Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks

Rating: 1/4 (Super-boring documentary on the making of a web service.)

Joel Spolsky is a highly influential writer on software and I have been a keen reader of his Joel on Software blog for years. Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks is a documentary that covers the making of a software product at his company, Fog Creek Software. Four interns are selected to come to New York and work at Fog Creek on a remote desktop web-service called Co-Pilot.

Aardvark’d is extremely boring and a waste of one’s time. The interns, their travails as they build Co-Pilot, their experiences in New York, and the Fog Creek offices, none of these have been produced to show any sort of interest. The photography is horrible and the few instances of excitement are pithy. The geek in me died a slow death waiting for any scenes of coding or debugging. Aardvark’d is a movie that will interest neither the geek nor anyone else for that matter.