Joel on Software

2001/11/09

Prakash wants to know "how all of the esteemed contributors in this discussion list came across your website."

CityDesk Beta

Last night at around 10 PM we fixed the last (known) bug in CityDesk Beta 2. This morning we're going to do some smoke tests and last-minute banging, and if all goes well, we'll release Beta 3 today.

For this beta we found, and fixed, some of the nastiest, hairiest, scariest bugs that we thought we'd never be able to fix. A mysterious crash that couldn't be reproduced reliably. Occasional mauling of HTML code by the WYSIWYG editor, and even more occasionally completely destroying HTML code. (That bug, incidentally, was in a Microsoft library function, which we reimplemented ourselves.) Mysterious startup crashes when you're using a non-Latin1 version of Windows (Hebrew, Greek, etc.) Inability to run as a normal user on Windows NT. And we sped up incremental publishing dramatically by caching CRCs.

Update, 7 PM. We managed to release Beta 3 today - four times! Scary little show-stopper bugs kept popping up. I'm praying that the rate at which show-stopper bugs keep popping up goes down dramatically so I can take the whole weekend off for a change. Fog Creek Software: "We Make Lots of Bugs, But At Least We Fix Them!"

 

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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, 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 FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.