It seems like the CDN companies are suddenly(1) becoming App Platforms in a big way. “Computing at the edge” is going from expensive, meme AWS re:Invent buzzword to fun and easy — with no AWS in sight. I hope this deal works out well for the Glitch employees!
1: I know it’s been years in the making, but I’m still slinging Docker containers in a single AWS region.
Not going by their Glassdoor reviews. I know it is not a reliable source and its incentives are all wrong, but I've never seen a more damning set of reviews for any tech company
I've just read through several pages of reviews and while there are criticisms and red flags it does not rise to the level of 'most damning reviews of any tech company' that you imply.
What an amazing track record from Joel Spolsky: Launched Fog Creek, then StackOverflow, Trello and now Glitch (which I think is the successor of Fog Creek)
Fog Creek renamed to Glitch as we transitioned from being a bootstrapped product-incubation lifestyle company to a single-product VC-backed startup. I think of the Fog Creek storybook closing with that rename, since Glitch always had a very different business focus, but technically (and perhaps culturally) they're of the same lineage.
In other Joel track record exploits, he's also our co-founder over at HASH.ai [1] and a driving force behind the Block Protocol [2][3]
hash.ai and the "block protocol" sound like crypto shams. Nice to see something different, although I feel like the branding really, really makes it seem like crypto.
I know this is wrong, but I also think patio11 is somewhat a product of the Business of Software forum (that in many ways is a precursor to this place) so extremely indirectly I credit Joel with still seeing Patrick on my timeline regularly.
Feel free to upgrade that to a very, very direct influence. In 2010 after I quit being a salaryman I wanted nothing other than to go into semi-retirement on Bingo Card Creator (“sip iced cocoa and play video games all day”).
A long-ranging conversation with Joel on, among other things, confluence of Catholic theology and the Talmud plus the memorable phrase “Shouldn’t you apply your skills to something which isn’t totally bullshit?” caused me to have a sharp reassessment of life and career goals, but for which it is unlikely I would have made a serious go of my consultancy, successfully launched my following few companies, or continued writing at anything like pace observed over the interval.
and Patrick, I can say that you were the first heavy influence on me that pushed me in the direction of solo entrepreneurship. From your writings and podcast I found Brennan Dunn, Amy Hoy, Jonathan Stark, Philip Morgan and others who have inspired me to choose and pursue my own path. Thanks for all that you’ve done, and I aspire to leave the kind of mark on the world that you have left.
Glitch was the last iteration of FogCreek, right? There were some really fantastic companies to come out of FogCreek: StackOverflow and Trello being the big ones. It's a little bittersweet to see it get acquired.
Those who were there would be better at telling the story, but up until the Atlassian acquisition and Joel deciding to spend most of his time on a collection of other projects[1], my sense of FC was "software for developers." The original product they made for project planning (FogBugz) and its SCM companion (Kiln) continued on for a while, but seemed to have faded as Glitch ramped up.
The other one that comes to mind is Copilot, whose development was chronicled in the Aardvark'd movie - I think Tyler took over the project and is still running it on the side, last I heard.
Kind of bittersweet to see these fade away, but Glitch seems to have had more critical success outside of their traditional user base so they're running with it.
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks[1] is a delightful time capsule of 2005 software development. It includes interviews with @pg, the Reddit founders, and other delights. It's available on youtube now.
When I interviewed at Fog Creek, they had a DVD copy of Aardvark'd in a care package in my hotel room. I watched it that night, and for my interview day in the morning it felt like everyone I interviewed with was a movie star. Sneaky plan, Joel. Well executed.
I was actually wondering "hey, isn't that the old Fog Creek"? And went on their website, and yeah, not even a mention of FogBugz.
It's been kind of wild to see how FogBugz went from their main, almost exclusive priority, to something of barely any significance to the company, and now I'm guessing it's a forgotten product in a subsidiary of a giant CDN. Who knows how long until it's shut down.
It's sad; I still love the whole evidence-based scheduling part of it, and have never seen anything else like it.
FogBugz's evidence-based scheduling always resonated with me too. Back in grad school I remember writing a paper arguing how it was a fundamentally better way to manage project estimates and schedules. Curiously, even at Fog Creek, something happened over time where we kind of migrated away from using it and instead favored more kanban-style project management systems.
I think a few forces came together to diminish the relative importance of EBS in project management:
- Rapid shipping got easier; rather than uploading executables (or minting CDs!) we shifted to the SaaS model and with that, continuous delivery, etc. In this world, coordinating a "big release" became more of a marketing/communication topic than an engineering one. In the FogBugz customer base, it was the game development companies that held on to EBS the longest.
