yes, I use it. Yes, I think it is useful. Yes, I think this valuation is absolutely crazy."

Not many todo lists have millions of users, including some that pay actual money for the service. Having looked at many project management tools, Trello has absolutely nailed certain aspects of the user experience that many of the others get wrong. Try pasting an image into a card, for example.

It's not a perfect tool, but if you tried to recreate it yourself, you'd probably start to realize why they netted $450M.

<comment><USER65> Not quite the same right? FB is way more than a message board. And even back then when they were just a MB, they had millions of users in no-time.

<comment><USER66> My point is that TodoMVC is a todo list. Trello is a lot more than that.

FB has 3 orders of magnitude more value than Trello with 2 orders of magnitude more users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> What we really need from Atlassian is yet another syntax or markup to learn for a product in their suite that is different from all of the other products.

I'm glad that now they've acquired another company, we have the opportunity to soon look forward to this.

</comment><comment><USER68> From [http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian](http://blog.trello.com/trello- atlassian)

>> We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA).

<comment><USER69> So that's all well and good as far as it goes. But e.g. I currently rely on integration between Trello and Discord, which is in competition with HipChat - is there a risk of them killing that off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Really eager to hear what Spolsky has to say about the acquisition (nothing yet either on his blog or on Twitter).

<comment><USER71> His company is Stack Overflow, not Trello, so he probably doesn't have much to say.

<comment><USER72> Have a look at the history please. Trello came out of a company Joel created.

<comment><USER71> I started working at Fog Creek Software in 2006. Joel hasn't worked for Trello since 2014.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Great acquisition for Atlassian and I'm super pumped for the Trello team. The people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill informed and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves. This makes perfect sense and look forward to seeing what's next for both companies.

<comment><USER74> > The people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill > informed and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves.

No, but many have been users of companies that ended their beatiful journey soon after being acquired.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Atlassian don't want to waste half-a-billion dollars.

<comment><USER73> It's good point and a valid concern (Parse). But I think there is value there for both Atlassian and Trello. I don't think this will be a bad thing for end user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Looks like too many customers decided they JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE AUSTRALIANS! So many that "the Australians" bought the team. This is poetic and this is why I'm glad blogs often stick around.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats- cust...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats- customization-and-supersonics-fogbugz-7-is-here/)

<comment><USER71> FogBugz is still wholly owned and operated by Fog Creek Software.

Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow, and does not work for Trello (nor Atlassian).

<comment><USER75> That essay was written about 5 years before Trello was spun out of Fog Creek. You can see Joel in the photo on the WSJ article covering that story: [http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital- white...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-whiteboard- trello-spins-out-of-fog-creek-with-10-3m/)

To connect the dots, it's overwhelmingly likely that Atlassian was in fact "the Australians" referred to and Atlassian's tremendous growth (which was foreshadowed in Joel's piece) is _why they could_ by Trello 7 years later.

It's interesting to look at in JOS in retrospect because he literally blogged the birth of company A, its competition with company B and it's spin-off C, which B later bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Why did Fog Creek approved this acquisition? With products like Stack Overflow, Trello and GoMix I thought they want to become a big player on the market of software development. Why sell our own assets?

<comment> jon-wood My sense is that Fog Creek is more of an incubator than a traditional software company now, albeit one which is incredibly selective about what they invest in. Stack Overflow and Trello are both independent companies which started out as side projects for Fog Creek, and I imagine GoMix will eventually go the same way.

<comment><USER77> Fog Creek should still be the majority owner, no?

<comment><USER78> I would assume either FogCreek as a company or Joel and Pryor as owners thereof (especially Pryor since he was CEO of Trello).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I'm a big fan of Trello and Atlassian both. Personally speaking, if all they do is take away the crippling "add on" restrictions in Trello for solo users, this will be a huge win.

</comment><comment><USER80> Not sure how JIRA will marry Trello. They are different in their user base. I use both but for very different cases.

<comment><USER63> Yes – Just like Bitbucket Issues didn't marry JIRA. One core difference between Trello and JIRA Agile is, in Trello you can't hide tickets that you don't want right now in the sprint – In JIRA Agile, you only put a few issues in the sprint so the board looks clean.

Anyway. Not sure why some people want to move away from Trello now. Is it that they don't want an identity connection between JIRA and Trello (SSO or similar)?

<comment><USER81> I think it's likely that people who use Trello appreciate the simplicity and Atlassian aren't exactly known for creating simple software (speaking as a past Jira user/admin).

I had the same feeling of "oh well, what else can I use in the future" when I read this post.

<comment><USER82> You can try [https://ora.pm](https://ora.pm)

<comment><USER83> This is great! But it's fairly lacking in some features. Any word on release of API docs so devs can integrate their workflow into it?

<comment><USER82> We are planning to open API but it will be after the launch. What kind of features do you want to see?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Sounds like a move to capture the lower bound of the market. Right now, lots of teams leave Trello to something more robust like JIRA after crossing somewhere between 5-10 people, but with this, they're on Atlassian from the beginning. I also think the JIRA team could use some UX help from Trello :P

</comment><comment><USER85> Not related at all but I interviewed for Trello in 2016, the meeting was super cool (video call in the browser, nice RH girl apparently very excited about my profile), the job was full remote, they needed help to move from Backbone to React and they have millions of users (!) so I was quite hyped. Then I received an email of refusal from another guy containing only a quote from the CEO. I asked for feedback (probably my spoken english was not good enough but I wanted a confirmation) and the guy replied me that he couldn't say anything for legal reasons... and the same quote from the CEO. Cold shower experience.

About the topic: we used JIRA in my last job and it was not that bad. Curious to see what they are going to do with Trello.

<comment><USER86> What was the quote?

<comment><USER85> I just looked at my emails and actually my message was not exactly accurate. I received the refusal from the CEO and this email contained the following phrase:

> _sometimes we have to make very painful choices and pass over some > extraordinarily promising candidates._

Then I asked for feedback and the next reply from the recruiting team quoted this phrase.

They didn't give me any feedbacks for legal reasons (?).

<comment><USER87> Yes - that's very typical for US companies, because they're afraid of being sued. It definitely shouldn't be read as cold or uncaring on the part of the people responding to you; the worst that can be said is that they were paying too much attention to their lawyers. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I suspect this is as much about getting a dev center in New York, away from a tapped-out Sydney startup scene that is hostile to bringing in overseas talent, and having a brand with a reputation as a good employer; as it is about acquiring the IP or user-base.

