FishEye and Clover won Jolt awards (archive) this year! FishEye in the “Change and Configuration Management” category and Clover in the “Testing Tools” category.
They are “the Oscars of our industry” which – for better or for worse – is about right. But I still I have a fondness for the Jolt awards. The first time I saw the awards in Dr Dobbs Journal, I remember thinking how nice it was that this caffeinated beverage company targets us sleep-deprived code monkeys, and gets us enough to award us for our deeds. And fondness for the Jolt awards certainly has something to do with my fondness for Dr Dobbs Journal.
I’ve poured a lot of code into FishEye over the years. And we are still working quite hard at improving it, so it is sometimes hard to keep at the top of the stack the fact that a lot of people use it and think it is awesome. When non-nerds ask me what I do I give a standard response of “I develop tools for other software developers”, which most people seem to grok reasonably easily. This response took me a few years to refine and means such lines of conversation quickly get to the point where a change of subject is needed (to the relief of both parties). Conversations with other nerds run a little different. We can either be rather evasive, or overly detailed – seeing a fellow nerd’s face gloss over is a bad sign. It is a balancing act that I don’t always get right. But now, if someone’s curiosity matches my current grandiosity, I might just say:
I’ve won a Jolt.