After reading the blog and comments on here I now have a really bad impression of Fog Creek's CEO and little hope for their future.
I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
161–170 of 232 posts
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Anil Dash is a creep. His involvement in Gomix and Fog Creek means I'm less interested in those projects, frankly. I think he's one of the bigger blowhards in this scene, and I don't see the value in his participation, given that he seems more interested in social engineering his way to the top than .. you know .. actual engineering.
Judging from the lack of clarity in his post, he doesn't seem to know what his own product is. But he sure knows that he is the new CEO (he mentions it a few times). And he certainly thinks the successes of Fog Creek somehow reflect on him - in fact he talks about that more than the product.
For me, it is a bad sign when the personalities in the company has a higher profile than the products it is selling/making. Fog Creek seems to be heading down this path.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#163How many times can this blowhard say "I'm the CEO" in one blog post? He & his CEOness are not the story here.
Anil Dash is one of the most notorious social justice warriors in the tech world. It's unfortunate Fog Creek made him its CEO - I don't predict the company will flourish under him, since he seems more concerned with promoting an airy political agenda than with making good products. He's non-technical (I don't think he's ever written a line of code in his life, and knows next to nothing about the actual craft of build…
>"yet he's somehow been able to parlay his way into positions of influence by guilt tripping white liberals into giving him power".
So this is what HN has deteriorated into? Really? Might want to check your blood pressure cause all that salt can't be good for you.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#164I wonder, is there a quick way to learn what's that all about without watching a video? As usual, seems like good old text reading/writing skills are ignored...
Here you go: https://gomix.com/about/
May be in reading it wrong, but that page contains another video, couple example snapshots and "why we built this". I still have no idea what all the fuzz is about, and I'm not wasting my time on videos.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#1651/4 of the article about what is Fog Creek and how well everyone knows it. 1/4 of the article about culture and other guys and... I don't know what the hell it's talking about. I'm not even bothering reading half the sentence anymore. 1/4 Then it's talking about other unrelated products now? Outlook something. > "Gomix brings back the fun of the “view source” web" Oh finally. I had to re-read the article 3 times to f…
Yawn. Does this genre of comment have to be top of every thread?
this post saved me 5 minutes of my time.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#166> to stop coding from being an exclusionary priesthood for a small few Are there really people that see it that way? For me it's just the opposite, programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Since I learned to program when I was a teenager, by reading a book about the BASIC language and taking an introductory class where I could use a microcomputer, I have…
>>programming is a field that is easily accessible to anyone that's interested, with a very low entry bar. Not according to the hordes of HN posters who regularly shit on coding bootcamps.
Perhaps coding boot camps are the problem, and not the accessibility of learning to program? Not that I'm arguing bootcamps are bad, however there is a lot of junk out there.
* with that said General Assembly I hear is pretty good, and there is a reason why a lot of companies let their employees go to some of their Bootcamps. The rest, I can't speak for, even on a incidental level.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here you go: https://gomix.com/about/
May be in reading it wrong, but that page contains another video, couple example snapshots and "why we built this". I still have no idea what all the fuzz is about, and I'm not wasting my time on videos.
Here's the text of the page for you:
Gomix is the easiest way to build the app or bot of your dreams.
With working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment - anybody can build a web app on Gomix, for free.
Start by remixing. You never have to start from a blank slate. Remix a full, working app to personalize it for your needs, or build on the most popular and powerful developer frameworks to create your app.
Real collaboration. You don’t have to deal with the complexity of version control or tracking changes — the built-in editor allows multiple people to edit code at once and undo mistakes as they happen, just like working together in Google Docs.
It's not training wheels. Gomix is not a limited "toy" version of a real developer environment — your Gomix app is hosted on the exact same industry standard infrastructure that the best developers use to run their apps.
We handle the mess. While you work with Gomix, we seamlessly upgrade your servers and cloud infrastructure in the background. There’s no deployment or server provisioning because it all happens automatically.
