gecko

5,903 karmajoined 19 lat temu

I'm Benjamin Pollack, a human living in Raleigh, NC and working as a senior manager at The Knot Worldwide. I've previously worked as a staff engineer at a startup called Bakpax, led the Backend Team at Khan Academy, and worked at Fog Creek Software, where I founded Kiln wrote large chunks of Copilot. You can read more at https://www.bitquabit.com

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4 dni temudiscuss

My favorite alt time is definitely the ancient way of doing things: there are twelve hours during the day, and twelve hours during the night. Yes, this means that the length of an hour at night is different from the length of an hour during the day (at least most of the year). This system is still used in some oddball places (like certain aspects of Jewish religious law, and possibly Islamic law as well for all I know), but, having written such a clock once, I did kind of like that you could get a feel for where you were in the year purely based on how fast the second hand was ticking during which half of the day.

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

I will say that a lot of that RAM is going to creature comforts that aren't about apps getting worse per se. For example, everything is running double buffered images and windows in HiDPI. The era you're talking about, applications were in charge of redrawing their window whenever you exposed their contents/tabbed back to them/etc. If they genuinely needed double buffering, they'd need to do it themselves, so apps rarely did. Plus side, less RAM, downside, you would get gray nondescript windows and redraw errors when moving and resizing windows. Nowadays, Windows/macOS/Linux instead keep double- (or even triple-) buffered copies of all that. Throw on all the HiDPI images and whatnot, and you've already used up more RAM just on that one thing than the old apps used to take. But you can tab between apps with full previews, and you don't get gray blobs and tearing when an app is overloaded. Other things, like 64-bit pointers, or static linking becoming a common way to deal with DLL hell (sigh), also add RAM, but are also solving real problems.

I'm not really defending all those decisions or anything, beyond that it's not simply a case of lazy devs or whatnot. We made trade-offs as a community that genuinely improved the user experience. I may not agree with all of them, but I get why they happened, and don't spend a lot of time wondering why we used to need fewer resources.

2 lata temudiscuss

Uh, that title is...wrong...

2 lata temudiscuss

I'm in PowerShell 7.4.2 and they're definitely absent. I hadn't thought to install directly from GitHub, given part of the whole shtick of winget is it's The One True Package Manager and bundled, but I can't say I'm surprised, either...

2 lata temudiscuss

I was super excited to see this comment, but I don't seem to have those cmdlets, even though I'm on Windows 11, fully updated. Are you sure you didn't install something extra?

2 lata temudiscuss

I mean, it is a country of laws. Just...some of those laws are pretty bad. For what it's worth, the Court in this case is narrowly focused on correcting a lower court's interpretation of the Copyright Act, not something in the Constitution or something fundamental, and on a first glance, I at least feel that their conclusion is highly justifiable. That doesn't mean the Copyright Act isn't fundamentally broken (it is, on my opinion), but that's trivially fixable by Congress if we get appropriately minded representatives.

2 lata temudiscuss

I'm not sure you understand how WSL works: it's just the native `curl` binary for whatever Linux distro you're using in WSL. On both Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, which are the two I have installed, --cacerts works as expected, because of course it does.

Separately, Microsoft bundles curl.exe as part of Windows since somewhere in the later Windows 10 or early Windows 11 releases, I forget which. This also appears to be honoring --cacerts.

So no, this seems to very much be an Apple problem.

2 lata temudiscuss

I love the concept of Fossil being in SQLite, but there's a reason that Mercurial invented revlogs and Git tries to keep related objects close to each other in packfiles. Sometimes, you really do need a dedicated file format optimized for specific use cases. I'm completely unsurprised OpenBSD wasn't able to pull this off.

(Kiln split the difference by storing metadata in SQL Server, but keeping all the actual source data in their native formats. This works great, but is only really viable if you can guarantee things never get out of sync, which is basically impossible for random local Git repos.)

2 lata temudiscuss

Isn't that literally just slightly different colors? I don't remember meaningful differences between OS/2 1.3 and the Windows 3 line. I always thought that was part of why WinOS2 worked well: the Win32 apps looked like the old OS/2 apps, both giving them familiarity and emphasizing they were old.

