Joel on Software

Imaginary product

Why doesn't somebody make this?

• It's a power strip
• It's a network hub
• It's a USB hub
• You clamp it onto the back of any desk

This would make it easy to plug in laptops, USB peripherals, and all your rechargers at your desk without crawling around on the floor.

(The photograph shows a product by Mockett which comes tantalizingly close, but which has knockouts for you to hardwire your own ports instead of built-in LAN and usb hubs.)

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, which lets you organize anything, together, FogBugz, enlightened issue tracking software for bug tracking, and Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.