Glitch, Inc. (previously known as Fog Creek Software, Inc.) is a software company specializing in project management tools. Its products included

project management Project management is the process of supervising the work of a Project team, team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project initiation documentation, project documentation, crea ...

and

content management Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

, and

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or more people examine the source code of a computer program, either after implementation or during the development process. The persons perf ...

tools.

Fastly Fastly, Inc. is an American company based in San Francisco, which describes itself as a cloud computing company. Fastly provides content delivery network services, image optimization, and load balancing services. Fastly's cloud security services ...

acquired the company in 2022.

History

The company's original name was Fog Creek. Based in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

, Fog Creek was founded in 2000 as a consulting company by

Joel Spolsky Avram Joel Spolsky (; born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of ''Joel on Software'', a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Exc ...

and Michael Pryor. As the consulting market started to dry up due to the collapse of the

Dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, Fog Creek moved to a product-based business. In December 2016

Anil Dash Anil Dash (; born September 5, 1975) is an American technology executive, entrepreneur, Prince scholar and writer. He is the Head of Glitch and VP of Developer Experience at Fastly. Career In 1999, Dash launched his personal weblog, dashes.com ( ...

was appointed CEO. Fog Creek's offices are located in the

Financial District A financial district is usually a central area in a city where financial services firms such as banks, insurance companies, and other related finance corporations have their headquarters offices. In major cities, financial districts often host ...

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

. On September 25, 2018, the company was officially renamed Glitch after its flagship product. Glitch staff announced intentions to unionize with the

Communications Workers of America The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media labor union in the United States, representing about 700,000 members in both the private and public sectors (also in Canada and Puerto Rico). The union has 27 loc ...

in early 2020 as part of the

Campaign to Organize Digital Employees The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and empl ...

. The company voluntarily recognized their union. Around the same time, the company

laid off A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization ...

a third of its staff during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

. In February 2021, Glitch workers signed a

collective bargaining agreement A collective agreement, collective labour agreement (CLA) or collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is a written contract negotiated through collective bargaining for employees by one or more trade unions with the management of a company (or with an ...

with the company. According to the

(CWA), this is the first agreement signed by white collar tech workers in the United States. Cloud services

, known for its

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

, acquired Glitch, as announced in May 2022. CEO Anil Dash became Fastly's VP of developer experience. Glitch's staff had declined since 2020 from 50 to 14 employees, all of whom joined Fastly. The union dissolved prior to the acquisition when its collective bargaining agreement expired and the union's three remaining members decided not to pursue another agreement.

Products

FogBugz

FogBugz is an integrated

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

system featuring bug and

issue tracking An issue tracking system (also ITS, trouble ticket system, support ticket, request management or incident ticket system) is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues. Issue tracking systems are generally used in collab ...

, discussion forums,

wikis A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic process that organizations use to manage, analyze, and improve their interactions with customers. By leveraging data-driven insights, CRM helps businesses optimize communication, enhance cus ...

, and evidence-based scheduling developed by Fog Creek Software. It was briefly rebranded as Manuscript in 2017, which was acquired in 2018 and was renamed back to FogBugz.

CityDesk

CityDesk was a website management software package. The backend of the system ran as a desktop application written on Windows in Visual Basic 6.0 with all data stored in a Microsoft Jet database. It was one of FogCreek's first products, first announced in 2001.

Copilot

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,

, 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 A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, called Project Aardvark, where they posted updates on the progress of their project, even though at that time the details were still 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 TightVNC is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source remote desktop software server and client application for Linux and Windows. A server for macOS is available under a commercial software, commercial source code license only, with ...

, a variant of

Virtual Network Computing VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the RFB protocol, Remote Frame Buffer protocol (RFB) to remotely control another computer. It transmits the computer keyboard, keyboard and computer mouse, mouse in ...

(VNC), as its core protocol. On November 7, 2005, a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, was released. It was produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films. In 2014 Fog Creek restructured, spinning Copilot out as a separate company. In 2022, Copilot announced it was closing and that the domain name had been sold.

Stack Overflow

In 2008, Jeff Atwood and

created

Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...

, a question-and-answer Web site for

computer programming Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called computer program, programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of proc ...

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 A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

Digg Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...

. 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 12,000,000 registered users and more than 20,100,000 questions. Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top ten most discussed topics on the site are:

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

, C#,

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, Android,

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, jQuery, C++, and CSS. 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 An IT administrator, system administrator, sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administr ...

and Super User for questions from computer "

power users A power user is a user of computers, software and other electronic devices who uses advanced features of computer hardware, operating systems, programs, or websites which are not used by the average user. A power user might not have extensive tech ...

". In June 2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

Stack Exchange

In September 2009, Fog Creek Software released a

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...

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 Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

from

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...

and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects.

Trello

In 2011, Fog Creek released

Trello Trello is a web-based, kanban-style, list-making application developed by Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Fog Creek Software, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold to Atlassian in January 2017 ...

, a collaborative project management hosted web application that operated under a

freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium", is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical ( ...

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. In 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 Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with headquarters in both San Francisco and London. It invests primarily in tech companies. History Index Ventures has its origins in a Switzerland, Swiss bond (finance), bond-trading firm cal ...

and

Spark Capital Spark Capital Partners, LLC is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in the U.S. with operations in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Spark is a generalist VC firm with a portfolio that spans verticals such as consumer internet, enterpris ...

. In January 2017,

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australia, Australian-United States, American proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management. Domicile (law), Domiciled in ...

announced it was acquiring Trello for $425 million.

Glitch (application)

The Glitch web application launched in the spring of 2017 as a place for people to build simple web applications using JavaScript. While JavaScript is the only supported language, other languages can be unofficially used. Pitched as a "view source" tool that lets users "recombine code in useful ways". Glitch is an online IDE for

and Node.js and includes instant hosting, automated deployment and live help from community members. IDE features include live editing, hosting, sharing, automatic source versioning, and

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

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 (except for the editor and API), allowing users to view or remix the site's

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

. In December 2018,

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

announced that it will retire

Thimble A thimble is a small pitted cup worn on the finger that protects it from being pricked or poked by a needle while sewing. The Old English word , the ancestor of thimble, is derived from Old English , the ancestor of the English word ''thumb''. ...

, Mozilla's browser-based educational code editor, 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 early 2020, Glitch released a paid plan, known as "boosted apps". Users can pay 8 dollars a month to have projects with more

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

, more storage, and no wake up screen. In May 2025, Glitch announced it will end project hosting on July 8, 2025, while continuing to provide downloads until the end of the year.

References

External links

* {{Glitch navbox Business software companies Privately held companies based in New York City Software companies based in New York City Software companies established in 2000 Software companies of the United States 2022 mergers and acquisitions