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 2016Anil 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 their 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.
Products
Glitch (application)
The Glitch web application launched in the spring of 2017 as a place for people to build simple web applications using JavaScript. Pitched as a "view source" tool that lets users "recombine code in useful ways". Glitch is an online IDE for JavaScript 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, allowing users to view or remix the site's source code. In December 2018, Mozilla announced that it will retire Thimble — 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 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 11,000,000 registered users and more than 18,700,000 questions. Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top ten most discussed topics on the site are: JavaScript, Python, C#, PHP, Python, Android, jQuery, HTML, C++ and iOS. 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".
Stack Exchange
In September 2009, Fog Creek Software released a beta 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 from Union Square Ventures and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects.
In 2011, Fog Creek released Trello, 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. On 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 and Spark Capital. In January 2017, Atlassian announced it was acquiring Trello for $425 million.
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 , 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, as its core protocol. On November 7, 2005 they released a documentary on the interns' summer, titled, produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films. In 2014 Fog Creek restructured, spinning Copilot out as a separate company.