- Developer tools in general got easier and faster to use, and along with that all of our tolerance for managing timers and estimates went down. Estimation and work tracking I think are still hugely valuable, but there's an ever-higher UX bar to hit to actually have people use the software, and we want the computer to be smart enough to figure it out on its own. EBS never achieved that fluency of UX and it really needs diligent users for it to perform well.
For the last ~10 years of Fog Creek, we were largely structured so that we had core groups of developers focused on our mainstay products, like FogBugz, which were happily profitable revenue sources and could fund all of our assorted bits of inventiveness. After pushing on FogBugz and Kiln in an innovative way for a few years, we came up against an adoption wall of sorts--- changing those products to increase their user base was harder than inventing entirely new products. Trello, in many ways, represented our next stab at productivity and software development tools, and making FogBugz more Trello-like was never going to be as compelling as Trello already was. This pattern kept repeating, and so we did our best to stabilize FogBugz while inventing other sorts of things that would show us a more compelling path to growth.
Glitch was the biggest next invention and its interest and adoption so greatly outpaced what growth we could achieve in FogBugz that it make sense to reorient around it. But of course FogBugz paid the bills and Glitch wasn't doing so yet, so that lead to a VC raise for Glitch and, ultimately, a sell-off of FogBugz and Kiln.
I still love FogBugz, and all of the users of FogBugz were ultimately the seed funders of inventions like Kiln, Stack Overflow, Trello, Glitch, HASH, CoPilot, and a dozen others that we never let past internal testing. Thanks, FogBugz :-)
edit: Maybe you shouldn't download random PDF's from the internet; here is the text and links:
--
Copilot is Closing
Hi,
I'm Tyler, owner and founding member of Copilot.
Copilot was originally built by a team of interns in 2005 at Fog Creek Software in New York City. I was one of those interns. In 2014, Copilot became its own company and relocated, with me, to Denver, Colorado. For the past 8 years, I have been running it independently, providing people all over the world with simple, effective screen sharing.
However, this past year, it has become clear that Copilot is no longer providing the level of service that I would like it to. After much thought, I have decided it is time to shut Copilot down. The reasons are simple: Technology is changing rapidly, and as an independent software vendor, I am no longer able to keep up with those changes, while maintaining compatibility with the older systems that so frequently need support.
The Good News
Because user experience is a key factor in closing Copilot down, shutting it down without an alternative was never an option. So I set about trying to find another company who offers similar services to partner with, to continue giving Copilot users a great screen sharing service.
To that end, Copilot has chosen HelpDesk by RemotePC¹ to provide future screen sharing services. I've spoken with the team at RemotePC and trialed their software extensively. I'm confident it will meet and exceed your needs.
As a bonus, they're offering Copilot users 95% off the first year, meaning that you will get HelpDesk for a full year for just $24.98, with unlimited users and computers. Or, if you just want to kick the tires, you can try it free for 7 days. Sign up here.¹
How It Will Happen
Copilot's servers will remain operational until May 1, 2022, and your account will continue to be active until that time. On May 1, all services will cease and all remaining subscriptions will be ended. For those who choose to move to HelpDesk by RemotePC, your account will be canceled automatically when you sign up for a paid account. As always, you can cancel your Copilot account at any time on your account page² or you can email support@copilot.com with any other questions or concerns.
Thank You
I want to thank everyone who has used Copilot over the years. It's been my privilege to be a part of Copilot from the beginning and to hear how many people it has helped over the years. Truly, thank you.
Honestly, was a little bittersweet for me too, as we got into this process. I'm one of those folks who was a coder working at a cubicle reading the early days of Joel on Software, and I still think about that history a lot. I do think we'll do justice to the legacy, but you're not the only one who feels that little pang around this transition, even though obviously I'm super excited about it happening.
I really hope this works out well for the Glitch userbase. I'm always nudging people towards it because I don't know anything else that makes it as easy to get started with a flexible web project without having to learn The Boring Stuff.
I've been using Glitch since it was HyperDev and love it. My main use cases are: 1) learning various frameworks without installing cruft on my dev laptop and 2) small personal or side projects where I need a little hosting but not full AWS/Azure account. It really scratches an itch. Zero friction to just set up and run. I even set up a simple CI so that I develop on a "dev project", but then can push the code to a demo or production project.
Great product.
