Glitch (previously known as Fog Creek Software) was a software company specializing in project management tools. Its products included project management and content management, and code review tools. Fastly acquired the company in 2022.
History
The company's original name was Fog Creek. Based in New York City, Fog Creek was founded in 2000 as a consulting company by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. As the consulting market started to dry up due to the collapse of the Dot-com bubble, Fog Creek moved to a product-based business. In December 2016 Anil Dash was appointed CEO. Fog Creek's offices are located in the Financial District of Manhattan. On September 25, 2018, the company was officially renamed Glitch after its flagship product. Glitch staff announced intentions to unionize with the Communications Workers of America in early 2020 as part of the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. The company voluntarily recognized their union. Around the same time, the company laid off a third of its staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2021, Glitch workers signed a collective bargaining agreement with the company. According to the Communications Workers of America (CWA), this is the first agreement signed by white collar tech workers in the United States.
Cloud services Fastly, known for its content delivery network, acquired Glitch, as announced in May 2022. CEO Anil Dash became Fastly's VP of developer experience. Glitch's staff had declined since 2020 from 50 to 14 employees, all of whom joined Fastly. The union dissolved prior to the acquisition when its collective bargaining agreement expired and the union's three remaining members decided not to pursue another agreement.
Products
FogBugz
FogBugz is an integrated web-based project management system featuring bug and issue tracking, discussion forums, wikis, customer relationship management, and evidence-based scheduling developed by Fog Creek Software. It was briefly rebranded as Manuscript in 2017, which was acquired in 2018 and was renamed back to FogBugz.
CityDesk
CityDesk was a website management software package. The backend of the system ran as a desktop application written on Windows in Visual Basic 6.0 with all data stored in a Microsoft Jet database. It was one of FogBugz's first products, first announced in 2001.
Copilot
Fog Creek Copilot was a remote assistance service offered by Fog Creek Software. It launched on August 8, 2005.
Originally known as Project Aardvark, Fog Creek Copilot was developed by a group of summer interns at Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek's founder, Joel Spolsky, wanted to give his interns the experience of taking a project through its entire lifecycle from inception, to mature released product. The interns set up a blog, called Project Aardvark, where they posted updates on the progress of their project, even though at that time the details were still secret.
On July 1, 2005, the Project Aardvark team revealed that they were working on a remote assistance system for consumer use.
Fog Creek Copilot uses a heavily modified version of TightVNC, a variant of Virtual Network Computing (VNC), as its core protocol.
On November 7, 2005, a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, was released. It was produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films.
In 2014 Fog Creek restructured, spinning Copilot out as a separate company.
In 2022, Copilot announced it was closing and that the domain name had been sold.
Stack Overflow
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange.
Stack Overflow serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to a wiki or Digg. Users of Stack Overflow can earn reputation points and "badges" when another user votes up a question or answer they provided.
, Stack Overflow has over 12,000,000 registered users and more than 20,100,000 questions. Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top ten most discussed topics on the site are: JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, PHP, Android, HTML, jQuery, C++, and CSS.
Following the success of Stack Overflow they started additional sites in 2009 based on the Stack Overflow model: Server Fault for questions related to system administration and Super User for questions from computer "power users".
In June 2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.