Why Did We Make Gomix? In some ways, Gomix is a throwback to an older era of software or the internet, when there were simpler ways to get started making cool stuff. For people who were around at that time, they'll understand Gomix easily: We’re bringing “View Source” back. Of course, they didn't literally take “View Source” out of web browsers, but the ability to just look at the code behind something, and tweak it, and make your own thing, was essential to making the Internet fun, and weird, and diverse, in its early days. And that has sadly disappeared.
Similarly, in even earlier eras, tools like HyperCard on the Mac and Visual Basic on Windows democratized software creation, letting regular individuals or casual business users create useful apps to meet their needs. During development, Gomix was even called “HyperDev”, as a nod to this history — and its early-90s aesthetic subtly nods to that heritage, too.
Whether we look at simple issues like being able to do fun things with an Amazon Echo, or hugely complex issues like trying to make tech and programming more inclusive, Gomix has a role to play in solving problems that matter. And we’re going to have fun doing it!
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#168How many times can this blowhard say "I'm the CEO" in one blog post? He & his CEOness are not the story here.
Anil Dash is one of the most notorious social justice warriors in the tech world. It's unfortunate Fog Creek made him its CEO - I don't predict the company will flourish under him, since he seems more concerned with promoting an airy political agenda than with making good products. He's non-technical (I don't think he's ever written a line of code in his life, and knows next to nothing about the actual craft of build…
I'm not going to pick on you specifically here, but this is a great place for me to highlight something.
I think folks in tech (and society at large, frankly) have a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what comprises discrimination and sexism. The systematic disenfranchisement of a gender/race/ethnicity whatever term you want to use, often is not remedied without some kind of equality of status, that's what 'retweeting only women' is doing. Its giving equality of status to women that they likely would not usually have. Fundamentally I think its hard for a lot of folks to grasp this, even those who have historically been discriminated against when it comes to something they don't understand, part of that is human nature, but over and over again actual psychological studies and sociology studies show again and again that when you give people equality of status only then do things change. [0][1][2][3]
As far as Pax goes, CTO of a growing (and arguably large at the time even) should have known better, and frankly, his comments, joke or not, were inexcusable. I also don't care what people may say about what people say in private, because that is something I cannot react to, because I'm not party to that conversation, but this took place on a public forum, and it was in very poor taste at a minimum, and given an executive at a company, likely someone with such poor taste on a public forum as such I can't imagine was doing much for bettering workplace standards. This may be complete conjecture which I acknowledge. With that said, in my experience dealing with people who tend to act the same way in a public forum, in private they're more often than not just as inexcusable.
[0] http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&co... [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racia... [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/10/business-...
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#169This mostly seems to be about a new CEO at Fog Creek. I have never heard of him but appearantly he has a big following. And it appears that a very large number of people don't like him - enough to create a bunch of new accounts here at HN just to comment on his persona. Fog Creek has to me always been about Joel on Software. And to me they always got a lot of credit and extra attention to their products because of hi…
The HN discussion of the product - was it this one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13116426
Just thought the link might be useful for folk interested in reading more about that.
Re: I'm at Fog Creek, and we're introducing Gomix
#170Considering there are probably many thousands of developer hours invested in this, I hope Fog Creek invests ten or thirty hours into making some quick and dirty youtube videos showing starting from scratch and building out a a few full apps with persistence, some integrations, etc so we can see what that involves. I still don't completely understand what GoMix is exactly from the video shown here.
Ditto. This is my second or third exposure to this project and I'm still not sure what the heck it is, and what the value add is. I understand things like setting up DBs, wiring up a front and back end, etc... But this? I don't get it. It seems like it's supposed to be an easy to use, but powerful and extensible, way to build apps, but it doesn't necessarily look any easier. And it looks complex in its own way.
So yeah, I'd like a really robust tutorial (text, preferably, I don't like to sit and watch videos) which shows the creation of a full featured web app with persistent data storage, and a dynamic front end. Something with robust functionality so we can see how something like that is built.