I dearly love Glitch for k-12 education use cases. My only consistent complaint after all these years is the slow speed, especially "waking up" apps. Hoping this acquisition will result in continued investment to speed up the platform!
This is a very cool combo I'm excited to use. The glitch in-browser IDE combined with fastly's wasm-hosting-at-the-edge means you can whip up a quick front end without ever having to fight with a terminal. Dramatically lower barrier to entry and reduction of scut-work.
The case law is that the "successor" company in an acquisition is still held by all the same union obligations as before an acquisition [1]. So the folks in the Glitch union keep their bargaining unit and keep their contract.
Many union contracts also have an explicit "successor clause" too, although I don't know about the Glitch union contract.
Things have been good pre-acquisition, so let’s dissolve the union immediately before we get new management. Fellow techies I beg you: stop being so gullible!
I doubt the acquisition would have happened with the union intact. for Fastly in their diligence, that would likely be a dealbreaker. And I don't know the dynamics of the deal and where Glitch was with other options, but that could have very well spelled the end of the company.
Fastly focused exclusively on enterprise accounts and ceded the "entry level" developer market entirely to Cloudflare. Full on snobbishly. In the short run that worked great as being best-in-class won big deals. In the long run that lost the mindshare fight and left 100M+/y in fat margin revenue off the table. And boy oh boy does it show in the market caps.
As they bet the future on wasm-at-the-edge saving them from the crushing downward pressure of bandwidth pricing, having a compelling product for the "entry level"* developer market will be crucial to getting the mind and marketshare needed to hit revenue targets (eventually, not this year).
Put simpler: fastly made itself overly exclusive and difficult to use, glitch is the polar opposite. Fastly's customer base is 45 year old vp's of infra/devops/sre, glitch's is 27 year old app/front-end dev/designers. There's more money in a deal with the former, there's more of the future in the latter.
* I want to be clear, with ~20 years exp when I sit down to figure out a vue front end to my latest flask thingy I'm entry-level af in js/front-end land. Lowering barriers to entry, much like handicap accessibility, is usually a win for everyone.
The operating theory is that caching was only just the first/simplest/cheapest use of a globally distributed network of compute nodes (CDNs), but that as more and more transistors and clock cycles become available it incrementally makes sense to push more and more "workloads" out to the "edge" of the network, for latency benefits. Right now, the most immediate things that come after caching are stuff like input validation, auth validation, waf filtering, rate limiting, routing, decorating, error handling, load-balancing and traffic management type stuff. With WASM, and more specifically rust & javascript, IMHO the next step will be template rendering. After that maybe ML model inference? As long as transistors keep getting cheaper and the speed of light stays the same the opportunity space grows.
Adopting and experimenting with all of that stuff will require developers fully embrace the CDN (oops, "edge") as part of their app architecture. A lot of places still treat the CDN as an ops/infra "config and forget" tool.
More heroku for rust at the edge than varnish as a service.
Features that Fastly has that CF does not (or are better on Fastly)
- Compute@Edge is a far better product than CF Workers. I think CF is catching up, but right now Fastly is ahead.
- Video. Fastly's streaming video offering is so much better than CF.
- Large file support (ex: +200gb game downloads), unless it was added recently CF is more limited on file size that can be cached effectively.
- Morals. Fastly has morals, CF is severely lacking. I don't know if this one could be "acquired" though.
What? Cloudflare workers has far better javascript support than Compute@Edge, and you don't need to email them to sign up like you do with Fastly. You can try it yourself after creating an account.
They also just announced a couple of crazily useful features that Fastly does not have [1] [2]. In fact, you can bet that most new things Cloudflare releases are complete innovations. They are changing the landscape with nearly every new offering.
On top of that, Cloudflare workers are faster [3]. Not sure how many people need 200+GB downloads, maybe that's a niche Fastly does cover, though given their history of dubious claims I'd want to see that working before trusting their declarations.
Then, they are open sourcing the workers codebase [4], which is absolutely huge, along with forming a working group for standardizing this type of interface [5]. It's everything you could dream of because they're leading the way before you know you need it.
Seriously no idea what you are talking about with morals. Like, in regards to which websites they allow to be on their system? I'm really tired of this argument. We can't just close off core internet services to people with whom we disagree. That only increases tension in society. If anything, that speaks to Cloudflare's higher moral fiber.
They had 200M of revenue last q after what like 13 years in business ? Maybe I’m spoiled but doesn’t seem exactly the behemoth that hn frequently makes it out to be compared to big three
1: I know it’s been years in the making, but I’m still slinging Docker containers in a single AWS region.