Chicago; about 70 local software developers turned out. Chicago is a great city for architecture. Much better than New York. Here they build skyscrapers just because they love them.

Can I talk about hotels for a minute? There are about a million different ways to rate hotels. That makes user review sites, like TripAdvisor, somewhat hit-or-miss. One person’s hovel may be another person’s palace.

I’m sad to say that the Congress Plaza Hotel where we did the event at this morning does not qualify as anyone’s palace. The usual nice words you might use to describe such a hotel would be “threadbare” or “shabby.” Other words (“maccabre,” “Barton Fink,” and “scuzzy”) come to mind. This was entirely my fault; I set a target budget for hotels in each city and didn’t do the research to make sure the hotels would be entirely nice.

I’ll bet you can tell almost everything you need to know about the quality of a hotel based on how often they replace the sheets and towels. Another good indicator, for some bizarre reason, is plasma TVs. The nice chains, inexplicably, have old fashioned big-ass tube TVs. The ancient rotting edifices have 32” plasmas. I don’t know why this is. Maybe they think that having a plasma TV they can advertise on their web site will make them seem fancy.

Anyway, the Congress Plaza Hotel is the kind of 850 room monstrosity that Lot Polish Airlines would fill up with a 777 full of passengers, on their way to Warsaw, if the plane was stuck in Chicago overnight due to mechanical failure.

Oh. And the staff was actually on strike. So people coming to the demo had to cross a picket line. I’m sorry about that. I never thought to ask if there was a strike at the time we booked. I guess shabby hotels just treat their employees shabbily. Apparently Chicago considered passing a law requiring hotels to tell people about these strikes when they booked rooms and meetings. It didn’t pass.

The lesson from Chicago is that using cheap hotels is not a good idea for business meetings. Psychologically, I think that people tend to associate the environment they’re in with the presentation. When a demo is in a modern, new, shiny business hotel, it’s like a little one hour vacation in luxuryland. You go to the bathroom and it’s marble everywhere and individual cloth hand towels. And you think nice things about the demo. But when you go to a demo at the Congress Plaza and the rug is stained and there are fluorescent lights everywhere and the bathroom looks like LaGuardia airport, some of that general depressing aura of shabbiness will rub off on the product being presented.

After the demo was over I walked two blocks south to the Hilton where the Inc. 500 Conference was in progress. There I spoke to a bunch of small companies about how we hire people at Fog Creek. A lot of the material I talked about is available on this site, as a series of articles I wrote about a year ago:

• Finding Great Developers
• A Field Guide to Developers
• Sorting Resumes
• The Phone Screen
• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

You can get the whole series plus one bonus chapter in book form, as well.

I’m flying back to New York now, on We’ve Pretty Much Just Given Up Airlines. On Monday morning, if you’re in the city, please join me and the FogBugz development team at 9:00am for the FogBugz 6.0 World Launch, at the New York Marriott East Side Hotel. It’s free, but you have to register to reserve a space.

About 200 attendees came in Seattle; this will be one of our biggest scheduled demos except, maybe, London. I apologize that the screen wasn’t so easy to read throughout the room. We made a point of asking the hotel before we booked the room if the screen would be clearly visible to all attendees. It wasn’t, because the ceiling wasn’t high enough, and the hotel didn’t have the ability to raise the ceilings, so of course they lied and told us it would be fine, and it wasn’t. This is a problem at every tech conference I’ve ever been to; these rooms were built long before PowerPoint.

A bunch of Microsoftees had to cancel because they are having their annual company meeting today in a gigantic football stadium. The size of that company is insane. Can you imagine Safeco Field filled to the brim with software developers? And that’s just the Vista Shutdown Menu Team.

Something that came up in the demo today that I wanted to share. Software development is a cycle with three distinct phases: design, development, and debugging. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re doing Ultra Extreme Elite Programming, in which case you do all three phases in one week, or The Ancient OS/360 Waterfall Method, in which case you do them over the course of a year or two. You still have to design what you’re going to build, build it, and then debug it.

The three phases have to be scheduled in a very different way.

• Design is the art phase, where you’re doing new, creative work. Even though what you’re doing is completely new, after you’ve gone through a few software development cycles you’ll start to get a pretty good idea of how much time it takes to design a new version of your software. I’ve usually worked with relatively long development cycles of 12-18 months, and it’s always taken me about two months to get a detailed, first-draft spec containing enough detail for the development team to create very granular estimates.

