Glitch (company)

Glitch (previously known as Fog Creek Software) is a software company specializing in project management tools. Its products include project management and content management, and code review tools.

Glitch, Inc.
FormerlyFog Creek Software, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustrySoftware
Founded2000 (2000)
Founders
[1]
HeadquartersNew York
Key people
[1]
ProductsGlitch, Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Trello, FogBugz
Number of employees
~32[2] (2020)
Websiteglitch.com

History

Based in New York City, Fog Creek was founded in 2000 as a consulting company by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. As the consulting market started to dry up due to the collapse of the Dot-com bubble, Fog Creek moved to a product-based business.[3] In December 2016 Anil Dash was appointed CEO.[4] Fog Creek's offices are located in the Financial District of Manhattan.[5][6] On September 25, 2018 the company was officially renamed Glitch after their flagship product.[7] Glitch staff announced intentions to unionize with the Communications Workers of America in early 2020 as part of the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. The company voluntarily recognized their union.[8] Around the same time, the company laid off a third of its staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.[2]

Products

Glitch (application)

The Glitch web application launched in the spring of 2017 as a place for people to build simple web applications using JavaScript.[9]While JavaScript is the only supported language, other languages can be unofficially used. Pitched as a "view source" tool that lets users "recombine code in useful ways".[9] Glitch is an online IDE for JavaScript and Node.js with and includes instant hosting and automated deployment and live help from community members.[10] IDE features include live editing, hosting, sharing, automatic source versioning,[11]and Git integration.[12] Glitch focuses on being a friendly, accessible community; since its launch over a million people have used the site to make web applications.[13] The Glitch site is self-hosting (except for the editor and API),[14] allowing users to view or remix the site's source code.

In December 2018, Mozilla announced that it will retire Thimble — (Mozilla's browser-based, educational code editor) and asked users to migrate all of their projects to Glitch.[15] Thimble was shut down in December 2019 and its projects were migrated to Glitch.[16]

In early 2020, Glitch released a paid plan, known as "boosted apps".[17] Users can pay 8 dollars a month to have projects with more space and other perks.

Stack Overflow
Main article: Stack Overflow

In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange.

Stack Overflow serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to a wiki or Digg.[18] Users of Stack Overflow can earn reputation points and "badges" when another user votes up a question or answer they provided.[19]

As of September 2020, Stack Overflow has over 12,000,000 registered users and more than 20,100,000 questions.[20][21] Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top ten most discussed topics on the site are: JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, PHP, Android, HTML, jQuery, C++, and CSS.[22]

Following the success of Stack Overflow they started additional sites in 2009 based on the Stack Overflow model: Server Fault for questions related to system administration and Super User for questions from computer "power users".[23]

Stack Exchange
Main article: Stack Exchange

In September 2009, Fog Creek Software released a beta version of the Stack Exchange 1.0 platform[24] as a way for third parties to create their own communities based on the software behind Stack Overflow, with monthly fees.[25] This white label service was not successful, with few customers and slowly growing communities.[26]

In May 2010, Stack Overflow was spun-off as its own new company, Stack Exchange Inc., and raised $6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects.[26]

Trello
Main article: Trello

In 2011, Fog Creek released Trello, a collaborative project management hosted web application that operated under a freemium business model. Trello was cross-subsidized by the company's other products. A basic service is provided free of charge, and a Business Class paid-for service was launched in 2013.[27]

In July 2014, Fog Creek Software spun off Trello as its own company operating under the name of Trello, Inc.[28] Trello Inc. raised $10.3 million in funding from Index Ventures and Spark Capital.[29]

In January 2017, Atlassian announced it was acquiring Trello for $425 million.[30]

FogBugz
Main article: FogBugz

FogBugz is an integrated web-based project management system featuring bug and issue tracking, discussion forums, wikis, customer relationship management, and evidence-based scheduling developed by Fog Creek Software. It was briefly rebranded as Manuscript in 2017, which was acquired in 2018 and was renamed back to FogBugz.[31][32]

Copilot

Fog Creek Copilot was a remote assistance service offered by Fog Creek Software. It launched on August 8, 2005.[33]

Originally known as Project Aardvark, Fog Creek Copilot was developed by a group of summer interns at Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek's founder, Joel Spolsky, wanted to give his interns the experience of taking a project through its entire lifecycle from inception, to mature released product.[34] The interns set up a blog, called Project Aardvark, where they posted updates on the progress of their project, to the world even though at that time the details of what they were working on was still a secret.