</comment><comment><USER89> [http://wekan.io](http://wekan.io)

Libre open source alternative.

Can be self hosted or self hosted from within Sandstorm

</comment><comment><USER69> So I guess we'll see JIRA rebranded as "Trello Server" and it will become impossible to search for any help on it?

</comment><comment><USER90> If I was the Atlassian CEO reading this thread, I'd be really worried. There are a _lot_ of comments from developers with zero faith in Atlassian's ability to create (or even preserve) a great product.

</comment><comment> gm-conspiracy So, pardon my ignorance, but I wasn't aware FogCreek spun it off into its own entity...

But, what was the $10mil of VC money used for?

Has Trello evolved since taking the money (features)?

Over $300mil in cash for kanban cards? Nice exit.

</comment><comment><USER91> What Trello has needed since day-1 was a self-hosting option. Many companies won't allow their customers to use it since there's no formal agreement on data protection.

</comment><comment><USER92> I have a hard time understanding how Trello is worth that much money. Does it really cost 1/2 billion to get 19 million users and a Trello like app built? Is the Trello team really worth that much? Was Trello that threatening to Atlassian? There are a lot of there other successful collaboration SaaS out there as well (e.g. Asana). This is not like social/content services where there can only be one (or very few e.g. instagram, github, whatsapp).

<comment><USER93> Think about this from the perspective of a purchase like Google -> Youtube.

Google paid $1 billion for Youtube. It's now conservatively worth $50 billion.

That means they could have 50 large acquisitions go to zero and still be breakeven on their Youtube deal.

You can use the same economics for most deals.

(to say nothing about consolidating the large apps in this space -- maybe Asana is next on their list?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Not the biggest fan of Atlassian (but an admin for 10 years). I am trying to figure out what product to use for project management, and what path Atlassian will take.

They started with Jira Agile, which became Jira Software where you could plan agile sprints. Assuming this was the future i was a bit surprised to see Portfolio pop up, but i am assuming this project will be shut down at some point in favor of a new Trello for Jira? Or?

We currently bought Softwareplants BigPicture & BigPicture Enterprise, but also played with TempoTeam Planner.

I see both Trello and Atlassian's CEO being here, please let you loyal customers know what your intentions are so we can plan for our futures.

To clarify: My largest fear is not that they screw up Trello, but that once more developing resources we pay ever doubling license-fees for will be reallocated to making sure Trello works well with the rest of the stack, and becomes a big seller.

It's all about new bells and whistles with Atlassian, while we the end-users are begging for bugfixes or feature-requests for decades. This is clearly reflected in not patching bugs in current version but instead force users to upgrade, while sometimes losing functionality we loved just to keep the application safe.

Jonas

</comment><comment><USER95> As a causal user of Bitbucket and Trello at work, I thought Trello was an Atlassian product until today. Makes it an obvious acquisition choice.

</comment><comment><USER96> Atlassian follows MBA 101[1]: if you're selling an elastic inferior product, you can always buy out the competition.

[1] As portrayed on The Wire

</comment><comment><USER97> Atlassian has supported me with educational tools and discounts. Their git services and customer support has been the best for me and I became a paying customer.

Glad they bought trello. I'm hoping they integrate it to the existing issue workflow and make it a better product than it is. And there is a good chance of that happening.

</comment><comment><USER98> Atlassian: We make the software other people make you use.

<comment><USER99> bitbucket I choose to use, for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Dear god please don't make it anything like HipChat

</comment><comment><USER101> Jira is by far the worst and most convoluted application that I have used. It's slow a d very horribly designed that I even wonder if they did tgat on purpose. Heck you have to shell out $3000 for your team just to learn how to use it.

Hopefully they'll leave Trello as it is.

</comment><comment><USER102> I bookmarked this comments page as reference for Trello alternatives in case Atlassian ruins it :)

</comment><comment><USER103> I hope they can learn from Trello to improve JIRA Agile. JIRA seems much better for software projects with organised sprints and large numbers of tickets, but front end performance is terrible and the overall UX feels like it could be improved significantly.

<comment><USER104> That would be nice. JIRA Agile definitely could use a push to get a better UI. It also doesn't support real world bug tracking well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Microsoft Planner was released as a free add-on to Office 365 at the backend of last year, which seems to be a direct "good enough" competitor to Trello's business & enterprise plans. Wonder if that was a factor in the sale?

</comment><comment><USER106> Don't sweat it. There are other services to migrate to. In my startup[1] we've added a quick Trello Migration in just a day.

There is now a new market share to fight for

[1][http://www.getswip.com](http://www.getswip.com)

</comment><comment><USER107> I just hope they leave the design alone and don't try enforcing their hideous design philosophy upon it. (Why do big tech companies think that making all their software look the same helps anyone or makes them more money?)

</comment><comment><USER108> How to get rich:

1\. Create an awesome ToDo list

2\. ???

3\. Profit

<comment><USER109> I think most of it is about the brand; about buying a name which is already imprinted in millions of minds. The technology alone is probably only worth 1-5% (?) of the price.

<comment><USER110> Agreed. Maybe the 2. ??? was "How the heck did they go from unknown to a recognizable brand?"

<comment><USER111> I think it is more something like :

1\. Write really popular blog.

2\. Create Stack overflow and make it the goto for developers.

3\. Create todo list

etc..

The brand was there before they even started the todo list. All it took was a blog post "We are going to create a todo list now" and it was pretty much set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Too much casualty that Asana is suffering a DoS problem right now.

</comment><comment><USER113> Can anyone point me to any acquisition that resulted in a net benefit to the customers of either company/product?

Or maybe I should not consider the users of a product the primary customers?

<comment><USER114> Atlassian: Confluence - Went from very small user base to hundreds of thousands of users. It's a great tool for internal content management (think HR docs, decision documentation, meeting notes, etc.).

HipChat - Small user base and unscalable architecture. Hundreds of thousands of users and loads of resources to rewrite nearly all of it's backend. Still a work in progress but it's been very stable for the past year and the clients, which were all non-native web views, are coming along nicely.

Fisheye/Crucible - Small user base, unprofitable. Now has thousands of users and is hands down the best code search and review tool that lots of people don't know about.

