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# Joel on Software

## Your host

I’m Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.



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Read the archives in dead-tree format! Many of these articles have been collected into four books, available at your favorite bookstore. It’s an excellent way to read the site in the bath, or throw it at your boss.

## Careers

Ready to level up? Stack Overflow Jobs is the job site that puts the needs of developers first. Whether you want to take control of your search or let employers discover you, we’re on a mission to help every developer find a job they love.

Looking to hire smart programmers who get things done? Stack Overflow Talent is a fully-customized sourcing solution that helps you understand, reach, and attract developers on the platform they trust most. Find the right candidates for your jobs. Learn more.

For my day job, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and level up. Each month, more than 40 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow to ask and answer questions and find better jobs. Stack Overflow is also the flagship site of the Stack Exchange network, 160+ question and answer sites dedicated to all kinds of topics from cooking to gaming. According to Quantcast, Stack Overflow is the 30th largest web property in the United States and in the top 100 in the world.




I also founded Fog Creek Software, one of the most influential small tech companies in the world. As an independent, privately-owned company, we’ve been making customers happy since the turn of the century. We share what we've learned about how to make great software, both by writing about our ideas and by creating products, like FogBugz, Trello and Gomix, that help others make great technology. As a result, Fog Creek's impact on the world of developers rivals companies a thousand times our size.

## Twitter! Twitter!
My Tweets

## What’s new?

December 19, 2022 by Joel Spolsky

## Progress on the Block Protocol

Since the 1990s, the web has been a publishing place for human-readable documents. Documents published on the web are in HTML. HTML has a little bit of… Read more “Progress on the Block Protocol”

January 27, 2022February 1, 2022 by Joel Spolsky

## Making the web better. With blocks!

You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long… Read more “Making the web better. With blocks!”

June 2, 2021March 12, 2024 by Joel Spolsky

## Kinda a big announcement

The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before… Read more “Kinda a big announcement”

June 18, 2020March 12, 2024 by Joel Spolsky

## HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world

Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. Read more “HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world”

## Reading lists

Over the last 16 years I’ve written 1114 articles on this site about software development, management, business, and the Internet. To make it easy to find the best ones, here are some reading lists, sorted by topic.

### Top 10

- Things You Should Never Do, Part I
- Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
- Fire And Motion
- The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
- The Law of Leaky Abstractions
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- How Microsoft Lost the API War
- The Perils of JavaSchools
- The Development Abstraction Layer

### Stack Overflow

- stackoverflow.com
- Stack Overflow Launches
- Stack Overflow is a Wiki
- Stack Overflow Live!
- Talk about StackOverflow
- Server Fault now in public beta
- Get a job
- Upgrade your career
- Programmer search engine
- Stack stats
- Raising money for StackOverflow
- Facebook / LinkedIn importers
- Stack Exchange 2.0
- Sites for experts
- News
- Area 51 is now in beta
- Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta
- A new WordPress Stack Exchange
- Fork it!
- New, PNG-based Stack Overflow flair
- Stack Exchange for Jewish Life and Learning
- The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions
- Stack Overflow 2010 recap
- Careers 2.0 (by Stack Overflow)
- Stack Overflow (the company) is now Stack Exchange
- Stack Exchange Raises $40m
- The Stack Overflow Age
- Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams
- The next CEO of Stack Overflow

### New developer

- NDAs and Contracts That You Should Never Sign
- Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- Getting Your Résumé Read
- Mike Gunderloy’s Coder to Developer
- Advice for Computer Science College Students
- The Perils of JavaSchools
- Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3
- Talk at Yale: Part 2 of 3
- Talk at Yale: Part 3 of 3
- Exploding Offer Season
- The Duct Tape Programmer
- Developers’ side projects

### Rock star developer

- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
- Painless Bug Tracking
- Daily Builds Are Your Friend
- Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
- Hard-assed Bug Fixin’
- A Hard Drill Makes an Easy Battle
- Back to Basics
- Five Worlds
- The Law of Leaky Abstractions
- Craftsmanship
- Biculturalism
- Foreword to Painless Project Management with FogBugz, by Mike Gunderloy
- Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
- Can Your Programming Language Do This?
- Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
- Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby

### Tech lead

- Two Stories
- Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
- Lord Palmerston on Programming
- The Development Abstraction Layer
- Three Management Methods (Introduction)
- The Command and Control Management Method
- The Econ 101 Management Method
- The Identity Management Method
- Evidence Based Scheduling

### CEO

- Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
- Things You Should Never Do, Part I
- Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?
- Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers
- Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
- Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
- Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
- Wasting Money on Cats
- Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef
- Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
- Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it.
- In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome
- Fire And Motion
- Strategy Letter V
- Platforms
- Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity
- How Microsoft Lost the API War
- Seven steps to remarkable customer service
- Strategy Letter VI
- Martian Headsets
- Figuring out what your company is all about
- Why testers?

### Startup founder

- Fixing Venture Capital
- Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
- Foreword to “Eric Sink on the Business of Software”
- My First BillG Review
- Architecture astronauts take over
- The eternal optimism of the Clear mind

### Software designer

- Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy
- Figuring Out What They Expected
- Choices
- Affordances and Metaphors
- Consistency and Other Hobgoblins
- Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
- Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives, Part Two
- Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives, Part Three
- The Process of Designing a Product
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1: Why Bother?
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 2: What’s a Spec?
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 3: But… How?
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 4: Tips
- Humane Programming
- The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
- Nothing is as Simple as it Seems
- Building Communities with Software
- It’s Not Just Usability
- The Project Aardvark Spec
- Introduction to Great Design (Second Draft, In Progress)
- Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft)
- What Makes It Great? (First Draft)
- Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!
- Choices = Headaches
- Simplicity
- Elegance
- The Big Picture
- Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering

### Product manager

- How Many Lies Can You Find In One Direct Mail Piece?
- Mouth Wide Shut
- Camels and Rubber Duckies
- How to demo software
- Where there’s muck, there’s brass

### Recruiter

- Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Find Programmers?
- Hitting the High Notes
- Finding Great Developers
- A Field Guide to Developers
- Sorting Resumes
- The Phone Screen
- The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
- Programmer search engine

### Fog Creek Software

There’s a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully. Fog Creek Software. Here’s the story:

- More on Sabbaticals…
- Command and Conquer and the Herd of Coconuts
- Spring in Cambridge
- What is the Work of Dogs in this Country?
- Working on CityDesk, Part One
- Working on CityDesk, Part Two
- Working on CityDesk, Part Three
- Working on CityDesk, Part Four
- Working on CityDesk, Part Five
- Rub a dub dub
- New Server at Peer 1 Network
- Finding an Office in New York City
- Bionic Office
- Colo Expansion Version 2.0
- The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part I
- The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part II
- The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part III
- The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part IV
- The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part V
- Project Aardvark Midterm Report
- How to Ship Anything
- FogBugz 4½ and Subjective Well-Being
- Copilot 2.0 ships!
- A game of inches
- Five whys
- The new Fog Creek office
- New, faster Copilot
- Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here
- How Trello is different
- Introducing HyperDev
- Anil Dash is the new CEO of Fog Creek Software

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