Links For Future Use, Years After The Fact

I haven't maintained this site at all, save to point back to the post about Fogbugz actively interfering with developer communication.  I saved a bunch of links in a draft post that I never published. The stuff here is worth saving, so here goes:

• Joel On Software
• Coding Horror: Has Joel Spolsky Jumped The Shark? Excerpt:

  ...[T]wo weeks ago we found out that Joel's company wrote their flagship product, FogBugz, in a proprietary language they created themselves.
  

  FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

  You couldn't possibly have heard it, but that was the sound of fifty thousand programmers' heads simultaneously exploding.
  Writing your own language is absolutely beyond the pale. It's a toxic decision that is so completely at odds with Joel's previous excellent and sane advice on software development that people literally thought he was joking. He had to write an entire follow-up post to explain that, no, he wasn't kidding.

• Zed Shaw: Fortune Favors Big Turds. Excerpt:

  I am getting tired of Joel blabbing about his one trick pony FogBugz. I’ve used it and it’s utter total garbage. It’s pain level just happens to be between Trac and a prostate exam from Dr. Edward Scissorhands so some corporations buy it. What’s even more amazing is that he actually manages to sell what is basically a crappy todo list to companies and make some money on it.
  Until Joel can learn enough statistics to conduct a usability study that does a task analysis comparing FogBugz to Trac for developers he can shove it. You see, FogBugz sells because it screws developers for the sake of keeping managers and bean counters happy. It’s like every lame ass tool sold to management. Rather than make a time tracking or defect tracking system that developers can use they make a product that managers love. Slap a few fancy charts and reports nobody will use, present it to an accountant or desperate manager, and sold to the man in the funny hat.

• Google: "joel spolsky wanker". Mostly just for comic value.

All right, as you were