  That said, when you’re building something brand new from scratch, you really can’t estimate the design phase at all, and that’s OK. Today I met somebody from a company in Seattle that’s working on a project headed up by one of the world’s great programmers, Charles Simonyi. Near as I can tell, they have been in the design phase for 16 years.

• Development is the engineering phase. It’s a construction project. As long as you start with a detailed blueprint, which, of course, can change over time, but which is really your best guess for what you’re building, this phase can be scheduled with great precision. FogBugz 6.0 has a spiffy new feature called Evidence-based scheduling, which uses a variation on the Monte Carlo method for making your schedules remarkably reliable during the development phase. When I get a chance, I’ll you about it in more detail.

• Debugging is the science phase. Science is difficult to schedule because you’re looking for things, and predicting when you’re going to find them is remarkably difficult. Unless you know in advance how many bugs you’re going to find, you don’t have an ice cube’s chance in the Sahara to work out a detailed estimate of how long this phase will take. Here at Fog Creek we’ve learned that for a new release of FogBugz, this phase takes at least 12 weeks, sometimes a little more, and we just leave it at that.

  Some people are more ambitious and try to track the rate at which bugs are being found and being fixed, and try to extrapolate to see when you’ll ship; in practice I’ve found that the rate of finding bugs is way too messy to be able to extrapolate from. If you have a fixed size test team and infinite bugs, they’ll find bugs at a constant rate, simply because they’re all spending 8 hours a day entering bugs and then stopping, but this flat line doesn’t mean you’re ever going to ship. You’re not. You have infinite bugs, remember? Sorry. On the other hand you may have just released a new beta to a new batch of beta testers, and it’s the best beta yet, but it’s the biggest group of beta testers, so there will be a big spurt of new bugs found, which doesn’t mean the code is getting buggier—it just means you have a bigger group of beta testers.

Now, there are various ways to get in trouble. If you don’t like writing functional specifications or doing up-front design, what happens is that you’re burdening the design phase with the development phase. If you ever started a new project by writing code, and you thought you’d “design as you went along,” what you’re doing is driving around with the handbrakes on. Here’s why. Designing a feature by writing a thoughtful spec takes about 1/10th as much time as writing the code for that feature—or less. If you try to code as you design, then you’re interrupting your short spurts of design with long spurts of coding. Now, if you’re the kind of person who designs everything perfectly the first time, that’s fine. But I don’t think you are. I think that your first designs are pretty good, but when you see them, you get ideas for even better designs. And if you already coded up the first draft, bad design, well, that’s coding time wasted. Your product’s design can only get better at 1/10th the speed that my product’s design can.

I’m now en-route to Chicago, where I have to do two speeches tomorrow: the morning FogBugz demo, and, in the afternoon, I’ll be talking about hiring to a bunch of startup CEOs at the Inc. 500 conference. I’m editing this in the e text editor, a Windows clone of TextMate, which is coming along nicely but could still use some polish before I’m ready to switch to it full time.

Vancouver, BC: Day one of the FogBugz World Tour. About 120 people showed up to see the first public demo of FogBugz 6.0, which will officially launch next Monday.

Vancouver is, without a doubt, one of North America’s most beautiful cities. Sparkling, clean, everything works well, nothing can possibly go wrong, people are friendly, and with the new weakened US dollar it’s really quite a prosperous place to live. Brett and I had dinner at Joe Fortes, where you get a choice of 4 different local species of salmon, maybe 20 other kinds of fresh fish, or about 10 different type of oysters, and there’s a beautiful rooftop deck where you can enjoy the usually pleasant Vancouver weather.

The demo went relatively smoothly, despite a few first-time kinks. At some point I was fiddling around so much with the report generator that I queued up a backlog of lengthy Monte Carlo simulations on the web server which made FogBugz lose interest in continuing with the demo; this not the kind of thing that happens in production web servers (part of the problem is that the laptop is running XP which has a kind of 3/4-baked implementation of IIS, version 5.1, which is not what anyone would run on a real server). Anyway, I had to restart IIS in the middle of the demo. Ooops. Hopefully that won’t happen again.

