Hacker Cinema
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks
2005 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Lerone D. Wilson
Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer geeks around the world fix their friends' computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek.
5 positive2 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Nowhere near the same quality and actually (mini)series but:
- Halt and Catch Fire (actually pretty good quality and full series)
- The Playlist (creation of Spotify)
- The Dropout (creation of Theranos... do not get advice from this one though)
- WeCrashed (about WeWork, haven't seen this one though)
- Silicon Valley (silly comedy but might work)
Also some TV/movies/docs you might find in YouTube:
- Pirates of Silicon Valley (movie about bill gates and steve jobs)
- Project Code Rush (about the beginning of Mozilla)
- Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with geeks (doc about a startup by Joel Spolsky of StackOverflow fame).
Oh and also those two Steve Job movies that came out side by side.
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks[1] is a delightful time capsule of 2005 software development. It includes interviews with @pg, the Reddit founders, and other delights. It's available on youtube now.
When I interviewed at Fog Creek, they had a DVD copy of Aardvark'd in a care package in my hotel room. I watched it that night, and for my interview day in the morning it felt like everyone I interviewed with was a movie star. Sneaky plan, Joel. Well executed.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
Aaron makes an appearance in the 2005 documentary "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", which was a documentary about interns building a product at at FogBugz (by Joel Spolsky, now known for Trello and Stack Overflow). I watched it again recently after many years and was sad to see Aaron appear with his unbridled optimism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc.
I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.
Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]
PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Geeks
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2033981/
Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman).
https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946
If you like this sort of thing, Fog Creek released their 2005 Aardvark'd documentary for free on YouTube last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg .. not balls off the wall exciting but an interesting look at a team of interns developing a product.
Ha, it was video footage by Lerone Wilson that gave him away.
If I may, I'll plug the "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks" documentary that Joel sells. It was much better than I expected.