SourceTree - Massive expose for a very small tool that wasn't well known before acquisition. Many new features, has remained stable throughout.

Greenhopper - Was a small, profitable, plugin. Now built-in, completely integrated hundreds of new features and has adapted well to various trends in Agile (scrum, kanban).

Despite this thread, which shows HN's consistent (and ironic) distain for (or is it lack of understanding of?) successful software companies, Atlassian is actually great at creating great products out of questionable acquisitions.

Outside of Atlassian:

Whatsapp is free now, people like free. That's neat. To people crying out privacy, honestly… privacy is the only thing that VC backed b2c companies sell that's actually worth real money. They were eventually going to open that pandora's box.

Twitch gets to continue existing and it's ad-free for prime members now as well. I like free :).

Firebase is better than ever. Let's all cry a single tear for Parse, we all wanted a massive Mongo cluster backing our data, right?

<comment><USER115> Small detail: Confluence wasn't an acquisition, but Atlassian's second product (JIRA was their first).

<comment><USER114> You are correct. I thought that Conf was an acquisition of a very basic wiki product that Atlassian built into a enterprise content collaboration suite but I was remembering incorrectly. The story was that Confluence's main development line was maintained by contractors instead of in-house developers and after launch dev was pulled in. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Trello is one of the best SaaS I've used.

Atlassian used to be loved before prior to its IPO.

I'm not too happy with Atlassian acquiring Trello. How much of Fog Creek will still be part of Trello?

<comment><USER117> Fog Creek is dead, long live Fog Creek

<comment><USER116> Why do you say that? They just sold Trello for half a billion and still have Stack Overflow. I'm sure Fogbugz is profitable although it's not anything stellar and it looks like they have a new product

<comment><USER117> They shared an office with Trello, but it spun off long ago, so they made no money on this sale. Same goes for Stack, totally separate company. AND now their closest ally, Trello, has been sold to the direct competitor of FogBugz.

Thus, Fog Creek is dead, Long live Fog Creek.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> Confluence is starting to move in on SharePoint's turf, I've witnessed it first hand. The two products really don't compare, but for Digital teams who just want to get something going Confluence is way easier.

I think this acquisition will add to the Confluence vs SharePoint story and make Atlassian more attractice.

IF (it's a big if) Atlassian are planning to move into the intranet/productivity tools space this acquisition is really sensible.

</comment><comment><USER119> I love Trello!

At one of my internships (Elec Engineering) with a mining company they used Trello to organize the majority of their work.

After that experience I started using Trello to organize all my daily stuff.

I had it to organise my book reading list, book purchase list, Quarterly and Yearly goals, Job application status, plan and execute on my thesis, assignments and side projects.

I can't believe how much value it has provided me for free!

It's good to see them get rewarded with a nice buyout.

</comment><comment><USER120> one of the largest players in the project management game acquires another tool and it's a-okay because there's loads of competition; but realistically, trello was one of the competitors to JIRA that actually could hold its own when being reviewed for use by non-developers. JIRA has been the default choice of many companies and while not a monopoly I'd say it's approaching that status.

</comment><comment><USER121> Well, since Atlassian is in the mood of acquiring, I have made an analytics and data processing system that plugs into JIRA to create custom reports in ways that are not possible currently by JIRA.

It also integrates externally to JIRA regardless of whether it's a cloud or on-premise version.

We have been using it internally successfully since a few months, first in my team and then in others in our company.

Would you guys be interested at Atlassian?

</comment><comment><USER122> Congrats to Atlassian and the Trello team!

</comment><comment><USER123> Makes a lot of sense although I expect at least one of my former co-workers is really is really irritated because they hate Jira and were feeling "forced" to use it. Perhaps with this acquisition there will be a 'local server' option which is something some companies really look for.

</comment><comment><USER124> I kinda see Jira and Trello as separate target markets. Jira = Enterprise (for me) and Trello = Small-to-mid-sized companies and personal use.

My company uses Jira (correctly) and it is great - for software. I keep all of my personal lists in Trello.

Also - VersionOne <<<<<<<<< Jira

<comment><USER45> Similar here. I don't see Trello and Jira overlapping for the majority of users. For simple tasks, there are still alternatives like wunderlist and taskcade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> wow! I had recently decided to go all in on Trello for my personal use and I was in the process of making a Trello-Gitlab powerup (just like Trello Github powerup).

I wonder what the future of Trello is - both as a customer and as a software dev (I loved their remote work policy).

</comment><comment><USER125> Such a shame, I wonder how long it will take Trello to turn into heavy 'enterprise' bloatware like the rest of said companies products. There are a few good open source alternatives out there now so I'll personally move to one of those.

</comment><comment><USER126> So... it's going to stop being free and start sucking?

<comment><USER127> What, you don't like decade+ old highly useful and yet ignored issues?[0][1]

[0] [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369)

[1] [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821)

PS: Here's a bonus issue that took 10 years to resolve (renaming users!): [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549)

<comment><USER128> Here's one I ran into just an hour ago: [https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5814/reify-pull- req...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5814/reify-pull-requests-by- making-them-a-ref)

Not as old, only 5 years. Yet this is blocking my switch to a new CI server (GoCD) and makes building pull requests in general a pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Congrats to Trello and Fog Creek Software!

I've moved on to Zenhub instead of Trello, but it's indeed a really nice product that can be used by many, and not just people in software development

<comment><USER130> ZenHub is nice but it's also overwhelming with information that's not pertinent or contextual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> If they kill the free tier, it will help our desktop card-based planner: [http://www.hyperplan.com](http://www.hyperplan.com) ;0)

</comment><comment><USER132> Trello is about to become an add-on for Jira that won't work 95% of the time and be jammed down your throat by a scrum master as the only tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER133> When I hear Atlassian, I hear Jira and we all 'love' Jira. I don't know, I see how this is good for Atlassian, not really how it is good for me.

<comment><USER133> Is there really anyone who things this is a good deal for us users?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> I am really glad I never started using Trello for my task organization. It lacked the basic act of marking tasks as Done. I needed to manually drag the done tasks to a 'Done' board.

On that note, my hunt for good task organization app led me to Todoist! It's awesome! It has great web and Android apps and great API which I intend to hack at some point to create an emacs interface for it.

So glad that Todoist wasn't bought by Atlassian. My biggest gripe with Atlassian is that it natively doesn't support Markdown in Jira. It uses its funky own markup that's really bad.

