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I had lunch with an old junior-high, high-school, and college friend of the dice geek cum computer geek crowd, Jason Cohen. Kim managed to track him down for my suprise birthday party last weekend. Before that, terrible keeper-upper with people that I am, I hadn't seen him since long ago in the Liaison days when he was working in the same building.

Since college he's started and run several companies (one of them funded, oddly enough, by one of the founders of the company I work for, BMC: I think he was the "M.").

We talked almost exclusively about our geek day lives. Currently, he codes and sells several developer tools that all look really interesting:

• Code Reviewer provides quite a bit of assistance to reviewing code, allowing you to queue up batches of code for review, comment on individual lines, and put a nice interface and automate a lot of what goes on in code reviews. I've carped about code reviews before, but I think Code Reviewer would eliminate most of the things that anoy me about them.
• Code Historian basically data mines version control systems, putting a really nice looking GUI ontop of what is usually otherwise icky looking diffs and spread out information. He said he sells quite a bit it: it must be really gratifying to see all those sales.
• Code Metrics which does a lot of project management oriented data mining of the source.

He said he's about to release another product which sounds really cool: essentially, it loads all your version control info and other metrics into a data base and allows you to query it. He showed me a demo through Excel that was a good example of layering new features into using pre-existing tools instead of re-inventing the wheel.

He's also been doing work with IT Watch Dogs on their super small environment monitors: they're small devices that you put in a server room, for example, to monitor and report on temperature, humidity, power supply etc. When he was describing the WeatherDuck, I was thinking it'd be a shoe box sized device, but really, it fits in your hand.

Overall, as always, he's up to interesting stuff, and all on his own without working for a big company.