I went this morning to Mountain View Sunnyvale to see Joel Spolsky give a presentation on FogBugz. I don’t know why people claim that south of 85/237 is Mountain View! That’s not Joel’s fault; I’m sure the Hilton is just trying to scam everyone that their meeting is in a fancier town and thus deserves a higher fee.
Anyways, I am a big fan of Joel’s blog. He writes about software development, management and recruiting and I find his writing style engaging. His thoughts almost always cause me to rethink something I’m working on. I think this is why I found his presentation a bit underwhelming.
The slides were (really) short and sweet; he spent most of the time demoing FogBugz and it has a number of really smart features. The estimate-based scheduling is a very unique look at how engineering really gets done. He’s certainly one of the best designer-engineers out there making software. But at the end of the morning, it was still just a product presentation laced with some humor and Q&A. There’s no reason it should be like his writing – they are two totally different targets and goals. But… it felt a little bit like loving a CD, going to the concert and walking away disappointed, knowing that you’ll still love the CD anyways.
Joel, I’ll keep reading, don’t worry. But I probably won’t switch from my Trac+Subversion setup to FogBugz just yet. 
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