It couldn’t be that bad. Here’s some email feedback we already received from the demo:

“Thank you for the entertaining and informative talk. We will be buying FogBugz as a result.” Thank you! OK, we just broke even in Vancouver.

“Do you intend to provide free versions of FogBugz for open source projects, non-profits, or small teams of 2 people (like Perforce does with their products)?”. Yes, it’s called the Student and Startup Edition. We’ll announce it soon, but it’s available now.

“Well, I expected to be bored about FogBugz and enraptured by fascinating tidbits of Joel Spolsky wisdom. In reality, the opposite was true. I now believe FogBugz to be a pretty interesting looking app, whereas an hour before your spiel I think I described it to someone as a “glorified Excel spreadsheet” (it’s amazing what I can come up with when I am not encumbered by facts).” My tidbits aren’t that fascinating.

“ Having just attended Joel’s FogBugz 6.0 demonstration in Vancouver, we were very impressed with its capabilities.  My boss wants to go ahead and use FogBugz, however Joel mentioned that the Linux/Unix version was still in Beta.” For Unix we’re still on 5.0 while we debug the PHP port, which I hope won’t take long. While you’re waiting for Unix FogBugz 6.0, you can either run 5.0 — and upgrade for free — or run a free trial on our server, and download the data when we’re shipping.

The night before, in rehearsals, I discovered that the Fn+F7 trick that is supposed to turn on external monitors on this Thinkpad was actually freezing the computer solid, due to some kind of buggy interaction between the Intel 965 graphics chip software and the IBM/Lenovo Presentation Director software. I never did solve that problem, so I learned to use the Intel software to turn on the external monitor instead of pressing Fn+F7.

Flying in September after Labor Day is really not that bad, despite the scare stories you might have heard in the press; once everyone gets home from summer vacations the number of passengers in airports and on flights drops quite dramatically and flights start operating closer to schedule with much shorter lines. So far I don’t think we’ve waited in one line at an airport. Here are my favorite tricks for planning air travel to avoid chaos, delays, and cancellations:

1. The ideal time to fly is around 10 am. Usually delays pile up throughout the day, so the earlier you fly, the less likely you are to suffer delays. The very early flights are popular with people who want to get a full day in, so the midmorning flights tend to be the most civilized.
2. Always check the OAG before booking to see what flights are available. The OAG includes JetBlue and Southwest flights which the online travel agencies can’t show you.
3. Make sure you’re never on the last flight of the day if you really need to get somewhere on schedule. If something happens to the last flight, you’re in trouble. As a general principle, while planning for this trip, I always checked that there was at least one alternative flight that would get me to my next destination on time. Since we fly first class at Fog Creek, if one of our flights got cancelled, the airline will work hard to reaccomodate us while the coach passengers might have to wait forever for a rebooking.
4. Fly out of smaller airports whenever possible. My favorite alternative airports: John Wayne or Burbank instead of LAX, Ft. Lauderdale instead of Miami, Love instead of DFW.
5. If the flight you’re booked on is cancelled, don’t wait in line with the crowds for the single, overworked airline representative. Get on the phone to your airline’s frequent flyer priority number. They can rebook you just as well.
6. The American Express Platinum card pays for itself just from the free membership in Continental, Northwest, and Delta’s lounges… not only because the lounges are quiet and pleasant, but because the lounges have unharried and experienced airline agents who are happy to help you with complicated problems, rebookings, and upgrades.
7. Final trick: never schedule an important flight during the last few days of the month, especially on Northwest. Pilots are only allowed to fly a certain number of hours per calendar month and by the end of the month they’re running out of hours, especially on the more awfully-managed airlines like Northwest, so flights galore get cancelled in the last few days of every calendar month.

See you tomorrow in Seattle! There are still five seats available if you haven’t registered yet.

“Basically a small company has a flavor to it, whereas a big company is sort of like checking into the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It’s a nice hotel but it has 5,000 rooms, so don’t expect anybody to remember your name. A small company is more like a bed and breakfast. You’re going to have a great time because you get along with people and it’s a much friendlier experience. You don’t really mind that the bathroom is down the hall because the people made a special vegetarian meal for you and then showed you around town. On the other hand, you might be at a bed and breakfast where they have weird leather implements and lots of cats.”

— From A Conversation with Joel Spolsky in ACM Queue.

