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."
Welcome back to The Geek Hunter... today we visit its lair.... the basement... they spend most of their time reading slashdot.....On a sidenote why does it feel like I'm an animal that people want to study?
only everyone is Garreth
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.
Check out this guy's BZFlag cheat client!
Revenge of the Nerds
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088000/
Of course the real profit is in increased exposure to Joel's company and the highlighting of his internship program, which likely promises an even better crop of students next summer.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It documents and humanizes the effort at Data General, with one team working to soup up the existing architecture, and another team working to redefine the market with a revolutionary new design.
Anyone got a torrent?
There is another engaging film that focuses more on the personalities of the people than on the technology
I especially like the jiffy-pop ending
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It looks like one of them is a clone of Bill Gates. Note the peculiar neck implant. This can only be the work of the Borg as they try to infiltrate our planet.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
In the Beginning, there was 0....
On the 1st day God said, let there be 1's and it was good...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Brilliant! No, seriously, this is the perfect way to introduce prospective CS students to the geek culture. I have friends that are very worried about their future, and aren't sure whether they're ready to commit themselves to studying CS yet, but a film like this is the perfect way to help alliviate some of their fears. It wont solve any outsourcing dilemmas, but it will certainly encourage them.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
It looks like VNC on the client, and some proprietary code on their server so that rather than have VNC listen, it connects to their server which acts as a matchmaker. The advantage being that it can get through firewalls, since most of them don't block outgoing connections on port 443.
https://www.copilot.com/tech/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Maybe next time around he could get a group of 20 prospective interns and then, in a high-pressure software company version of the board room (Joel's office maybe), fire one of more of them each week until only one remains as Joel's Apprentice! Of course, finding type-A personality geeks who would appeal to the same audience as Trump and Martha might be difficult...
There was almost no technical content and nothing dramatic happened. Code Rush and StartUp.com were more entertaining.
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.
The last time I tried Remote Assistance to help my Dad who was 100 miles away, it said it couldn't find the host 'dadpc'. No kidding professor. If I have to set up static IP and external DNS for my dad's home PC and configure port forwarding on his router/firewall to use Remote Assist, I'll just install VNC thanks.
With CoPilot (as I understand it), both ends just act as a client, and you go through the CoPilot servers - so if you can make an outbound TCP/IP connection to their VNC servers (I'm guessing they support port 80 for obvious reasons), then you win, and nobody gets goo on them.
Whatta coincidence. I have software that documents the making of a film.
Table-ized A.I.
In other words, it's exactly like go2mypc, VNC but fun, snappy, easy, bypasses firewalls and highly commoditized not to mention being 5 years old.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
And if it is your thing, give me a call and I'll cut you a deal.
Seriously though - not everything Joel writes is all that valuable or important or worthy of Slashdot frontpage real-estate. In fact, I've just gotten downright tired of articles by or about him or his thoughts. Maybe he's a nice guy and maybe he isn't. I don't know much about him beyond a few of his articles. I just know that there's a lot more content and many more voices out there that could be heard and shared with the bandwidth this guy gets on Slashdot and I'm getting Katz'd-out from it.
But let's not attack the guy on that level . . . Come on . . . In fact, it's not his fault Slashdot posts everything of, by, for or about him. You'd roll with it and use the opportunity too, if you had it. I blame the Slashdot staff, frankly.
But hey - at least they haven't given him his own editor/posting account yet like they did with Katz.
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.
I actually tried the Copilot product. It's very easy to use and works well over faster connections. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well over high latency/low bandwidth connections. I think this has more to do with basing the product on VNC than on anything they did wrong. I ended up with GoToMeeting, which works exceptionally well over slower connections. I was able to (usably) remote contol a 1920x1200 screen that was located on a home broadband connection across the US. Still, the movie looks very cool, and it's possible Copilot performance will improve with some tweaks. It would probably work well for people with small remote offices that have decent upstream connections.
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.
This film is something I do every day... do I really want to watch it? I guess the only difference is that they'll probably cut out all of the meaningless web surfing, porn viewing, and IM'ing that I do at work...
Does it show things that are more important, like if the product actually makes money, or them going through the bug-fixing and customer service phase where their customers (if they have any) are screaming at them because of a bug, or they have a sales person yelling at them to get a feature in because they already closed a big deal telling the customer that they already have the feature in the software???
I'll tell you waht I'm jealous about -- I'm jealous of that sweet UID you have. Bastard.
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!
Nice. Joel and Fogcreek have yet another frontpage Slashdot advertisement, then a comment about Joel and Fogcreek's products gets moderated as "offtopic" in that very same article thread. What the fuck?! It's no more an "advertisement" than the other 500 Joel on Software articles posted to Slashdot.
After years of putting up with the crappy reality shows that my wife likes to watch, this will make the perfect gift for her! Sweet payback for all the nights I've had to endure her [bleeping] "Real World" addiction with its 20-year old mindless babble.
Perhaps. You know, most documentaries (and movies) that are successful are usually based on things we experience every day (bad presidency, McDonald's, relationships, work, et al). And given the fact that the movie industry is huge, I'd probably guess that a lot of people would want to watch something like this. I'm not sure how this documentary is any different from the rest, except that someone has finally done a documentary on your specific line of work.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
That, of course, is a plagiarized version of a quote by Paul Erdos, who described mathematicians as "machine[s] for turning coffee into theorems."
After all, I am strangely colored.
I was actually just watching this movie a second ago. It didn't quite live up to my expectations.
.com is a must -- what's wrong with "copilot.fogcreek.com?")
This movie is primarily about geeks geeking out. If you've never been around that, you will probably find the movie more interesting than I did. For example, a good ten minutes were devoted to the interns discussing whether they could jump out their window to the next building in case of a fire. If you are a geek who performs thought experiments with friends/co-workers all the time, you already know what that's like.
This movie is not about sharing insights about how to develop good software. You shouldn't think of the movie as an extension of Joel's column. Opportunities for venturing into that realm are abandoned. For example, all the interns are given a stopwatch and a stack of computer books their first day. Later on, one of the interns admits that he has no idea what the stopwatch is for. Unfortunately, the movie never gives us the answer to that question. I was wondering if it had something to do with user interface design, like quantifying the irritation of having to wait around for software by starting the stopwatch when you see the hourglass. But we never find out.
There is also not much technical content. We get only a few details about the project and its technology.
The biggest disappointment was the camera work. The footage shakes around a lot, especially in shots of computer screens you're trying to read. Far too much of the film is overexposed -- Joel's face is often half-white. This happened throughout the movie, and was visually distracting. This ultimately left the film feeling somewhat amateurish.
For the good: Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham were both engaging as always. They're the kind of guys that manage to make almost every word they say intriguing. The employees and interns are likable people you don't get tired of hearing from. You get a chance to see some interesting decisions, like deciding to pay $10k for "copilot.com" instead of using the inferior name "sidepilot" (though we never hear anyone justify why having the
Launch MSN Messenger. Ask your dad to ask you for remote assistance. Use his desktop transparently. Disconnect. Works every time, firewall or not. I've fixed PCs halfway across the globe with that thing.
Wanted to ask you something ... ;)
Did you know the book won a Pulitzer prize?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)