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It seems like the CDN companies are suddenly(1) becoming App Platforms in a big way. “Computing at the edge” is going from expensive, meme AWS re:Invent buzzword to fun and easy — with no AWS in sight. I hope this deal works out well for the Glitch employees!
1: I know it’s been years in the making, but I’m still slinging Docker containers in a single AWS region.
They are trying to do to the Cloud what the Cloud providers did to on-premises iron and "legacy" hosting providers.
And the wheel of re-innovation turns yet again.
I doubt it's going to be a payday for glitch employees stock-wise, but hopefully fastly is a good place for them to work.
Not going by their Glassdoor reviews. I know it is not a reliable source and its incentives are all wrong, but I've never seen a more damning set of reviews for any tech company
More like content companies, not nec. app providers.
What an amazing track record from Joel Spolsky: Launched Fog Creek, then StackOverflow, Trello and now Glitch (which I think is the successor of Fog Creek)
Fog Creek renamed to Glitch as we transitioned from being a bootstrapped product-incubation lifestyle company to a single-product VC-backed startup. I think of the Fog Creek storybook closing with that rename, since Glitch always had a very different business focus, but technically (and perhaps culturally) they're of the same lineage.
In other Joel track record exploits, he's also our co-founder over at HASH.ai [1] and a driving force behind the Block Protocol [2][3]
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2020/06/18/hash-a-free-online... [2] https://blockprotocol.org/ [3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-bet...
hash.ai and the "block protocol" sound like crypto shams. Nice to see something different, although I feel like the branding really, really makes it seem like crypto.
I know this is wrong, but I also think patio11 is somewhat a product of the Business of Software forum (that in many ways is a precursor to this place) so extremely indirectly I credit Joel with still seeing Patrick on my timeline regularly.
Feel free to upgrade that to a very, very direct influence. In 2010 after I quit being a salaryman I wanted nothing other than to go into semi-retirement on Bingo Card Creator (“sip iced cocoa and play video games all day”).
A long-ranging conversation with Joel on, among other things, confluence of Catholic theology and the Talmud plus the memorable phrase “Shouldn’t you apply your skills to something which isn’t totally bullshit?” caused me to have a sharp reassessment of life and career goals, but for which it is unlikely I would have made a serious go of my consultancy, successfully launched my following few companies, or continued writing at anything like pace observed over the interval.
Glitch was the last iteration of FogCreek, right? There were some really fantastic companies to come out of FogCreek: StackOverflow and Trello being the big ones. It's a little bittersweet to see it get acquired.
Yes...and no.
Those who were there would be better at telling the story, but up until the Atlassian acquisition and Joel deciding to spend most of his time on a collection of other projects[1], my sense of FC was "software for developers." The original product they made for project planning (FogBugz) and its SCM companion (Kiln) continued on for a while, but seemed to have faded as Glitch ramped up.
The other one that comes to mind is Copilot, whose development was chronicled in the Aardvark'd movie - I think Tyler took over the project and is still running it on the side, last I heard.
Kind of bittersweet to see these fade away, but Glitch seems to have had more critical success outside of their traditional user base so they're running with it.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/12/05/so-hows-that-retir...
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks[1] is a delightful time capsule of 2005 software development. It includes interviews with @pg, the Reddit founders, and other delights. It's available on youtube now.
When I interviewed at Fog Creek, they had a DVD copy of Aardvark'd in a care package in my hotel room. I watched it that night, and for my interview day in the morning it felt like everyone I interviewed with was a movie star. Sneaky plan, Joel. Well executed.
I was actually wondering "hey, isn't that the old Fog Creek"? And went on their website, and yeah, not even a mention of FogBugz.
It's been kind of wild to see how FogBugz went from their main, almost exclusive priority, to something of barely any significance to the company, and now I'm guessing it's a forgotten product in a subsidiary of a giant CDN. Who knows how long until it's shut down.
It's sad; I still love the whole evidence-based scheduling part of it, and have never seen anything else like it.
