I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, responsible for just about everything on this site. This is Joel on Software, where I’ve been ranting about software development, management, business, and the Internet (ack) since 2000. Rest assured, however, that this isn’t one of those dreaded blogs about blogging.
Born in the USA, I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I started programming in 1978 at the UNM Computer Center, on an IBM-360 mainframe running CALL-OS. I moved with my family to Jerusalem, Israel when I was 15 years old.
After high school, like most Israeli kids, I served in the military, where I was in a program called Nachal that allowed you to spend less time in uniform in exchange for work on a kibbutz. It was during this period that I spent almost two years, in all, working in the giant bread factory Oranim, baking hundreds of thousands of loaves a night. By the time I finished my military service, I had reached the rank of sergeant in the paratroopers (tzanchanim), which anyone who knows me will realize is completely absurd. I have no ability to submit to discipline, I’m terrible at anything requiring physical prowess, and I hated every minute of that time in the army.
I came back to the US for college, where I went to Penn for a year, then transferred to Yale, where I got a BS in Computer Science. My senior thesis was a design for a programming language called U, a dialect of C that supposedly let you declare “user” variables and functions that would automatically get exposed to the user through the UI.
I started my career at Microsoft, a little software company outside of Seattle, where I was a program manager on the Excel team. My area was “programmability” and most of what I worked on in those days was replacing the Excel macro language (XLMs) with Excel Basic, and providing an object-oriented interface to Excel. Excel Basic became Visual Basic for Applications and the OO interface is what you know as OLE Automation, a.k.a. IDispatch.
In those days, Microsoft was small (5000 employees!) and reasonable. But I was tired of having no life outside of work, so I moved to New York, where I spent about ten minutes working for Microsoft Consulting before I fled in fright, getting on a bicycle and riding straight across the USA over the course of ten weeks while I figured out my next plan.
I had two more jobs in New York. I spent a couple of years at Viacom Interactive Services, doing a lot of goofing around but also building an application server for MTV which was really fast. Then I crossed the street to work at Juno Online Services, a national ISP.
But I had always wanted to start my own company, and I finally reached the point where my mind had tricked me into thinking it was going to be easy. So, together with my friend Michael Pryor, I started Fog Creek Software in September, 2000, which is what I've been doing ever since. We've been growing steadily, without any outside investment, since then, and despite the so-called downturn we’ve managed to double our sales every year. We didn't start with a particular product in mind: our goal was simply to build the kind of software company where we would want to work, one in which programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy. The theory, which has proven itself over and over again, is that this kind of thinking would allow us to attract the super-talented software developers who would do great things and make us successful.
This website started in early 2000 at the URL joel.editthispage.com, hosted by Dave Winer's UserLand on his new Manila publishing platform. I just started banging out articles about the business and management of software, including a whole book about user interface design. All that stuff is still here, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. I’ve also published four books which are mostly just edited versions of this website, and I speak at conferences several times a year.
Over the last 9 years I’ve written 1062 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.
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.
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:
I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.
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Jeff Atwood and I have a weekly podcast where we chat about software development and the new developer Q&A website we built, stackoverflow.com.
Get answers to programming questions at StackOverflow, a site I co-founded with Jeff Atwood.
Chat about software on the discussion groups
Share interesting links with other readers at The Joel Reddit
Meet me at the annual Business of Software Conference, a conference I co-host with Neil Davidson. There’s also a year-round Business of Software discussion group
For my day job, I’m the CEO of Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY. We’re proving to the world that treating developers well can be profitable.
We make FogBugz, a bug tracking system that actually works and can be used to manage everything your development team does, from bug tracking to customer email to feature management to project scheduling and so much more. Free online trial.
We also make Fog Creek Copilot, which lets you control someone else’s computer (with their permission, of course) over the Internet. It's the best way to fix someone's computer problems remotely. There’s nothing to install, it’s simple as heck, and it works through any kind of firewall, NAT, or proxy situation with zero configuration. More
If you're in college, we have the best paid internships in the business. If you’re not, check out our job openings.
Many articles on this site have been generously translated by volunteers around the world on our public translation project wiki. If you speak a second language, would you be so kind as to translate something?
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