Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software and Fogbugz fame is doing a cool project with a bunch of summer interns.

He hired 4 summer interns - software developers - and told them to create a 1.0 project. Over 800 students applied for the 4 jobs. Check out the blog of the guys who made the cut.

One quote I really like:

The first time you give an end-to-end demo to the boss, it always fails, and everyone scurries back to their desks to figure out what the heck it is about showing a demo to the boss that makes software which has run successfully 10,000 times before suddenly crash inexplicably, with an error message that is usually no more helpful than “remote side closed connection.” And the boss chuckles, and goes back to his office to practice golf putting, while the developers flail around wildly trying to get their code to run in even the most basic way again.

Unbelievable how often that happens. It’s like a law of nature, or something.

The part that’s actually completely awesome is that an independent filmaker is hanging around with a video camera half the time, taping material for a movie of the intern’s summer. That will be one I’ll be looking for at the video store.