<comment><USER135> For me the best todolist would be like a tree where you would be able to divide tasks into sub tasks and see every thing in one screen.

I haven't been able to find such app so as for now I'm stuck with pen and paper

<comment><USER134> If you are open to emacs, check out org mode. It's awesome!

[http://orgmode.org/features.html](http://orgmode.org/features.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER136> They bought 19M users for $425M, it's $22 per user, I don't know how many users pay for the service?

PS: their pricing page says $10 / year and user

<comment><USER137> Trello has a free tier, not all of those 19M pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> Screen schemes, issue types and permission schemes. 10 years in Jira and more confusing by the day. Coming to a trello board near you!

</comment><comment><USER139> my experience with Atlassian products tells me that this will likely become a "third project type" to JIRA: Scrum, Kanban, Trello (or whatever generalized name is given). They feel like different products.

Or Atlassian is using this to go after competitors like A-Ha! which it doesn't currently serve (i.e. non software development projects)

</comment><comment><USER140> Seems like it's the right time when we have made an easy importing from Trello. Many people migrate to Kanbanchi.

</comment><comment><USER141> Interesting match. Trello is a lightweight/fast tool. Jira is quite the opposite. Where are they going to meet?

</comment><comment><USER142> I've tried a few alternatives and what i dread is lack of keyboard navigation in some. esp about a board.

</comment><comment><USER143> Somebody who knows this pattern better than me: are we likely to see Trello shut down within 3 years?

</comment><comment><USER144> congrats! Anyone know how much the payoff for a standard dev at trello is in a deal like this?

</comment><comment><USER145> Oh god... Let's hope they don't spoil it. I just made a paid subscription...

</comment><comment><USER146> Oki-doki, time to move.

Does anyone know or, better yet, use any good self-hosted Trello alternatives?

<comment><USER147> Try Active Collab. It does wonders for my team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> If anyone is looking to selfhost, I recommend wekan or kanboard on cloudron.io

</comment><comment><USER149> Awesome. Nice to see that it was a spin out from Fog Creek as well. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER150> Please may I have "convert this trello card into a bitbucket issue"

</comment><comment><USER151> Is this why there hasn't been a stackoverflow podcast in a while?

</comment><comment><USER152> Just to prepare: Does anyone have a way of exporting Trello data?

<comment><USER153> Looks like you can export any board as JSON by going to Board Menu > More > Print and Export (from [http://help.trello.com/article/747-exporting-data- from-trell...](http://help.trello.com/article/747-exporting-data-from- trello-1)).

There's also a Chrome extension to export a board to a spreadsheet: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-for- trello/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-for- trello/nhdelomnagopgaealggpgojkhcafhnin?hl=en-US).

</comment></comment><comment> Jean-Philipe Is it just me, or does the price seem a bit low?

</comment><comment><USER154> $425M is a lot of money. Was Trello profitable?

</comment><comment><USER155> Time to build a Trello spinoff! Who's in?

</comment><comment> j-pb Time to cancel that gold subscription then.

</comment><comment><USER156> How long until Atlassian acquire FogBUGZ?

</comment><comment><USER157> Is Slack next? Could they afford that?

<comment><USER158> I don't think anyone other than Facebook/Microsoft/Apple/Google can afford Slack.

<comment><USER159> ...and Microsoft tried, was spurned, and built Teams and is pushing Teams and Skype to attack Slack where it lives.

<comment><USER2> They need to get Teams right before they are attacking anything except the coffee maker. I hope they do get it right cos we use s4b at work. I really want them to make that a capable product so that i dont have to use a basket of products to get communications done: yammer, s4b, email, FTP, sharepoint, internal systems (that really just need a bot to chat with instead of a app UI),....and many others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER160> Goliath Acquired David

</comment><comment><USER161> Atlassian tries to be too much to too many. They are going to ruin Trello.

Checkout zenkit.com.

</comment><comment><USER162>
        > $425M / 716 comments => $593,575 per comment

</comment><comment><USER163> _dread sets in_

</comment><comment><USER164> clearly overpaid... not worth. my opinion. =)

</comment><comment><USER165> oh no. : (

</comment><comment><USER166> Is it just me or the acquisition amounts decreasing?

Soundcloud - $500M potential buyout

Trello - $425M

I'm not aware of any other. All those 10,000 startups world wide and only a couple gets bought out few IPO. The chances of a payout doing a VC funded startup is marginally slim despite what PG wrote in his articles nearly 10+ years ago.

Coupled with rising interest rates, it seems like the ride is coming to a slow crawl but this is just my gut feeling.

There's no better time to bootstrap than ever. Control your own company with no outside influences. You don't need billions of dollars. If you can double your day job salary with a SaaS then I think that's a huge success.

Here's to a happy & successful 2017 for the rest of us bootstrappers on HN.

</comment><comment><USER167> Kinda makes me happy for trello's founders. Have been using it as a reference site for HTML and CSS development. I really liked those buttons! :D I hope atlassin doesn't make it bloated and shitty. Hope it stays good for the small teams as it has ever been!

</comment><comment><USER168> Oh yeah! Just leave everything exactly how it is now and I will keep on loving Trello! :)</comment>


Ask HN: Mac app to automatically upload a screenshot? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I'm only asking this after searching for this for a few months now without finding a suitable software for this simple task, I even considered writing something myself but haven't had the time for that yet and I'd have to script something. I'm not familiar with Objective-C.
What i'm looking for is a simple app which will upload screenshots created with the default Mac OS shortcuts (ctrl + shift + {3,4}) to my own server and copying the link to my clipboard if the upload was successful. That's it.
Apps that I tested but don't fit my needs: - http://www.getcloudapp.com/ > not self hosted
- http://www.capturedapp.com/ > no public key auth, short URLs
- https://web.archive.org/web/20101210225932/http://mikeable.com/apps/ > The one I'm using for a few years now, no public key auth, abandoned, no sftp.
The most promising one:
- http://fileshuttle.io/ > Missing public key auth, short URLs, slow developement. Best case scenario: Fork adding these features
I'm searching for a tool with the following requirements:
- simple and lightweight
- retina ready
- using the default Mac OS screenshot shortcuts
- Moving screenshots from the default location (Desktop) to a specified directory or deleting them after a successful upload
- sftp / scp upload using public keys in ~/.ssh
- uploading to my own server, no third party service
- (optional) menu bar icon with a history of the last 5 screenshot links for easy access
- editing features are not needed
- Direct link in clipboard (https://example.com/2014-2348-2342-2342.png)
- A long/not easy to guess and unique filename.
Thanks for any recommendations, I'm happy to pay for an app if it fits my needs. <comment><USER2> Just do it with Automator.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the fair valuation (now and 5 years later) of Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

Of course, in your opinion. <comment><USER2> would be tough to estimate without knowing their product (and income) pipeline for the future. I am sure they have got more features planned up but not known outside.

