Sufficiently Small

Liz and I have just finished watching Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks- the documentary about the Copilot project which Joel Spolsky’s clutch of interns completed over the summer of 2005 for Fog Creek software.

The film is certainly entertaining, and had us laughing out loud on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that the readers of Joel’s blog, who probably comprise the majority of his customers will eject the DVD having enjoyed the film, but feeling a little disappointed in retrospect. Joel is known for his expositions, not on the details of coding, but on the wider development process in which coding activity is an albeit major part, including the business and economic aspects of software projects. We found the film light on any detail of the actual development process – we saw the first demo and the release party – but I don’t feel we learnt much about what actually happened between these events. There was no real explanation of how software design was done, how developers work together, or how quality was assured. Did they do code reviews or unit testing? Did Joel do any project management, or did they just hack away at the code? We simply don’t find out.

The second disappointing aspect of the film is its production quality. The camera-work is of poor quality with unnecessary disorienting pans and movement, which although it may be intended to convey a sense ‘reality’, in actual fact it severely detracts from the overall sense of quality of the product. Furthermore, the transfer to DVD video is definitely amatuerish, resulting in jerky motion of slow pans and moving vehicles.

In spite of these shortcomings, Aardvark’d gives you an excellent sense for the kind of people Joel hires and the personalities of the interns shine through. The end result is less likely to be useful to Software Developers themselves, than to ‘Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity’. Its doubtful that the former will learn anything new from this film, although managers and marketers may get a better sense of the kind of people software geeks really are. The most interesting part for many ambitious developers will be the digression with Paul Graham disussing the motivation and funding for software start-ups.

Our industry needs more films with the same objectives as Aardvark’d, but with deeper content on the planning and execution aspects, and a bigger budget to carry off the production successfully. Joel is to be commended for having the imagination to commission such a film.