I bought a retail copy of Office 2007 today (I’m loading up the new laptop I got for the world tour, which is a Thinkpad X61s), and I must be a complete spaz, but I simply could not figure out how to open the bizarre new packaging.

It’s a hard plastic case, sealed in two different places by plastic stickies. It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an utter F in the school of Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. To be technical about it, it has no true affordances and actually has some false affordances: visual clues as to how to open it that turn out to be wrong.

This is the same box that Vista comes in. Nick White over at Microsoft seems proud of the novel design, but from the comments on the web it seems I’m not the only one who couldn’t figure out how to open it. It seems like even rudimentary usability testing would have revealed the problem. A box that many people can’t figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design. As the line goes from Billy Madison: “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Wasting five minutes trying to get the goddamned box open is just the first of many ways that Office 2007 and Vista’s gratuitous redesign of things that worked perfectly well shows utter disregard for all the time you spent learning the previous versions.

I’ve tested Office 2007 extensively, and find it a tolerable replacement for the previous version, although it’s extremely frustrating every time I have to spend several minutes finding something that I knew exactly how to find in the previous version. Even though there’s no reason to upgrade to Office 2007, if you’re setting up a new system, it’s just as good as the previous version, even a little better in some places. But Vista is another story.

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

PS The FogBugz 6.0 World Tour is filling up fast. Austin is already full. Vancouver, Seattle, Kitchener, and Irvine have just a few seats left. Sign up now!

What’s the point, exactly, of physically going to 21 different cities to demo FogBugz 6.0 in person? Why not just put a video up on the web and be done with it?

A long long time ago when Windows 3.0 first came out, Microsoft organized a huge, permanent “Windows Seminar” team of intelligent, charismatic young people who went from city to city giving demos of Windows, Word, and Excel. Back then, showing someone cut and paste from one GUI window to another was astonishing.

Since then, I haven’t seen a lot of demo tours like the one we’re planning. Travel just costs too much. Business hotels all charge ridiculous amounts for catering ($15 per person for coffee), audio visual equipment ($500 to rent a projector), and as many additional gougy-charges as they can think of. $50 for sneezing. $120 to have the window shut. And $92 to have the lights on.

When we did up our budget, including hotel rooms, meeting space, rental cars, airfare, food, a projector, coffee and tea for attendees, and a printed brochure to hand out, our estimate is that it’s going to cost us somewhere between $60 and $70 per person.

So, OK, maybe I don’t know what I’m doing.

The reason we finally decided to pull the trigger is that we don’t have a sales force. None. We have inside sales people who handle incoming phone calls (very rare) and incoming email (we get a lot of it), but our software is just priced too cheaply for the traditional enterprise software sales system, where you have a bunch of commission-based suits flying around the country, staying in nice hotels, and taking clients out to lunch. That kind of sales force costs $50,000 to make one sale. With prices in the $21/month range, that model just doesn’t work for us.

When you think about it this way, $60 to reach one person is cheap!

Here’s what you can expect if you show up. There will be some really, really expensive coffee and maybe a muffin or something if the hotel in particularly cheap. If you come a bit early, it’ll be a great chance to meet some interesting software people in your city.

I’ll show off some of my favorite features in FogBugz 6.0, but mostly, I’ll talk about the software development process in general. I’ll leave a lot of time for Q&A. There will be a member of the FogBugz development team with me and we’ll also leave plenty of time afterwards for one-on-one questions if you have something to ask us that isn’t of general interest. Then we’ll pack our projector and rush off to the airport and on to the next city.

So far, we’ve planned 21 cities in North America. If you’re in the US or Canada, you can register right now, in fact, you should, because we expect to fill up really quickly. If you register and can’t make it, please cancel (you’ll get a cancellation link in the confirmation email) so we can take someone else from the waiting list.

We are planning to visit international cities, but we haven’t figured that bit out yet. We’ll probably hit Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in November. If you’re outside the US and want to attend, make sure you’ve filled out the survey with your correct email address so we can figure out where to go next and let you know when we’re coming.

If you can’t make it, we’ll have a video of the New York City world launch of FogBugz 6.0 on our website sometime in September.

So. Click on the cute kiwi to register:

Liz and I have been working to get ready for the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour, in which I travel from city to city (accompanied by a programmer) giving demos of all the cool features in the upcoming version. This is basically about the same logistical complexity as planning a family trip to DisneyLand, times 32.

