Slashdot Mirror
Film Documents Software Creation
vasanth writes "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks a story of intern programmers at New York-based Fog Creek Software creating a product from scratch to shipping, is now finished, one of the first films to delve wholly into the life and culture of coding. And though it may not be the next Harry Potter, it's an engaging film that focuses more on the personalities of the people than on the technology, bringing to life a process ordinarily wrapped in geek mystique."
You must be new here. That has been Joel's modus operandi for months now. If he farts and writes about the delectible smell, it winds up on Slashdot.
First, does this movie feature
* Attractive girls, elsewhere than on computer screens?
* Humour, understandable by people who aren't living in their parents' basement?
* Action, more thrilling than tracing a memory leak in C program?
* Adventure, filing post-outsourcing job applications to mcdonalds not included?
* Love, relationships to chat bots not counted?
* Message, other than that life sucks and your imaginary girlfriend doesn't?
Slashdot doesn't have any of these, and yet people come here in droves. On a more serious note, there have been many movies that have done well without that, like "March of the Penguins". Obviously this isn't your typical blockbuster, but keep in mind that making a profit requires a lot fewer sales.
You've got to hand it to Joel: regardless of what you may think of his programming skills, he does have the art of shameless self-promotion down to a science.
It seems like everything today is being turned into a film or reality show. Not everything is exciting, especially coding a new project. In fact, that's probably one of the least exciting things they could have focused on.
Not to mention that Joel is pretty much out of karma - the guy has been preaching as a self-anointed genius of software development for over half a decade now.
So what has he achieved?
Well he still has a tiny shop - about the same size that he had when he cashed in his Microsoft options. A large portion of his pimping is for trivial crap like his endless use of Amazon affiliate links, as well as attention whoring. Of his products, one is a trivial, overpriced rip of an open source VPN, the other was a marginal CMS that they've pretty much canned, along with a one-of-about-a-million-clones bug tracking package.
Woot!
What a prophet.
All I can say is I'm going to make sure to catch this ASAP - to try and determine whether I can send it out to family members so they can finally understand what exactly it is that I do every day.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!