It would also depend on how well they implement them in face of competition for those features.

The 5 year one, it would be a joke to even try to estimate it, its too unpredictable in the web business. One misstep, and you can be gone!

</comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion it is worth what people will pay for it when more then 5% is floated on the open market.</comment>


GitHub is your resume so keep your resume in GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/Markdown-resume/ <comment><USER3> As mentioned several times, Github is not your resume. At the very least, it's not mine. Sure, I have a github profile, but the little side projects there don't really have anything to do with my professional work (most recently, data deduplication and video processing).

Also, LaTeX can produce much, much better resumes than markdown. Here's a link to my (extremely dated) resume using the moderncv template: [http://jsaxton.com/resume.pdf](http://jsaxton.com/resume.pdf)

It's great for a number of reasons:

1: It immediately gets the attention of the hiring manager, since it looks way better than the typical MS Word resume.

2: It's really easy to edit. If I want to add an item, I just add "/item Did X". It's great.

3: It's plaintext, so you can throw it in git, which is really nice. Since I don't want the public to know if I'm updating my resume, I keep my resume in a private git repository (the same private repo where I keep all my Coursera work).

<comment><USER4> I am sorry but that CV needs some spacing. The font rendering might be top notch but it's way too cramped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No it's not. Github only shows an extremely small portion of the story. If you plan to be seen as a straight code monkey - sure. My github is practically empty because I'm doing high quality work that people would prefer I not share. Also, github doesn't capture much more than the capability to slign code.

<comment><USER6> It disappoints me that so few people here read the linked article. This article talks about writing your resume in markdown and only tangentially mentioned git at all in that writing it in markdown will make it versionable. The only direct mention of github is a link to a repo that converts resumes to pdf.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps the link title should more accurately describe the post content, then. It's up to the author and link submitter to clearly communicate.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but does that justify commenting on a link without even reading the content?

Keeping your resume in source control makes sense, whatever technology you end up using is completely up to you, all you _really_ need is changelist history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Glad to see some pushback on this whole "Github is your resume" thing. I know I'm not the only person whose employer demands that their code be kept closed- source. My Github profile is full of weird little experiments and is definitely not meant to be some kind of polished, "hey please hire me!". Feel free to ask me about what's in there, but it's not some kind of showcase of my best work. Everything in there (that's public) is just stuff I've done for fun.

I feel like programmers should all realize this, which makes me think that the people that are going to be "judging" based on what's in there are not exactly people that are equipped to know if I'm a good programmer or not anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wouldn't state it as intensely as justizin, but I agree with him. ~60% of programmers I'd call first to work on a project with me don't even have a github account.

Github is a great resume if you're young and don't have real work experience, if you want to change "tracks" and show you have skills in a different domain, or if you really love and support open-source.

I guess it's a self-resolving problem as companies who take not having github activity as a negative probably aren't places people without github account would want to work anyway.

<comment><USER11> i was more going after these angles:

      (a) once upon a time, it was _expected_ of a competent developer to be able to run a server with a web server and a resume html file.  putting your resume in github is no more impressive than putting your resume in your personal wikipedia profile.

      (b) some of us have been programming a lot longer than github has been around, and it does not come close to effectively showing community contribution over such a career.

      (c) as someone responding to my original comment noted, not all code can be published.  i have a lot of commits, even in github, which you can't see.

All that said, I do expect people increasingly to examine github for recent community work, I would be concerned with someone who had never used it, though outside the fad bubble of the sf mission, a lot of people are using bitbucket and - GASP - hosting their own git repos.

GitHub is a great tool, a useful community 'hub', but also a SPOF and a relatively young player in the source control space.

I can say from experience, however, it's just very frustrating to have a recruiter say that some founders ten years your junior who probably have a great idea and could be great to work for want to see a github profile.

kids, i helped build Rackspace, without which there would be no GitHub. Give those old-timers a call. ;)

Anyway, this debate may not be fair to OP who was just showing how to use GH to host actual resume. There are some advantages, but really, fire up a $5 DigitalOcean VM and show me that you know about code running some way other than foreground in your laptop console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's mine, [http://philcv.com/](http://philcv.com/). It's also generated from Github and a simple push to gh-pages has changes up. It's HTML, but modular and would be easy enough to convert the chunkier bits of text to markdown.

If you hit print you'll get a stylesheet suitable for distributing a PDF... or printing.

You can even change the colour theme with the left/right arrow keys, but that's just to help me pick a colour scheme, rather than a feature of the CV itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> Clear case of: [http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt- america-r...](http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read- anymore)

</comment><comment><USER14> The linked article (title "Painless Resumes With Markdown") doesn't even mention GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not keep your resume as pure git repo? That's more in the spirit of git, no? That way you could even track ppl's CV for updates. (More of a joke than a real CV [https://github.com/kidd/Me](https://github.com/kidd/Me) )

<comment><USER16> now that's a resume in Github :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, Ohloh works far better as a resume than Github; the vast majority of the projects I contribute to live elsewhere.

Even better, though, I have a real resume, much of which consists of a section "Open Source Project Experience": several paragraphs explaining the biggest projects I've contributed to, what I've done, and how that work is significant. That section in particular works _very_ well with potential employers/interviewers. THat works far better than just saying "there's my work over there, evaluate it yourself".

</comment><comment><USER11> github is not your fucking resume, whippersnappers.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't agree more. Once, in an interview, I was asked for a link to my "Github resume". I replied, "I don't have one. I get _paid_ to write code." I got the job.

<comment> torrent-of-ions Everything I've ever done is on my github account. I also get paid to code.

<comment><USER19> Well, for the majority of us that is not the case. If you work for Mozilla (or something like that) then great, but to expect the same from everyone is just ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow - there is a lot of hating going down here, and it took me a while to work it out. The majority seems to be "But _my_ employer won't let me Open Source my work". Well, yes.