Very little has been finalized, but it looks like the first round will hit Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Waterloo, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Denver, San Francisco, Berkeley, Newark (CA), Mountain View, Santa Monica, Irvine, and San Diego. The second round will hit Auckland, Christchurch, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Munich, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, Cambridge, and Dublin. Whenever my squirt nephew decides to have his bar mitzvah, we’ll come to Tel Aviv.

Given the cost of flights, hotels, rental cars, meals, catering (we’ll serve refreshments), printing (we’ll pass out brochures), FogBugz polo shirts, etc., it looks like the cost for this trip is going to come to about $64 per attendee… that is, it’s costing us $64 to put on a live demo of FogBugz for each person who attends. Phew. No wonder people do those crappy webinar things instead. I still think it’s worth it, though.

Clay: “…the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’”.

Dave: “…he says that I don’t allow comments on Scripting News. That’s not exactly true, there are comments here, but you have to look carefully to find them. I find this ups the quality enormously — people don’t generally comment here to embarass anyone or to provoke a fight — there isn’t enough traffic to interest those people. But the people who want to add information to a thread here on Scripting News, and have been reading the site long enough to know what it’s about, they find their way to the comments and add something to the mix.”

Both excellent comments. Thank you. This is an example of people posting their replies on their own site. There is a lot more value to them than the comments about this post on my own discussion forum. Why? Because I know who Clay is, I’ve met him, he wrote A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which, to this date, is the most important, insightful, and brilliant understanding of group dynamics in online communities. Dave has something to add to the conversation; some thoughts he’s had since the article I quoted him on. Great content, in their own spaces.

And you’re not only hearing their replies because I’m telling you about them. You might be hearing about it from Techmeme, which has really cool algorithms to figure out where the conversation is, and put it back together. Look at Techmeme right now:

They reconstructed the conversation magically for you. Of course, Techmeme only works for the biggest, noisiest bloggers. But Bloglines will do it for anyone.

PS to Clay: I’m still in awe at:

Now, there’s a large body of literature saying “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.” Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

I apologize for falling into such a common pattern!

Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it’s worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn’t allow them).

“…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.”

The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words. Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you’re already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying “go kill yourself.” On a real estate blog. #18 and #23 have launched into a middle eastern nuclear conflageration which continues for 100 posts. They’re proving John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory every day. Pathetic. On a real estate blog. Lockhart Steele, is this what you want Curbed to look like? Really? It’s not fun, freewheeling freedom of expression, yay first amendment!. It’s mostly anonymous hate speech.

OK, that’s an extreme example… or is it? I don’t know how many times I’ve read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I’m excited, I’m impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If the article, for example, mentions anything in anyway related to Microsoft, you get some kind of open source nuclear war. If the article mentions web browsing in any way, there’s always some person without an outbound filter who feels compelled to tell you about how he uses Opera, so he doesn’t have this problem, although, frankly, I could care less what Anonymous uses. He’s not even human to me, he’s anonymous. What web browser he uses doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not a single bean. It’s not even the memory of last week’s huevos rancheros. It’s just noise. Useless noise. Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn’t read the article very carefully and didn’t come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site’s software doesn’t physically prevent him from posting.

Dave is absolutely right. The way to give people freedom of expression is to give them a quiet place to post their ideas. If other people disagree, they’re welcome to do so… on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.

I’m really losing patience with anonymous posts, “anon”, “anon for this one,” people who don’t even have the energy to sign their messages with a made up name and leave the whole signature blank. Frankly if every anonymous post disappeared from the Joel on Software discussion group, the overall quality of the conversation would go up, way up, and the discussion would be way more interesting. Try this as an experiment: read through the last few dozen topics on the discussion group, and imagine that all the “anonymous” and signed-blank posts just disappeared. Would the quality of conversation be higher? Would that be a place you’d be more likely to want to spend time in?

Reminder! The annual Fog Creek open house is today (Thursday), so if you’re in New York, I’d love to meet you in person and show you around.

Come on by between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm to see our offices and meet the Fog Creek team including this years’ interns, a.k.a. the caribou, the software management trainees, and me. Bring your boss to prove how private offices, 30″ LCDs, and Aeron chairs are possible. See the fish. Drink free wine. Show off your new iPhone. No RSVP necessary.

Fog Creek Software is at 535 8th Ave., on the 18th Floor.