Fog Creek Is Now Glitch, Inc | Hacker News Reader

Fog Creek Is Now Glitch, Inc

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50 pointsmattl9 comments

I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic, I read his excellent blog articles way back when they were first written. His intelligence, business acumen and subsequent success are not in dispute. I am a big fan of his ideas and work. But even I would say this marketing puff piece is over the top, I thought it must have been satire...

"Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers"

Visionaries? The company they started was a consulting shop that only later transformed into software products when the dot com boom crashed and consulting dried up. Was that part of the vision?

"The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple ground-breaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way."

Trello is great and I use it myself, but it is a TODO list application and certainly not ground-breaking. FogBugz is a bug tracker, which is not ground-breaking, and was actually out-competed by JIRA. StackOverflow is definitely ground-breaking and I would agree changed the software development industry, but the original idea came from Jeff Atwood with Fog Creek providing mainly the money and initial public profile.

"...other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk..."

I mean no disrespect but I would not consider any of them successful and influential.

Maybe Glitch will become a big product in the future, but for now can be step down the marketing intern that wrote this whilst drinking too much caffeine.

>I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic...

It might be worth pointing out that Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor aren't really involved at Fog Creek anymore. Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow now, and Michael is CEO at Trello. The CEO at Fog Creek has been Anil Dash since December 2016:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...

Well, Joel is still the chairman of our board, and I spoke to both Joel & Michael them yesterday, so while they're certainly running Stack Overflow and Trello, respectively, we do benefit from their wisdom and experience.

The video linked in this piece explains Glitch a bit, but since this was a corporate announcement (and really only of interest to people who track such things), I didn't want to go too far into talking about the product itself. Ironically, it was because I knew folks on HN would say this kind of announcement is too heavy on the marketing.

On the plus side, we listed a bunch of new jobs, and the response seems to be extremely strong, so different people have different impressions about the announcement, I guess.

Firstly, I have to agree, this marketing on a 11 after a few too many red bulls.

But I think you aren't considering what these services were at the time, when they first entered the market.

Fogbugz, Manuscript and Kiln were some of the first to market quality web based products that were approachable to startups.

Granted they were all over shadowed in time, but their contributions, by simply pushing concepts that not many others were at the time certainly deserves them some credit.

Then again, Stack Overflow is just Expert Sexchange without the paywall. Not really a revolution.

I have followed Spoelsky and Fog Creek more in the past but less recently. This piece of self-praise fails to convey the message what Glitch (community?, product?) is all about. They are assuming everybody knows, but that seems to be an overestimation, given the low attention the item has drawn on HN so far.

I've used glitch before... its like plunkr.co , or codesandbox.io

Glitch (the software) has been around for like 3-4 years... but the marketing is some of the worst I've ever seen especially for a well established company like Fogcreek (now glitch, inc, how is that different from glitch software. Makes it even more confusing now?)

The UX is just... no. One of the worst examples of UX possible in my opinion. I say this after trying thousands of tools. Contrasting colors everywhere, going on that site is like a deer seeing headlights for the first time. Except those headlights are constantly strobing different colors. Constantly. Enough to give it a seizure, if it stares too long

The logo isn't pleasant on the eyes. It seems very retro, but not really. What does fish have to do with the word "glitch"? Why two fishies? The first word when I hear "glitch" is the movie Matrix, which fits in the theme... since its programming.

The plain white background contrasted by the bright antonym colors everywhere are VERY distracting.

The 1,000,000 drafts created... are mostly driven by online course users following along. Possibly, many K-12 school courses. I have used the "help" section a few times and I haven't gotten many helpful responses from it. I had used glitch in one of the MOOC's I took earlier with watchandcode's practical javascript. I had used glitch's API through freecodecamp as well, but all I needed was the endpoint anyhow.

I honestly question what Glitch is trying to do. What are they trying to do? Have they lost their touch? I say this in all seriousness, I really don't know. I'm sure the backend programming is topnotch, frontend...not really.

Where is money going to come from with glitch...? Schools? Ads? Who is the userbase? Is it newcoming young age developers? Why would I want to use this tool over all the more beautiful tools out there like codesandbox and codepen? What's the appeal? Why the logo choice? What is the overall theme? Why the strong contrasting colors on white? What have they done in the last 3 to 4 years?

The only real benefit I see for a company using glitch is having a place to host a REST API.

I even ran a siteprofiler on glitch.. I am even more confused now. The top keyword was "news, google, blog, community, search" 1MM monthly visits, compare this to codepen which is "programming, design, webdevelopment,google,blog" , 24MM monthly visits.

What I did see is glitch is used alot for A-frame, and VR tutorials / hosting. And some starter react-projects as well for courses

All those alternatives you mention appear to be for client-side code only? I see people using Glitch for running small services quite a bit.

Agreed with your questions about monetization.

I must not know about what glitch's small services are for. They do have paid plans for monetization. I would be really curious to know what companies are using them for what service and why

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