What a week!
I was in Utah Wednesday, meeting with a subsidiary of a large software vendor that I work closely with. Great people with a really cool product. After work, they took us up into the mountains to a restaurant at Sundance. Oh my – the food was excellent, but the scenery … it was incredible.
On my way back, I stopped in Chicago for a couple of days to work at the Microsoft Technology Center there. Last night, another one of my ISVs, DoubleTake Software, gave a customer appreciation party for CDW at the House of Blues, and Microsoft helped sponsor the event. How many public companies have a CEO who plays in a very, very good cover band with other employees? Cluster-Funk rocks! They often play at Microsoft events like TechEd and the WorldWide Partner Conference. Last night was the first time I got to hear them.
I tried to play my fiddle for a couple of tunes, but that didn’t go so well … we had technical difficulties, and I didn’t really know any of the songs. For jazz and blues, I can fake it well enough, but for rock, I need to prepare ahead of time. These guys were great, so I’m going to learn the set list and bring my electric fiddle to their next gig. Still, I had an absolute blast dancing and cutting loose with a fun, fun group of people.
Finally, today (Friday) I got to meet one of my heroes, Joel Spolsky. Joel is brilliant and funny, a combination that makes him my favorite author – I recommend his blog, Joel On Software to everyone in the software industry. I also got to meet Brett, a developer at Fog Creek, and he was really cool. He even laughed at one of my jokes.
They were in Chicago to give a demonstration of the new version of FogBugz. I’ve used FogBugz in the past, and although it’s a competitor to one of our products (Team Foundation Server), I have to say it’s excellent. And hey, it integrates really well with Visual Studio.
I've learned a lot from Joel's writing over the years, and Joel's company, Fog Creek, is a very interesting case study in software development practices. I've written some thoughts on how ISVs can learn from this very open company, but I have to dot my i's and cross my t's ... so I'll share in a few days ...
But in the meantime, let me just say ... what a great week!
