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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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

There was a documentary about the creation of copilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

⬐ tailspin2019

I remember buying this on DVD and following this little startup with fascination!

I was just starting my own software business so it was quite inspiring at the time.

⬐ chrisseaton

What became of Fog Creek? It's all gone a bit... NFT.

https://glitch.com

⬐ None

None

⬐ zerr

Relocating for an employment - so old school :)

⬐ mattl

I was given a DVD of this when I visited Fog Creek one day.

Aaron makes an appearance in the 2005 documentary "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", which was a documentary about interns building a product at at FogBugz (by Joel Spolsky, now known for Trello and Stack Overflow). I watched it again recently after many years and was sad to see Aaron appear with his unbridled optimism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc.

I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.

Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]

PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Ge...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2033981/

⬐ eastdakota

That's an interesting idea. Will suggest to the programming team. Probably tricky while we're all working from home. But… maybe in the future.

A mini version of that is a show that John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is going to be hosting weekly:

https://cloudflare.tv/schedule/3RbW4iJZAbfN9OetUovuQ2

"Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem that needed to be solved — and how they did it."

⬐ lstamour

That does sound interesting, but the link says it streams 6:30-7am. (I presume that’s a local time for my time zone?)

Any chance it will show up as a podcast or on YouTube, or available to watch at another time?

⬐ eastdakota

John is based in Lisbon, so it’s scheduled for his work hours. The live version, which will allow for the audience to interact and ask questions, will be during that time. I’d imagine many of those sessions will make it into our Best Of repository or be played in a recorded version at different times during the week.

⬐ jgrahamc

I've asked teams in the US offices to volunteer people to come on the show. I imagine that once we get through the first week of this we'll add another Story Time slot so I can talk to people in California easily.

⬐ FearNotDaniel

Glad to see I'm not the only one actually scratching my head over time zones. It's a genius move to auto display times in the local user's zone but would be super helpful to state that fact somewhere otherwise I'm going to shrug and assume they're probably PDT or EDT and start doing mental arithmetic in my head while worrying I might have got the daylight savings wrong at either end. Bonus points for telling me what time zone you think I'm in... I have worked for companies that proxy all traffic through a different country, leading to not only a ton of dutch-language banner ads but timezone confusion to boot.

Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman).

https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946

⬐ swampthinker

Holy crap I recognize PG's old house, I used to live a block away! That's crazy!

Me and my dad would always talk shit about it though, horrible for insulation purposes. Looks great though.

⬐ wdr1

Thanks for sharing this!

I remember reading Joel talking about it in his blog, but never knew it was on YouTube!

⬐ bmccormack

The entire 6-DVD Making Better Software series, which was produced after Aardvark'd, is now free on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRP...

I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.

⬐ runevault

I have the DVD from when they sold it back when, every time I see the thing it feels weird realizing how LONG ago it was.

⬐ peternicky

Thanks for posting this!

⬐ pouta

Thanks for the share!

⬐ Alex3917

This is amazing. Even as someone who has been vaguely around for a while (e.g. attended the first couple Startup School events), it's easy to forget that this is how it was. It really puts a lot of things in context.

⬐ theparanoid

This was around the nadir of tech in general. The dotcom crash was only a few years earlier.

⬐ greenyoda

Summary of the video, from YouTube:

"[2005 Documentary] Four interns are brought into Fog Creek Software's Manhattan office and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a computer program that will, among other things, help millions of frustrated users fix their relatives computers via the internet. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique software startup, four quirky interns, and the world of the geek."

(Fog Creek is the company co-founded by Joel Spolsky.)

I think you’re underestimating the addressable market. StackOverflow has 45M unique users [1], and yet Evans Data [2] and others put the number of developers at around 20M. So there are tens of millions of people looking for help with programming issues who aren’t professionals. I think a lot of them, and professional developers with side-projects and quick scripts to write, will find utility here. The typical Git workflow best-practice is something of a one-size-fits-all at the moment, and we think it’s not a great fit in some circumstances. So this is just another option.

On persistence - each HyperDev project gets a DynamoDB. It’s definitely trickier to use than we’d like, so we’ll be getting to that, but for now here’s an example project you can remix that uses it - https://hyperdev.com/#!/project/typhoon-pine. Or there are other options like one that uses a free mlab MongoDB - https://hyperdev.com/#!/project/navy-flower that’s pretty easy to get going with.

But I think you should just try building something with it - here’s a good excuse: https://hyperdev.com/blog/developer-contest-get-back-nature/. From what I remember from Aavardk’d [3] you’re a keen photographer so it should be your thing!

1 - https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com 2 - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi... 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

There was a whole movie about interns at Fog Creek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

I admit it could have been edited a bit better (read: more interesting), but it was still fun to get a bit more of an inside view of a process like this.

If you like this sort of thing, Fog Creek released their 2005 Aardvark'd documentary for free on YouTube last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg .. not balls off the wall exciting but an interesting look at a team of interns developing a product.

⬐ derrida

"Sort of thing" for classes of things like computers, coders and offices. Otherwise Code Rush and Aardvark'd are not comparable. I suggest Aardvark'd is not worth the time. Code Rush is of interest both historically & for it's insight into the values and attitudes of some damn effective programmers (these people practically made the web accessible for all in a few short years).

If you are interested in those early years, there is also some video footage of that first class (and interview with PG) in Aardvarked, the Joel Spolsky video made that same summer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg&feature=playe...

Available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

⬐ nl

Is there a (legal) downloadable version of this somewhere?

⬐ andymoe

Looks legal to me. It was done buy Boondoggle Films and it's posted to their YouTube channel and they are linking to it from their site here:

http://www.boondogglefilms.com/aardvarkd.php

(I'm not going to lie - I bought the DVD when it came out in 2005)

⬐ nl

I meant one I could download and watch offline. My TV doesn't have Youtube support (except via the HDMI port + a laptop).

⬐ paulgerhardt

There's a pretty cool look at the first Y Combinator class at 48:56 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg&t=48m56s