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Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

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121–130 of 172 posts

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#121

I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me. The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of co…

I wanted to use Kiln but then they silently stopped supporting the server version and removed it from their webpage. Good that I had not started with it before that happened.

We use FogBugz, hosted in house (can't have our data out in the open for several reasons) and with some custom plugins to integrate with other in house systems like serial number lookup. I recently learnt that they most likely kind of cancelled that codebase too, but did not tell anybody. They just stopped to provide updates and also removed the excellent and powerful ability for plugins with the "performance update" enabled (instead they but popular plugins directly in their code):

http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes http://help.fogcreek.com/7562/fogbugz-plugins

The only info I can find on the future of FogBugz is here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19543512/is-kiln-for-your...

A VM is not really a solution for me for several reasons, especially if plugins are gone and our own will not work. I can only speculate, but it really looks that way. (They send newsletters to customers and announced the "performance update", but never talked about how and when this would come to "FogBugz for your Server")

I wish they were able keep the version for your server with plugins and without VM around.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#122

I would be interested if anyone has used this for project management?

The itch I needed scratched was that Trello lists sometimes disintegrate into junk-drawers. Their API let me build something to pull out a list, let the team rank the cards and then reimport it into Trello. Yay for killer APIs! http://blog.forcerank.it/tame-your-trello-backlog

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#123

Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years). From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably playe…

The guy is a legend to learn from over and and over

He namechecks this great older post on PR and conferences and how to launch: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/09/15.html

Worth a re-look for every startup founder

The shortest possible version is: launch is important

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#124
post #119

> Fog Creek, which was founded in 2000 and is owned by employees What happens to the Fog Creek employees? Do they have a stake in the new companies?

Fog Creek employees keep on making Fog Creek awesome, and yes, they have a stake in Trello Inc. (Some of the longstanding employees now even have a stake in both Stack Exchange AND Trello).

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they're apparently planning paid Business and Enterprise versions, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of those be a fully in-house solution. If they're not letting people do their own installs they may follow the path of the Google Search Appliance. On the other hand, it may not be affordable depending on the size of your shop, but that's a different matter.

we're enormous, with all the fun that entails, but for a purchase to be involved, the following criteria must be met: 1) it must be sufficiently expensive. free is bad 2) i must convince everyone on my department that this is "the new way" that we operate (i.e. everyone has to use trello just like I would) 3) i must show through some pseudo science how it improves efficiency to several layers of management Unless som…

That sucks man.

I used to work at a client site where they wanted us to list all of the tools we used (as software developers) because they didn't want us to use these "computers" that we were using, in their offices on their network, and instead they wanted us to all code using citrix dumb terminals.

I no longer work at that client site, or for the company that sent me there.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#126
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a simple idea, it's a deep idea refined over decades and implemented simply. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

I work at Trello. We actually don't think of Trello as Kanban. Trello at its core is a collaborative list of lists. You can use Trello to implement a Kanban workflow but Trello is not an implementation of Kanban. A lot of people use Trello for things like to organizing their soccer teams where there isn't a hint of Kanban -- each list could be a game and people add themselves to indicate that they want to play.

List of lists eh.

Now I want to write a Trello knockoff using homoiconic clojure.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#127
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a simple idea, it's a deep idea refined over decades and implemented simply. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

I work at Trello. We actually don't think of Trello as Kanban. Trello at its core is a collaborative list of lists. You can use Trello to implement a Kanban workflow but Trello is not an implementation of Kanban. A lot of people use Trello for things like to organizing their soccer teams where there isn't a hint of Kanban -- each list could be a game and people add themselves to indicate that they want to play.

I don't think that's what he/she meant, I don't even think the 'kanban' was about Trello. It's about taking something relatively simple, then honing it to perfection. That is how you make great stuff - not by building something huge that only works most of the time, and even then only satisfactory. Kanban is about small improvements every day, for many days, applying the power of compounded improvement so to say.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#129
post #121

I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me. The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of co…

I wanted to use Kiln but then they silently stopped supporting the server version and removed it from their webpage. Good that I had not started with it before that happened. We use FogBugz, hosted in house (can't have our data out in the open for several reasons) and with some custom plugins to integrate with other in house systems like serial number lookup. I recently learnt that they most likely kind of cancelled…

Yeah we're long-time in-house Fogbugz users as well. We wanted to move to a local Kiln but it wasn't available any more so we rolled our own Git setup. I see why running things as a cloud service makes sense for Fog Creek but unfortunately it's not for us.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#130
post #99
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think FogBugz's worst problem is its name. I feel stupid even suggesting it at work, and the name sounds silly so people ignore any suggestion I do make. Trello is a good example of a much more (word-of-mouth) marketable name.

I know that for some people, this is an issue. The problem is the cost of switching to another name. For a ten year old product, the cost is IMMENSE. It can definitely be done, but it's a hard problem. Naming is also really hard. We spent TONS of time picking out the name Trello and just narrowly avoided naming it something really stupid by serendipity. (The code name was Trellis, but all the domains were taken and w…

It probably self-selects a better client base. Not so sure if switching would be an advantage.
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