I'm not really defending all those decisions or anything, beyond that it's not simply a case of lazy devs or whatnot. We made trade-offs as a community that genuinely improved the user experience. I may not agree with all of them, but I get why they happened, and don't spend a lot of time wondering why we used to need fewer resources.

Separately, Microsoft bundles curl.exe as part of Windows since somewhere in the later Windows 10 or early Windows 11 releases, I forget which. This also appears to be honoring --cacerts.

So no, this seems to very much be an Apple problem.

(Kiln split the difference by storing metadata in SQL Server, but keeping all the actual source data in their native formats. This works great, but is only really viable if you can guarantee things never get out of sync, which is basically impossible for random local Git repos.)

    As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for
    the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful 
    technical blog posts for the next ten years :p

    (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you 
    think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?

Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better.

The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that.

I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!

[Edit: We did discontinue Kiln for Your Server while I was there. We nuked that because the support burden was monstrous, to the point we needed three extra SDETs/sales engineers purely to handle testing and on-prem bug fixes. It threatened Kiln's ability to be profitable. The FogBugz team may've made the same calculus a few years later.]

    There's an imdb trivia item[0] about how you and Liz disagree about whether 
    it was a shush, but it's unsourced, so it was hard to put much stock in it. 
    This is a much more satisfying answer.

I am aware of the IMDB factoid. Since they also had my bio wrong and gave me a Bacon number of two for years, I have generally just concluded IMDB doesn't care about having accurate data, and never felt a need to correct it.

    How do you feel about the movie looking back? I notice on your website that 
    you recommend people watch it "if [they]’re feeling masochistic." Is it just 
    the awkwardness of being the focus of a film at that age or were there 
    things you disliked about how it came out?

(Me being awkward and arrogant also does play into it, but, like everyone else, I've grown a lot since then. Seeing how far I've come is at worst a reminder not to let myself be like that again, but usually just ends up making me feel happy I've been able to learn from my mistakes and grow. I can't say it bothers me.)

I also just kind of feel like it's a lousy movie. The soundtrack was literally written on the way to the recording studio, and you can tell. The interviews are usually not asking great questions, as much as rehashing Joel's and Paul's blogs via interviews. And there's the fact the movie is so close to being about reddit and Y Combinator right at their inception, but somehow, just...misses it.

I should tone down the "masochistic" comment so it doesn't sound like I'm bitter or hate the film. I don't. I just don't really know it's worth a watch in 2023.

    What did you like/dislike about working at Fog Creek? How'd it change during your tenure?

The dislikes are mostly just versions of me noting that working in an anarchistic environment is great only if you shout loudest and care more than the next person, but I will add that that company was so young in so many ways. We often were figuring out how to do things from base principles instead of hiring people who knew what they were doing, because we weren't sure if we knew how to tell that someone knew what they were doing. And when we started to hire our way out, we made Some Mistakes. So, things that fell out of those bits.

    In one scene, she’s being interviewed on her birthday. Nobody remembered,
    so she had to buy herself a birthday hat. While she’s explaining this to the
    camera, one of her co-workers shushes her for making too much noise. On her
    birthday!

    [Benjamin Pollack] seems to have never caught the startup bug, mainly working
    at larger, more established companies.

I honestly really enjoyed the article, though, and neither of these are exactly big errors; just some extra color I wanted to provide.

[Edit: I'm also happy to answer any questions anyone has about the movie or about that time at Fog Creek.]