We are entering a world where companies will have to compete to hire harder than ever before. Coding is a job that _can_ be done anywhere in the world - so if they want to hire the "best" the companies need to be the most attractive.

OR ...

They need to guarantee low risk.

If you work in a company that does not expect to release some work product as open source, then it is not a company that is going to compete on that world stage.

If so then look at its approach to keeping employees safe and risk free - <USER2> layoffs, a nice profitable niche to exploit, no exploitation, no crazy deadlines, nice low turnover of staff.

If the company you work for is not competing for talent, nor is it giving you low risk in return for your work, then I strongly suggest you update your CV, on github or not.

PS

JoshTriplett comments are the sanest - in short "I have a github account for bugs I fix on major projects. I put that in my normal CV along with _why what I did was important_ "

Now that is how to use a github account. I have some catching up to do.

</comment><comment><USER21> Github is not your resume.

[http://osrc.dfm.io/](http://osrc.dfm.io/)

You can generate an open source report card based on your profile, but you should not see github as your CV:

[https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not- your-c...](https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/)

<comment><USER22> Two reasons you shouldn't cite James' post as an argument:

1\. He blocks HN traffic (hence the idiotic octopus gif)

2\. His post is incredibly inaccurate and simply wrong on so many levels

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice to see this getting some publicity. The markdown-resume-js project that this uses is based on my own markdown resume project at [https://github.com/there4/markdown- resume](https://github.com/there4/markdown-resume).

It's a project that generates both html and pdf versions of a resume written in markdown. It's distributed as a phar file so you can keep a copy in your bin folder and just keep your resume.md in it's own repo.

This was originally a way to experiment with css descendant selectors and learning more about the capabilities of wkhtmltopdf. It's limited compared to LaTex, but it's reasonable for a simple resume.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for your work! I'm the author of markdown-resume-js and it wouldn't exist if I didn't have your repo to blatantly rip-off :)

I'm actually surprise the library is getting any use at all. I hacked it together over a week after being frustrated with the options out there, then finding yours and wanting the same thing in node.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Quite opposite. Github is an anti-resume for dedicated hackers. You should not mention it, if you want to get 'normal' job in some corporation.

\- github shows you spend too much time programming outside of daily job

\- it shows how much more productive you are outside of work, possibly creating some uncomfortable questions for your boss.

\- running project with 10K+ users could interfere with your daily job

\- companies prefer younger 'not so much' experienced people who just follow

\- most companies have strict ban on any open-source activities outside of job, advanced Githubers are filtered out even before interview.

</comment><comment><USER26> You'd have to be a goddamn idiot to put your phone number and email address directly into a git repo or gist.

I get enough spam from recruiters on LinkedIn thank-you-very-much.

<comment><USER6> Maybe not my real phone number but Google Voice number? Sure, who cares?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What do you all do when they require it to be in Word, then? While I could just have a resume on at my personal site, about 99.9999999% of every job I've ever applied for, through a recruiter or not, has required my resume in Word format.

Also, I have several resumes, depending on the role of the job I'm applying/striving for.

But I appreciate the sentiment of using GitHub for a document version manager.

<comment> X-Istence I've had a Word document as my resume, but these days while using LaTeX I just have a PDF.

This has had two good benefits.

1\. Recruiters can no longer modify my resume easily to match their requirements. Yes, I've caught some recruiters modifying my resume they sent on to the company to include more keywords. (Which incidentally is also why I bring my resume to jobs with me) 2\. I can have a more consistent formatting that is enforced. I've found that even with Microsoft Word different versions across platforms would display my resume differently.

Even if recruiters/companies require Word documents, most of them are more than willing to take a PDF instead. Most online forms that pull information out of a resume can pull information out of a PDF just as well as out of a Word document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a dedicated email for my Github profile. Interestingly, I've received several unprompted job offers at that email, which is not the email listed on my resume. So there are at least some groups (most of these were startups) who may be hiring based off Github profiles alone.

</comment><comment><USER29> Depends on the company. The majority of companies that I work with would not even have heard of github, much less know how to extract information from it (in any meaningful sense).

A smaller percentage wouldn't care one way or the other.

The idea that github is a resume is, to my mind, wishful thinking at best.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am using rst2pdf and github for keeping my resume. [http://github.com/ragsagar/resume](http://github.com/ragsagar/resume)

</comment><comment><USER31> Repost: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732025)

<comment><USER6> Did you click on this link? It is not the same as the one you linked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> is it possible to get this resume exported to Pdf? I might consider it in that case, but i dont really have that much trouble using Latex and it really is quite beautiful once it comes out. Thanks Latex template makers!

<comment><USER6> What resume template for LaTeX do you like?

<comment><USER32> I personally like this one: [http://jblevins.org/projects/cv- template/](http://jblevins.org/projects/cv-template/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Github is not my resume. Stackoverflow is a piece of my resume.

</comment><comment> bjr- It's not styled for print.

<comment><USER34> Who's printing?

<comment><USER35> HR and interviewers.

Even though it will be developers looking at your GitHub profile, if they are looking to interview a batch of people they'll likely pass off a bunch of "resumes" to HR to be printed and reviewed by others and used in interviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I just got two great job offers without showing them a GitHub account. So this is b.s.</comment>


My Safari Extension - Mindful Browsing - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindfulbrowsing.com

<comment><USER2> Cool idea. I think it should block for a day, then automatically unblock...

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. Do you mean that it should block with no 'temporary' access for a day to let you cool off?</comment></comment>


The Shrinking of Detroit - <AUTHOR> http://mapscroll.blogspot.com/2009/06/shrinking-of-detroit.html <comment><USER2> "The problem is that economic growth in the US over the past several decades has largely been driven by urban development (for which read: suburban sprawl)"

Detroit is a nightmare, and I don't think there are many people who fully understand just how bad it is out here unless you live around here.

There are basically three pockets of Detroit that you can walk around on-foot. Take a ride on "The People Mover" (a very poorly thought out monorail) and you'll run through areas of Downtown that are good and areas of Downtown that look like they were used for bombing practice. Venture beyond Downtown, and you understand why some property in Detroit is selling for $1 and why that's highway robbery.

I used to do contract work for several companies. One of our companies was a charter school just on the edge of the border of Detroit. You'd take Mound Rd. to get there. Mound is a mile south of Van Dyke, which starts in the heart of Downtown and ends in farm country. The progression was clear...the closer you got to the edge of Detroit the more things started looking like a third world country.