On July 1, 2005 the Project Aardvark team revealed that they were working on a remote assistance system for consumer use.[35]

Fog Creek Copilot uses a heavily modified version of TightVNC, a variant of Virtual Network Computing (VNC), as its core protocol.[36]

On November 7, 2005 they released a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films.[37]

In 2014 Fog Creek restructured, spinning Copilot out as a separate company.[38]

CityDesk

CityDesk was a website management software package. The backend of the system ran as a desktop application written on Windows in Visual Basic 6.0 with all data stored in a Microsoft Jet database.[39] It was one of FogBugz's first products, first announced in 2001.[40]

See also

References
  1. "About Glitch - the Company". Glitch. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
  2. Kastrenakes, Jacob (May 22, 2020). "Glitch lays off 'substantial number of employees' to cut costs". The Verge. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  3. Livingston, Jessica (January 22, 2007). "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days". Apress. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  4. "A New Product Name, and a New CEO". Fog Creek Software Company Blog. Retrieved December 8, 2016.
  5. Spolsky, Joel (December 29, 2008). "The New Fog Creek Office". Retrieved January 7, 2009.
  6. Wilson, Claire (February 7, 2009). "A Software Designer Knows His Office Space, Too". The New York Times. Retrieved March 2, 2009.
  7. Dash, Anil (September 25, 2018). "Fog Creek is now Glitch!". Medium. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
  8. https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/13/online-code-collaboration-tool-glitch-votes-to-unionize/
  9. Thompson, Clive (July 11, 2017). "It's Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly". WIRED. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
  10. "How Glitch works". How it works. Glitch, Inc. Retrieved May 16, 2019.
  11. "Glitch". ThoughtWorks Technology Radar - Platforms. ThoughtWorks, Inc. Retrieved May 16, 2019.
  12. "Can I import code in a Git repository from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or elsewhere?". Glitch Help Center. Glitch, Inc. Retrieved May 16, 2019.
  13. Dash, Anil (March 23, 2018). "What is Glitch?". Medium. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
  14. "View Source". Glitch. Retrieved May 17, 2019.
  15. Mozilla (December 18, 2018). "A Note About Thimble". Medium. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  16. Glitch (November 13, 2019). "Welcoming Thimble to Glitch". Medium. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  17. https://glitch.com/pricing
  18. Atwood, Jeff (September 21, 2008). "The Gamification". Coding Horror Blog. Retrieved January 24, 2011.
  19. "What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it?". Stack Overflow. Retrieved August 14, 2010.
  20. "Users". Stack Overflow. Retrieved September 20, 2020.
  21. "Questions". Stack Overflow. Retrieved September 20, 2020.
  22. "Tags". Stack Overflow. Retrieved September 20, 2020.
  23. Clarke, Jason (August 20, 2009). "Super User - question and answer site for power users". DownloadSquad. AOL. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
  24. Mager, Andrew (September 27, 2009). "Find the answer to anything with StackExchange". The Web Life. ZDNet. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
  25. Oshiro, Dana (October 12, 2009). "StackOverflow Shares its Mojo: White Label Q&A for All". ReadWriteWeb. Archived from the original on February 22, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2011.
  26. Kirkpatrick, Marshall (May 4, 2010). "All-Star Team Backs StackOverflow to Go Beyond Programming Questions". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
  27. "Trello How much does it cost?". Archived from the original on April 3, 2014. Retrieved March 3, 2015.
  28. Pryor, Michael. "A Special Announcement: Trello is now part of Trello, Inc". Trello Blog. Retrieved September 29, 2014.
  29. "Digital Whiteboard Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M". The Wall Street Journal. July 24, 2014.
  30. Lardinois, Frederic. "Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  31. "Virtual User Conference sheets" (PDF). Retrieved September 17, 2018.
  32. Ravera, Alexia (January 2, 2019). "Manuscript is now FogBugz". FogBugz. Retrieved January 14, 2019.
  33. Spolsky, Joel (August 8, 2005). "Project Aardvark Ships". Retrieved January 8, 2009.
  34. Spolsky, Joel (May 10, 2005). "First Post". Retrieved January 8, 2009.
  35. Guez, Yaron (July 1, 2005). "Full Disclosure". Retrieved January 8, 2009.
  36. "Fog Creek Copilot - Technical Information". Retrieved January 8, 2009.
  37. Spolsky, Joel (November 7, 2005). "Aardvark'd DVD Goes on Sale". Retrieved January 8, 2009.
  38. "About Copilot". Copilot.com. Retrieved July 10, 2019.
  39. Spolsky, Joel (December 9, 2016). "RIP CityDesk". Retrieved August 26, 2020.
  40. Spolsky, Joel (October 12, 2001). "What Does CityDesk Do?". Retrieved August 26, 2020.
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