ArsDigita Founder Responds to Closing 304
An anonymous reader sent in: "Net celebrity and ArsDigita founder Eve Andersson has written a brief history of the firm, documenting its downfall from her point of view. Fascinating reading, and yet another example of how a good thing can go so wrong."
Greenspun's similar comments (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to know what really happened, I'd say that a combination of the two journals is likely a good start.
Philip Greenspun's version (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Interesting time line (Score:0, Informative)
Was that so hard to infer from the article?
Grain of salt (Score:2, Informative)
Not really (Score:4, Informative)
The reality is that the TCL version of ACS was abysmal. It did not scale in any reasonable way; it leaked memory like a sieve (we actually had to write a script to restart the server periodically), and it was a pain to use. Worse than that, the code was an ad hoc spaghetti mess, full of hacks that work around bugs introduced by other hacks. For example, a common joke among the developers was that any method prefixed with "philg_" could be replaced by the pseudocode "if(rand() > 0.5) crash();" Eve's own code was in the same league.
When the same people who wrote this monstrocity got their hands on Java, they made all the same mistakes -- hence, the failure of ACS-Java to accomplish anything remotely useful. The VCs are not the only ones to blame for aD's failure.
An Invitation of OpenACS.org (Score:5, Informative)
For general info read first: OpenACS FAQ
http://openacs.org/faq/one?scope=public&faq_id=
Aolserver is the native webserver of OpenACS, but you can use Apache if you like
http://openacs.org/software.adp
A list of companies that offer various OpenACS (and ACS) services and support
http://openacs.org/companies.adp
We all hang out at http://openacs.org/bboard
Come check it out for yourself.
Pushed out just in time. (Score:3, Informative)
But according to her story,he was victimized to the tune of 7.6 million dollars from a company about to go fuckedcompany? Not so bad.
His story (see link above from solman) doesn't mention money changing hands, so what do you believe?
Not all ArsDigitas are alike (Score:2, Informative)
I have been told that even source control and release management were considered "fashionable but not really useful" back in the TCL era at AD, and that ACS users were expected to grab a tarball and start hacking.
Remember when you were a wet-nosed little code monkey and thought that grinding out twenty functional points over a sleepless weekend meant that you were "productive?" Forget that the code was too slow and buggy to be released, or that it was so over-engineered that every programmer who had to add to it or use it squandered countless hours figuring out the architecture.
Slowly, if you learned at all, you discovered that all the boring stuff you disdained at first enabled you to actually bring products to market in a repeatable, cost-effective way. (Oh yeah, and no 80-hour weeks debugging, either).
ArsDigita was just beginning to learn these lessons and grow up into a real development organization when RedHat acquired it.
Re:Not really (Score:2, Informative)
The Java version was at least an order of magnitude more idiotic, IMHO.
Re:Interesting time line (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Made Money... (Score:4, Informative)
(There was actually an existing port of the ACS to Java, a straight translation from Tcl. It wasn't an unworkable monster like the aborted version 5.0, but certainly less successful than the Tcl version.)
Re:It must be easier to sling mud while hiding (Score:2, Informative)
So there.
I did a three-week boot camp at aD. They didn't
hire me, that might color my reaction.
I found that the culure of aD was dominated by
people who were self-righteous and arrogant.
This might possibly be b/c they're all from MIT.
They were generous in their help, but afterwards,
I felt dumb. Granted, I did meet some nice people.
Andersson et al. are such a bunch of cry babies.
They signed up for the $40M. They weren't forced
to go to the VCs. By all accounts, aD was doing fine
without the outside help. It was the founder's greed
that got aD into the mess.
To complain that people don't want to work more
than 40 hours a week is ludicruous. To brag about
one's performance review is shameless. While
Andersson's article started out well, it spiraled
into mudslinging at the end.