Emperor Gee 5

The friendly folk over at Apple developer relations lent us a G5 for our project. (Our code looks like it will run on pretty much any platform, and now we know it will run on OSX...)

Really, the amount of developer drool in my cubicle is obscene. And it's not at all unfounded. It sure is a fancy machine. And the 20" cinema display is simply the best one I've ever seen. If I had 7,000 spare dollars I'd buy one...

At work we use TRIM for tracking bugs - It's super extensible, and has all the features available in any bug tracker(plus a gazillion more) . But, the amount of legacy theory and added complexity made me investigate what other alternatives are available. BugTracker.NET is a great, open source variant that looks to me to be heavily inspired by FogBugz. If you need a quick free windows bug tracker - or even if you're considering FogBugz - you should check it out.

Given that Joel Spolsky seems to be building some kind of developer nirvana over there at Fog Creek, It makes me wonder when his company will actually do something...Surely you can't grow a hugely successful software company armed with bug tracking and dinky content management? On that note, I was speaking to a developer of a popular developer tool about SourceGear's Vault product - sadly, he had nothing nice to say about working with or integrating with Vault.

Eric Sink is another one of these great and talented bloggers (and CEO of SourceGear), and a guy who really really gets the blogging as marketing thing. Those guys are both doing an awesome job of building developer loyalty by appearing as pragmatic leaders of the development community. I' m sure If I posted this stuff on the JOS forum, there'd be no end of developers (who have nothing to gain by defending them) flaming me because they've bought mindshare from those guys..

I love that story about the emperor's new clothes. Not to say that their products aren't good - just that they mightn't be as amazing as the hype suggests.

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