Podcast 070
Spolsky: We are doing a very bizarre podcast this week, I'm on the road in Austin Texas, at the grand super extra Hyatt hotel.
Atwood: Is is sufficiently luxurious for your needs?
Spolsky: It's got a nice atrium
Atwood: Good, that's important. So you know I'm interested in why you picked Austin as a destination.
Spolsky: Well, Austin's a big tech city, you've got Dell, Compaq were both created over here. Was Compaq Austin or just Texas in general. But Dell its famous for and IBM has long had a lot of labs and stuff, you've got the university of Texas - it's sort of become a pretty major tech centre, in fact the flight - the nonstop flight from Austin to San José is called "The Nerd Bird".
Atwood: Ha ha, that's a funny little bit of trivia. The Nerd Bird. Nice.
Cool, I didn't know that. I knew Austin had some interesting things going on there but I didn't know it was such a tech hub.
Spolsky: Yeah, it's sort of the tech hub of Texas and so it's, you know it's not like your Silicon Valley kinda tech hub but it's you know, a good third or fourth in the country. Definitely in the top ten.
Atwood: Yes, so tomorrow that's the Austin dev days. How was the first Dev Days? You wanna summarize it for people?
Spolsky: Yeah, the first Dev Days was awesome for those of you that weren't there, there was a a lot of reviews you can find on the interwebs but um, we had a bunch of speakers, I can't remember, it's all just a blur. It's a blur of audiovisual adjusting mic levels, getting displaying things and putting things on the screen and running up and giving little talks and - phew. We did ah, it was kind of hyteria leading up to that cause there are basically four new products that all had to be ready for Dev Days.
Atwood: That's true. We might as well just list 'em here.
Spolsky: Might as well just list 'em here. So um, the Fog Creek - there's a new product that Fog Creek is coming out with which is now in beta, it's called Kiln. It's a version control and code review system. It's going to be a hosted version of Mecurial for those of you who are familiar with the Mecurial version control system. So that's one. Kiln now what's the second thing.
The second thing was ah, a training series for those of you that want to get corporate training videos brought to you by Fog Creek Software and there's a website for that training.fogcreek.com - ah, sorta in-house corporate training stuff and that's also sort of in beta in the sense that you know we've put up a website and we're taking orders but the final - they're still in post production so they're not going to be ready unitil January 1st.
The third thing is Stack Overflow Careers which we should talk about extensively coz that's going to be a major new stack overflow thing
Atwood: Right, well I'm actually looking at Kiln cause you guys had a logo contest.
Spolsky: Yeah, there's some...
Atwood: I liked the logo.
Spolsky: It's a crazy Dodo bird, he's sort of insane yeah.
Atwood: I like that it's sort of similar to the FogBugz Kiwi.
Spolsky: That's right. It's some kind of a bird that can't fly and...
Atwood: Well those logo contests are really scary in the beginning because you get the craziest things and you're like "This is not going to end well" and then...
Spolsky: That's true sometimes. I actually remember... Atwood: But it did! It came good.
Spolsky: Yeah, only just. I mean that was really the only one that was acceptable. I do remember 10 minutest before the end of the logo contest telling people "Shut this down. We're not using any of those logos over my dead body!"
Atwood: Is is sufficiently luxurious for your needs?
Spolsky: It's got a nice atrium
Atwood: Good, that's important. So you know I'm interested in why you picked Austin as a destination.
Spolsky: Well, Austin's a big tech city, you've got Dell, Compaq were both created over here. Was Compaq Austin or just Texas in general. But Dell its famous for and IBM has long had a lot of labs and stuff, you've got the university of Texas - it's sort of become a pretty major tech centre, in fact the flight - the nonstop flight from Austin to San José is called "The Nerd Bird".
Atwood: Ha ha, that's a funny little bit of trivia. The Nerd Bird. Nice.
Cool, I didn't know that. I knew Austin had some interesting things going on there but I didn't know it was such a tech hub.
Spolsky: Yeah, it's sort of the tech hub of Texas and so it's, you know it's not like your Silicon Valley kinda tech hub but it's you know, a good third or fourth in the country. Definitely in the top ten.
Atwood: Yes, so tomorrow that's the Austin dev days. How was the first Dev Days? You wanna summarize it for people?
Spolsky: Yeah, the first Dev Days was awesome for those of you that weren't there, there was a a lot of reviews you can find on the interwebs but um, we had a bunch of speakers, I can't remember, it's all just a blur. It's a blur of audiovisual adjusting mic levels, getting displaying things and putting things on the screen and running up and giving little talks and - phew. We did ah, it was kind of hyteria leading up to that cause there are basically four new products that all had to be ready for Dev Days.
Atwood: That's true. We might as well just list 'em here.
Spolsky: Might as well just list 'em here. So um, the Fog Creek - there's a new product that Fog Creek is coming out with which is now in beta, it's called Kiln. It's a version control and code review system. It's going to be a hosted version of Mecurial for those of you who are familiar with the Mecurial version control system. So that's one. Kiln now what's the second thing.
The second thing was ah, a training series for those of you that want to get corporate training videos brought to you by Fog Creek Software and there's a website for that training.fogcreek.com - ah, sorta in-house corporate training stuff and that's also sort of in beta in the sense that you know we've put up a website and we're taking orders but the final - they're still in post production so they're not going to be ready unitil January 1st.
The third thing is Stack Overflow Careers which we should talk about extensively coz that's going to be a major new stack overflow thing
Atwood: Right, well I'm actually looking at Kiln cause you guys had a logo contest.
Spolsky: Yeah, there's some...
Atwood: I liked the logo.
Spolsky: It's a crazy Dodo bird, he's sort of insane yeah.
Atwood: I like that it's sort of similar to the FogBugz Kiwi.
Spolsky: That's right. It's some kind of a bird that can't fly and...
Atwood: Well those logo contests are really scary in the beginning because you get the craziest things and you're like "This is not going to end well" and then...
Spolsky: That's true sometimes. I actually remember...
Spolsky: Yeah, only just. I mean that was really the only one that was acceptable. I do remember 10 minutest before the end of the logo contest telling people "Shut this down. We're not using any of those logos over my dead body!"
Spolsky: edit me!