3 lata temudiscuss

I'm happy to always have London, but I could do with forgetting most of Cambridge.

3 lata temudiscuss

    As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for
    the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful 
    technical blog posts for the next ten years :p

I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss.

3 lata temudiscuss

    (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you 
    think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?

No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box.

Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better.

The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that.

I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!

3 lata temudiscuss

Everything you're asking about happened after I left, so I have no idea. I didn't even know they'd discontinued FogBugz for Your Server.

[Edit: We did discontinue Kiln for Your Server while I was there. We nuked that because the support burden was monstrous, to the point we needed three extra SDETs/sales engineers purely to handle testing and on-prem bug fixes. It threatened Kiln's ability to be profitable. The FogBugz team may've made the same calculus a few years later.]

3 lata temudiscuss

    There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether 
    it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it. 
    This is a much more satisfying answer.

Liz thought I shushed her for a long time, but I didn't even know that until years later, at which point I apologized and explained what actually happened. So I guess there was disagreement in the sense that I didn't know she thought that, but we talked that through many years ago.

I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.

    How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that 
    you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just 
    the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there 
    things you disliked about how it came out?

On a personal level, there's a lot I dislike. There was a lot of pressure on us to have reality-TV-show-like conflicts, which we mostly just didn't have. As a result, I end up being the antagonist in quite a few scenes (the building jump experiment is the main one), where it looks like I'm a bit of an asshole due to how things got edited together. So, normal reality TV show stuff.

(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)

I also just kind of feel like it's a lousy movie. The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell. The interviews are usually not asking great questions, as much as rehashing Joel's and Paul's blogs via interviews. And there's the fact the movie is so close to being about reddit and Y Combinator right at their inception, but somehow, just...misses it.

I should tone down the "masochistic" comment so it doesn't sound like I'm bitter or hate the film. I don't. I just don't really know it's worth a watch in 2023.

    What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?

I learned a lot about tech, I got incredible freedom to work how I wanted on what I wanted, I had great coworkers, and I really believed in and used all of our products. They all brought me joy. That was all good. And it wasn't a grindstone like some of my friends went through at thefacebook and Google, so I had time to genuinely enjoy my hobbies and be with friends.

The dislikes are mostly just versions of me noting that working in an anarchistic environment is great only if you shout loudest and care more than the next person, but I will add that that company was so young in so many ways. We often were figuring out how to do things from base principles instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing, because we weren't sure if we knew how to tell that someone knew what they were doing. And when we started to hire our way out, we made Some Mistakes. So, things that fell out of those bits.

3 lata temudiscuss

This is honestly quite a trip to read (I'm the Benjamin Pollack in the movie). I did want to make two small corrections, though:

    In one scene, she’s being interviewed on her birthday. Nobody remembered,
    so she had to buy herself a birthday hat. While she’s explaining this to the
    camera, one of her co-workers shushes her for making too much noise. On her
    birthday!

No, this coworker right here was starting to say "shit fuck shit dammit" on camera as he discovered that a stale precompiled header was getting picked up on the build box and then realized Lerone was rolling, so you're hearing me halt myself before saying a pile of profanity on film. In retrospect, Liz talking about her birthday and me suddenly cussing like a drunk sailor would've been a much better take. I regret the error.

    [Benjamin Pollack] seems to have never caught the startup bug, mainly working
    at larger, more established companies.

I worked at Fog Creek (max ~60 employees during my tenure, usually more like 40) from 2005 to 2014, Khan Academy (~120 if you count contractors) from 2015 to 2017, Spreedly (~40) from 2017 to 2018, and Bakpax (there were a dozen of us) from 2018 to 2021 (we got acquired, I wanted to stay at startups, so I didn't stay once we were bought), and another small startup briefly after that before settling at The Knot Worldwide. Yes, I'm currently at a very large company (~6500), but I'm a bit confused at how you'd come up with that summary of my career.

I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to provide.

[Edit: I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]

7 lat temudiscuss

Has anyone here actually built one of these? I've eyed this project for forever, but I've always been a bit reticent for whatever reason. I think I'm nervous that either things are sufficiently put-together before I get it that I won't learn, or that they won't have time to go into everything, so it'll just be a soldering-based LEGO.