It's subtle at first: recognizable brand names start to become very sparse. Then occupied buildings in places other than intersections vanish. The intersections are littered with Check Cashing Liqour/General stores. Those are replaced in kind by the same but with bars on the windows and graffiti everywhere and eventually even those are gone replaced by what was once a Liquor store but is now a square of abandoned cement.

My parents and my wife's parents all lived in Detroit when they were young, as did all of their friends. They got out when crime went up. With the plummeting price of housing, even those who were once way too poor to live outside The City are getting out. Crime has increased in the area I live, but violent crime is still rare. Those who can find a way out, get out.

The city's decline won't stop. The burbs have created "The City" experience with great restaurants, great entertainment venues, great shopping and safe living.

Most of Detroit's Mayors were of the quality of Kwame Kilpatrick (other than Dennis Archer). The people of the city resent the folks who left, and folks running for mayor or city counsel do best if they blame Detroit's problems on the suburbs.

</comment><comment><USER3> The rust belt cities have been the victims of two great forces, one internal, one external.

The internal force is the incompetence of democratic city governance. Detroit had utterly incompetent elected leaders who in the 1960's and 70's allowed rioters to loot and burn large swaths of the city. Homicide rates rose by an order of magnitude. If you look at homicide rates in Europe, you have to back to the 12th century to find homicide rates as high as those in modern Detroit. Order and security are base requirements for economically productive societies. When the violence came, industries and productive residents fled. This process happened in major cities across the country: St. Louis, New Haven, Cleveland, Baltimore, etc.

Unfortunately, in a democracy the quality of government is proportionate to the human capital of the voting population. Now that the human capital has left, effective governance is even more unlikely. Thus the prospects for Detroit look grim indeed. The only hope is to put the city into receievership and grant a competent executive the authority to clean up the city (perhaps this would be a good job for General Petraeus).

The second factor is the American seinorage empire. Since the end of Bretton Woods in 1971 the primary export of the United States has been its own currency. China, Japan, Korea, etc, ship cars and steel to the United States. The U.S. ships back freighters full of dollars in return. As a result of China and Japan buying the currency, the exchange rate is artificially low. That makes it very hard for domestic manufacturers to compete with the Asian producers. What should have happened is that as American industries failed, we would have less exports which would weaken the dollar, making foreign products more expensive, thus increasing the profits of domestic manufacturers and stopping the cycle of decay. Instead, China and Japan continued to ship us cheap goods, and in return bought treasuries and financial products from Wall St. This greatly enriched the U.S. government and Wall St., but screwed over domestic manufacturers. The result was a growth in "service jobs" which were essentially jobs feeding off of the ever growing Washington bureaucracy. The United States is playing the role of 16th Century Spain. It exports a currency in return for foreign goods, while the domestic industries die.

The final blow to Detroit has been dealt by monetary incompetence on the part of Washington. The U.S. is currently experiencing a monetary contraction. Monetary contractions should never happen with competent economic stewardship. The government can always simply renominate the currency and avoid the problem. When a monetary contraction does occur, people dramatically cut spending on durable goods. Thus again, Detroit is punished for events completely outside of its own control.

<comment><USER4> I live in Japan so I've got an obvious bias, but growing up I don't remember many Americans who went with Japanese cars because they were _cheaper_.

The incompetence of city government angle, though, that I can get behind. Detroit in particular is two cities. We could call them Red Detroit and Blue Detroit. The Red politicians hate Blue Detroit with a passion, because they think the Blues have money and aren't sharing enough of it with Reds (and, most particularly, Red politicians). The Blues are deathly afraid of the Reds killing them, but try to be circumspect about putting it in so many words, so rather than stay in the city and face a possibility of death and a certainty of being "the colorist bastards always keeping hardworking Blues down" they have long since left for greener pastures.

That is a metaphor, of course -- no one in Detroit is actually colored Red or Blue.

<comment><USER3> _I live in Japan so I've got an obvious bias, but growing up I don't remember many Americans who went with Japanese cars because they were cheaper._

In the absence of the Japanese buying dollars, the price of Japanese cars would keep rising until trade balanced between the United States and Japan.

<comment> barry-cotter So the Japanese get paper and the US gets cars? sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

<comment><USER3> It's great in the short term. For the long term, well, see Spain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The comments point out a couple problems with the analysis, notably that it's comparing Detroit to some of the densest urban cores in the country rather than another sprawling suburb-city.

I'm really curious if the same thing will happen to San Jose in 50 years time. Like Detroit, San Jose is a monoculture, with an economy based upon American competitive advantage in one particular industry. And San Jose _already_ has a population density lower than Detroit: 940,000 people on 178 square miles. When the software industry gets off-shored to other companies and large Silicon Valley dinosaurs can't compete anymore, will we see pieces about urban decay in San Jose, with the crime, falling home values, and urban prairie that results?

BTW, does anyone else hear Dire Straits' _Telegraph Road_ in their head whenever they read a piece about the decline and fall of Detroit?

<comment><USER6> At least San Jose is in a pretty nice area, with a good climate, and access to some nice places (beaches to the SE, San Francisco an hour north, hills to the west and east). That's got to count for something.

<comment><USER7> Detroit is surrounded by some pretty nice places as well. Ann Arbor is a great town. And Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior are really pretty in the summer. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're not talking about some landlocked post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland.

<comment><USER8> Having grown up in Michigan and since moved to Silicon Valley, I can say that Detroit and San Jose are not really comparable. The weather in San Jose is much, much nicer. It's sunny and warm most of the year. The four-month winters in Detroit, with their freezing cold and grey skies, are never going to have the same kind of draw.

Ann Arbor is indeed a nice town, and is a reason that people might want to live in Ann Arbor. Living in Detroit so that one might occasionally visit Ann Arbor an hour away makes no sense.

It's true, we're not talking about a _landlocked_ post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland. But it pretty much is an industrial wasteland. An apocalyptic de- industrializing wasteland, if the ever-ongoing decline of the Big Three auto companies can be regarded as a sort of creeping apocalypse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I once read a plan for the revitalising of Detroit rather than the demolition. The plan involved turning Detroit into a free trade zone, along the lines of Hong Kong. There would be a low flat tax rate of 15% on company and personal earnings, no import/export duties, no welfare programs or government assistance, including being exempt from all Federal taxes, interventions and benefits. Basically set up a border around the city and let people do whatever they want. The idea was that within 10 years, it would again be a growing and dynamic economy as people would be attracted to the region to escape growing Federal intervention.

