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Victory Lap for Ask Patents
There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent fr…
Joel on Software
A weblog by Joel Spolsky, a programmer working in New York City, about software and software companies.
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- 113
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- #64 personal
Visit joelonsoftware.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2007 – Mar 2024
Tech Industry & Business 72Career & Management 53Software Engineering 25Startups 13Tools & Productivity 6Society, Policy & Culture 6
2
Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
3
HyperDev – Developer Playground for Full-Stack Web Apps
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well). Today we’re announcing the public beta of Hyper…
4
Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
5
Joel Spolsky: Lunch
What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom? I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome. I’ve been on teams that don’t, and lunch every day is, at best,…
6
The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
7
New York City gets a Software Engineering High School
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream…
8
How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
9
Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus…
10
Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
11
Anil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software
For the first time since Fog Creek Software was founded more than sixteen years ago, we have a new CEO, Anil Dash.
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Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and…
13
The Stack Overflow Age
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.
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Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?
One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the same, except that one block refers to “Sp…
15
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 he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha…
16
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
17
My First BillG Review (2006)
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
18
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
19
Hash: A free, online platform for modeling
Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them.
20
Trello, Inc
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
21
Strange and maddening rules
There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work.
22
The Patent Protection Racket
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have …
23
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
24
How to be a program manager
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t. Charles Simonyi, the brilliant p…
25
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
26
In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
27
Raising money for StackOverflow
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meet…
28
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
29
Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of…
30
Should you launch at a conference?
Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They’re all pretty similar). This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello, and both times, i…