Glitch (previously known as Fog Creek Software) is a software company specializing in project management tools. Its products include

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

and content management, and code review tools.

History

Based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

, 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 The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

, 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 Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the List of co ...

. 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 The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media labor union in the United States, representing about 700,000 members in both the private and public sectors (also in Canada and Puerto Rico). The union has 27 lo ...

in early 2020 as part of the

Campaign to Organize Digital Employees The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and empl ...

. The company voluntarily recognized their union. Around the same time, the company laid off a third of its staff during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

. In February 2021, Glitch workers signed a

collective bargaining agreement A collective agreement, collective labour agreement (CLA) or collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is a written contract negotiated through collective bargaining for employees by one or more trade unions with the management of a company (or with an ...

with the company. According to the

(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 A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially r ...

, 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

system featuring bug and issue tracking, discussion forums,

wikis A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a r ...

, 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 A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

, calle
Project Aardvark
where they posted updates on the progress of their project, to the world even though at that time the details of what they were working on was still a 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 they released a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, 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 Jeff Atwood (1970) is an American software developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He co-founded the computer programming question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and co-founded Stack Exchange, which extends Stack Overflow's question ...

and Joel Spolsky created

Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many facto ...

, a question-and-answer Web site for

computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...

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 A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launche ...

. 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 JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

, Python, C#,

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, 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 A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to en ...

and Super User for questions from computer " power users". In June 2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

Stack Exchange

In September 2009, Fog Creek Software released a

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labi ...

version of the Stack Exchange 1.0 platform as a way for third parties to create their own communities based on the software behind Stack Overflow, with monthly fees. This white label service was not successful, with few customers and slowly growing communities. In May 2010, Stack Overflow was spun-off as its own new company, Stack Exchange Inc., and raised $6 million in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

from Union Square Ventures and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects.

Trello

In 2011, Fog Creek released

Trello Trello is a web-based, kanban-style, list-making application and is developed by Trello Enterprise, a subsidiary of Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Glitch, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold t ...

, a collaborative project management hosted web application that operated under a freemium business model. Trello was cross-subsidized by the company's other products. A basic service is provided free of charge, and a Business Class paid-for service was launched in 2013. In July 2014, Fog Creek Software spun off Trello as its own company operating under the name of Trello, Inc. Trello Inc. raised $10.3 million in funding from

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a Europe, European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Sinc ...

and Spark Capital. In January 2017, Atlassian announced it was acquiring Trello for $425 million.

Glitch (application)

The Glitch web application launched in the spring of 2017 as a place for people to build simple web applications using JavaScript. While JavaScript is the only supported language, other languages can be unofficially used. Pitched as a "view source" tool that lets users "recombine code in useful ways". Glitch is an online IDE for

and Node.js with and includes instant hosting and automated deployment and live help from community members. IDE features include live editing, hosting, sharing, automatic source versioning, and Git integration. Glitch focuses on being a friendly, accessible community; since its launch over a million people have used the site to make web applications. The Glitch site is self-hosting (except for the editor and API), allowing users to view or remix the site's

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

. In December 2018,

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

announced that it will retire Thimble, Mozilla's browser-based educational code editor, and asked users to migrate all of their projects to Glitch. Thimble was shut down in December 2019 and its projects were migrated to Glitch. In early 2020, Glitch released a paid plan, known as "boosted apps". Users can pay 8 dollars a month to have projects with more RAM, more storage, and no wake up screen.

References

External links

* {{Glitch navbox Business software companies Privately held companies based in New York City Software companies based in New York City Software companies established in 2000 Software companies of the United States Announced information technology acquisitions