Fogcreek is shutting down webputty.net and has pushed the source code to github | Hacker News Reader

Fogcreek is shutting down webputty.net and has pushed the source code to github

blog.fogcreek.com

88 pointsbgraves29 comments

This is just yet one more example how Fog Creek, as a company, consistently demonstrates that they are a classy bunch of guys.

They treat their customers and developers well, Joel has contributed quite a bit of knowledge to the startup community, and on top of that, open-sourcing a dead product so that its fans can keep it going should they want to.

Thanks for your comments. The two devs who built the entire site, and pushed for open sourcing it are amazing people, and we're lucky to get to work with them.

We're hiring BTW. Need more Trello devs. Check out our tech stack: http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/ and join us if you find it interesting.

http://www.fogcreek.com/careers.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

from "Make Better Software: Recruiting", Joel Spolsky.

This is actually quite discouraging regarding applying for a full-time job at FogCreek.

Many people don't hate their current jobs but still are looking for better opportunities. And it's a good thing.

WebPutty dev here. Feel free to shoot us any questions here on HN or on twitter @webputty.

The most annoying thing is the name. Putty is a well known SSH client and terminal emulator. On seeing the name WebPutty I'd believed Putty had been ported to a web interface.

That's not a question. :)

OK, i'll bite. How did the product get the name, WebPutty?

No need to answer if this question is wasting useful development time.

It's just the idea of making the web, specifically your site, a little more malleable, that you can quickly morph how it looks.

I disagree. Prefixing names with "Web" is common but not pervasive. "Putty" is just an English word. BTW the SSH client is actually called PuTTY.

Same here. Would have just upvoted, but upvote counts aren't visible and people are replying to disagree.

I figured this was a web-based SSH terminal, which is pretty cool. Adding "Web" prefix to a popular product's name pretty clearly implies a web port.

First thing I thought, I was quite confused.

I had never heard of WebPutty until this post, and when I saw the headline I got excited that I could install PuTTY and use it in my browser. I understand where the devs got the name as explained in the post down below this, but even clever names need to have some consideration of existing product names.

I'm following the step-by-step instructions to run it on my google app engine account, but I get an error when I run "fab deploy." It asks me for my email and does a bunch of stuff, but then this happens:

Zipping ziplibs. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/main.py", line 712, in main args, kwargs

  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 327, in execute
    results['<local-only>'] = task.run(*args, **new_kwargs)

  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 112, in run
    return self.wrapped(*args, **kwargs)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 53, in decorated_func
    return func(*args, **kwargs)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 66, in deploy
    ziplibs(env.deploy_path)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 178, in ziplibs
    os.path.walk(to_zip, add_file, (zip_file, os.path.dirname(to_zip)))

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/posixpath.py", line 224, in walk
    func(arg, top, names)

  File "/Users/swiss/webapps/WebPutty/fabfile.py", line 177, in add_file
    zip_file.write(os.path.join(dir_name, name), os.path.join(dir_name[len(common_base):], name))

  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/zipfile.py", line 1024, in write
    fp = open(filename, "rb")

IOError: [Errno 21] Is a directory
Any idea what the problem is?

It is attempting to zip a directory in the fabfile. You don't need to zip the contents of an app to deploy it. Try deploying using the SDK directly with:
$ python2.5 appcfg.py -A appname update .
replace 'appname' with the name of the app you registered.

Try taking the ziplibs(env.deploy_path) call out. It's not strictly necessary.

Thanks! That worked. I get "Error: Server Error" when visiting my appspot url though (drpepecss.appspot.com)
Also, getting this error after successful deployment:
Completed update of app: drpepecss, version: 1 Uploading cron entries. Uploading task queue entries. Reverting /Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/js_css_packages/packages.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/fabric/main.py", line 712, in main *args, **kwargs File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 327, in execute results['<local-only>'] = task.run(*args, **new_kwargs) File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/fabric/tasks.py", line 112, in run return self.wrapped(*args, **kwargs) File "/Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/fabfile.py", line 53, in decorated_func return func(*args, **kwargs) File "/Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/fabfile.py", line 76, in deploy clean_packages(env.deploy_path) File "/Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/fabfile.py", line 89, in clean_packages compress.revert_js_css_hashes(base_path) File "/Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/compress.py", line 23, in revert_js_css_hashes popen_results(['hg', 'revert', '--no-backup', path]) File "/Users/Varun/Documents/workspace/webputty3/compress.py", line 152, in popen_results proc = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/subprocess.py", line 594, in __init__ errread, errwrite) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/subprocess.py", line 1097, in _execute_child raise child_exception OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

More information on the background of webputty [1] and why it was open-sourced [2]
[1] http://tghw.com/blog/lean-development-zero-to-launch-in-six-...
[2] http://blog.fogcreek.com/whats-up-with-webputty/?fccmp=webpu...

Isn't that gecko the Notepad++ icon?
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/assets/img/logo-green-orange.pn...

I was surprised as well to see that, they addressed that here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787082
Apparently 259 days wasn't long enough to find a replacement ;)

It was never a particularly high priority, especially once we decided to release it to the community.

Robert Hayes designed the icon for notepad++[1] Looks like FogCreek had explicit permission to use the icon [2]
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/forums/forum/33...
[2] https://github.com/FogCreek/WebPutty/

Thanks for open-sourcing it.
I wanted to use it but couldn't find a way to use a tool that didn't play with source control. It didn't work for sites too simple to need Git because it only hosted CSS and thus made the project too complex.

There were always plans to integrate it with Kiln's commit API (https://developers.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W166#toc_18) but unfortunately, the resources were not there.

This looks great, I wasn't aware this existed. Can anyone share some similar tools they use to speed up that Ctrl+S and changing between windows process that happens when editing CSS?

Not for editing the whole website, but we have launched a web widget editor recently (http://designduke.com). You can edit individual HTML widgets like buttons, input boxes, forms etc :)

Neat! I would like to point out that the intro text right under the header is a bit hard to read with that blue background.

Thanks! let me find a more readable color

I just play with Chrome's dev tools and then copy the changes I made to CSS.

A pity, I use this frequently, all my sites use this for CSS simply because they're small and make small style fixes easy.

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