While I don't think the idea would ever fly, and I'm not sure it could work, it's definitely an idea to make you think - perhaps the answer is less intervention, not more.

<comment><USER10> What happens if that plan is implemented and ten years later, after Detroit becomes prosperous, people in other cities want the same thing?

Now we see one reason the plan won't be implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the things not mentioned by the article is that the city of Detroit has an income tax on people working in the city, unlike virtually all of the surrounding cities. This is symptomatic of a wider dynamic, in which it actually costs more for companies and employees to work in the city of Detroit itself than in the surrounding areas. It isn't the cause of the decline, but it certainly doesn't help.

</comment><comment><USER11> Баян: <http://egland.livejournal.com/93045.html></comment>


Ask HN: What full-time self-project should I do in 2018? - <AUTHOR> [Throw-away for obvious reasons; on HN since 2012; 25 years old] I'm one of you who hangs out on HN/PH/Reddit. I joined CS in 2011, then dropped out to start freelancing (because I couldn't pay college fees) in 2013. After three years, in late 2016 I quit freelancing, and since then I've been building utility apps and simple mobile games for the last two years. Some of my apps are bringing me Ad revenue; combined revenue from my projects might sustain me for a couple of years.
By working in dozens of small-scale projects, I have gained a diverse range of skills; I'm pretty good at Unity3D, image manipulation using C++, native mobile apps, system/server administration (setting up web/mail/database servers and containers). Since I have had a passive revenue stream, I find myself spending a lot less time working; I just spend most of my time reading articles on Medium/HN/PH and tinkering with new technology, without any motive of commitment with any of those (take blockchain and flutter as two examples).
My apps might support me for 9-12 months without actively maintaining them. Personally I'd like to involve myself in a project that doesn't only involve writing CRUD and APIs. I'm pretty burnt out of all these stuff. I feel I'm doing the mindless programming even if I'm solving interesting problems in a while. I think I'm not working on something important enough, and will soon lose my passion for development. To fix this I have thought of three options-
i. help the open source community, because without it I'd probably be selling peanuts in the railway station,
ii. start working on to hardware/IOT with a lot of learning (Logic, Computer architecture, signals, boards, basic electrical, etc.)
iii. work on a technology that is promising, as well as interesting enough for coming years, like ML/AI/DL
I'm not a native speaker of english, and belong to the 3rd world country in South-East Asia, please pardon my ignorance of language. What would you suggest? <comment><USER2> Instead of just browsing the internet you could fix any issues that you found in libraries you used quite often, or help improve the libraries that helped your build your apps in the first place. This will make you feel like you're working on something important.

AFAIK many open source contributors started by supporting the projects they are already familiar with as they know how the library would be used. That would be a good start until you find something else to do.

(Edit: typo)

</comment><comment><USER3> Stick with the 1. option. Look for open issues on GitHub/GitLab and start contributing with whatever you feel pleased of.

You'll gain new friends, find a mentor and learn new skills, even soft ones.

Tip: try with some Linux distribution (Manjaro, Ubuntu, etc.)</comment>


Blythe Masters, creator of the credit default swap, joins Bitcoin startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e29808a8-c744-11e4-9e34-00144feab7de.html

<comment> cs- #register/paywall# no thank you!

Found full story here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2ym9zd/blythe_maste...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2ym9zd/blythe_masters_joins_bitcoin_startup_digital/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah sorry, I couldn't find another source.</comment></comment>


It's time for Python 2.7 - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/10/09/its-time-for-python-2-7/ <comment><USER2> It seems like everyone is converging on 2.7. The commercial distributions from ActiveState and Enthought are at 2.7. Apple's OS/X Lion ships 2.7. The major linux distros are there. PyPy is at 2.7. Jython and IronPython are mostly 2.7 capable. And my understanding is the Google's AppEngine will be at 2.7 soon enough.

This is the Long Term Support version of Python, the one that is currently getting bug fixes and will continue to get bug fixes long into the future.

AFAICT, there are very few reasons to be using an older version of Python. By now, most of major third-party modules are working with 2.7 so there shouldn't be much holding you back.

<comment><USER3> > so there shouldn't be much holding you back.

Four words: Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

<comment><USER4>
      wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7/Python-2.7.tgz
      tar xvfz Python-2.7.tgz
      cd Python-2.7
      ./configure
      make
      su
      make altinstall

Note: use "make altinstall" to avoid damaging the system python.

<comment><USER5> If you have make or a compiler installed on a RHEL system (other than your organizational build machine), you're Doing It Wrong.

<comment><USER6> I install from source to /opt. It's fast and it works. What's the downside of this?

<comment><USER7> I suspect sneak is implying that you should build packages on a build box, then your other servers can just grab those instead of compiling themselves. It's a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only thing that I miss on 2.7 is psyco. I support a somewhat popular python app in the open source world, and write a lot of python at the day job, and I usually deploy an executable with bundled python interpreter, and 2.6, because psyco does not work on 2.7, and makes a HUGE difference on 2.6

<comment><USER9> Have you tried pypy?

<comment><USER10> pypy doesn't support gevent/eventlet, as far as I know. :(

Unfortunately, psyco isn't x86_64 compatible either. So if you want to use psyco, you are "stuck" with python2.6 on x86.

<comment><USER11> _pypy doesn't support gevent/eventlet, as far as I know. :(_

Not yet, indeed. But according to their site they do have a stackless version: "PyPy can be configured to run in stackless mode, providing micro-threads for massive concurrency". This sounds promising, and could be used to implement gevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My exposure with Python is through Motion Builder 2012 and 2009 (Deploy for the first one, but due to asserts causing crash&exit, I develop with the 2009).

It was my first great exposure to python (I have some C, C++, lua, lisp behind me). I have to say wasn't expecting Python 2.5.2 and Python 2.6.x? (2009 and 2012 respectively) to support each other, but with "import from future" and other tricks I was able to get code working on both.

So thanks for the article, as my day job requires some more knowledge of it (but personally I do not favor python)

</comment><comment><USER13> Did not know about set and dict comprehensions - very nifty.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just wish we could stop supporting 2.4.</comment>