"Copilot is closing": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31192812
Honestly, was a little bittersweet for me too, as we got into this process. I'm one of those folks who was a coder working at a cubicle reading the early days of Joel on Software, and I still think about that history a lot. I do think we'll do justice to the legacy, but you're not the only one who feels that little pang around this transition, even though obviously I'm super excited about it happening.
Never underestimate what Joel Spolsky can do next.
I really hope this works out well for the Glitch userbase. I'm always nudging people towards it because I don't know anything else that makes it as easy to get started with a flexible web project without having to learn The Boring Stuff.
I've been using Glitch since it was HyperDev and love it. My main use cases are: 1) learning various frameworks without installing cruft on my dev laptop and 2) small personal or side projects where I need a little hosting but not full AWS/Azure account. It really scratches an itch. Zero friction to just set up and run. I even set up a simple CI so that I develop on a "dev project", but then can push the code to a demo or production project.
Great product.
Glitch? Oh they're with Fastly now! https://www.tiktok.com/@benedicttown/video/70983764223009620...
I was using Glitch before they renamed it to Glitch - does anyone remember that name? I can't remember and can't find it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(company)
Gomix I believe. https://blog.glitch.com/post/welcome-to-glitch
Oh cool, I didn't know Glitch actually worked with Slack to get the name. I miss that stupid game.
I think "HyperDev" actually - just found it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/05/31/introducing-hyperd...
I dearly love Glitch for k-12 education use cases. My only consistent complaint after all these years is the slow speed, especially "waking up" apps. Hoping this acquisition will result in continued investment to speed up the platform!
That is the specific performance constraint fastly's "Compute@Edge" (wasm app hosting) aims to solve for:
https://www.fastly.com/press/press-releases/fastly-launches-...
Perfect! Music to my ears
This is a very cool combo I'm excited to use. The glitch in-browser IDE combined with fastly's wasm-hosting-at-the-edge means you can whip up a quick front end without ever having to fight with a terminal. Dramatically lower barrier to entry and reduction of scut-work.
I love glitch for quick prototyping, the fact that I can point domain names to projects far more easily than ANY other toolchain is amazing.
Fog Creek got aquired!
End of an era, started circa 2000.
Bye-bye Glitch union.
The case law is that the "successor" company in an acquisition is still held by all the same union obligations as before an acquisition [1]. So the folks in the Glitch union keep their bargaining unit and keep their contract.
Many union contracts also have an explicit "successor clause" too, although I don't know about the Glitch union contract.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/ba...
It was dissolved already. Source: https://twitter.com/keithkurson/status/1527310014771130373
Does anyone know for how much?
Terms haven't been disclosed.
What's in it for Fastly?
Fastly focused exclusively on enterprise accounts and ceded the "entry level" developer market entirely to Cloudflare. Full on snobbishly. In the short run that worked great as being best-in-class won big deals. In the long run that lost the mindshare fight and left 100M+/y in fat margin revenue off the table. And boy oh boy does it show in the market caps.
As they bet the future on wasm-at-the-edge saving them from the crushing downward pressure of bandwidth pricing, having a compelling product for the "entry level"* developer market will be crucial to getting the mind and marketshare needed to hit revenue targets (eventually, not this year).
Put simpler: fastly made itself overly exclusive and difficult to use, glitch is the polar opposite. Fastly's customer base is 45 year old vp's of infra/devops/sre, glitch's is 27 year old app/front-end dev/designers. There's more money in a deal with the former, there's more of the future in the latter.
* I want to be clear, with ~20 years exp when I sit down to figure out a vue front end to my latest flask thingy I'm entry-level af in js/front-end land. Lowering barriers to entry, much like handicap accessibility, is usually a win for everyone.
Can’t believe it. Fastly itself seems like such an acquisition target right now for some bigger player. Maybe Cloudflare.
I would think one of cloud vendors would gobble them up but maybe internal opposition is too strong
Well played.
replit better