I have never used it myself. Perhaps it is the Platonic bug tracker. Still, like Manila or fetchmail, the project itself seems out of all proportion to the mighty river of wisdom that its author has coaxed out of it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JacobK
I mean no offense, but JacobK doesn't really contribute at all to HN except to post his own self-promotional stories. Fog Creek isn't completely unique, but I see this masked soft sell all the time...
"Here is my new X feature that makes my product awesome. Here is how/why I came up with this idea, yay for me."
It's one thing to speak from experience, but I find it a little distasteful when you use it to shill a product. Fortunately many writers (like PGs essays) communicate substance without the marketing spin.
Okay Joel, we know you single-handedly wrote every line of code in Microsoft Excel. And you create homemade fairy languages like wasabi where nobody knows what the hell you are talking about but is supposedly awesome. It's all talk and no game. Contrast this with DHH. Sure he is a self-promotional prick. But guess what? He actually helps people. He puts good material out that isn't just "I came up with X which is so much better than X and here is why I'm awesome."
Listening to Joel's tech advice is like getting child-rearing advice from Lynne Spears and Dina Lohan, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
For example he is obsessed with private office for developers. Okay, whatever. Except Microsoft is waning and FogCreek has 15 employees... If someone at Facebook or Google wrote an article about private office I would listen, but they don't and they don't. Joel is a hierarchical "corporate coder" from the 1980s, and that's the only people who would benefit from his advice.
Joel had the benefit of being first-mover. He actually wrote stuff before anyone else was writing. On the internet where the writer/reader ratio is 1/1000 just being willing to start the discussion gets you halfway there. It's the Bill O'Reilly school of self-promotion.
Disclaimer, I have an irrational aversion to anything Spolsky gets close to... :)
You'd think that a team of rock stars in a a cubicle-free paradise with the benefit of Joel's wisdom would be able to really nail an application as trivial as bug tracking over the course of 7 versions. You'd think.