Reading lists

Over the last 8 years I’ve written 1014 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

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

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)

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

Startup founder

• Fixing Venture Capital
• Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
• Foreword to “Eric Sink on the Business of Software”
• My First BillG Review

Program manager

• Picking a Ship Date
• Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test
• Usability Testing with Morae
• Set Your Priorities

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
• 2001/12/15
• 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
• 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)

Now that you've read all that —

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

 

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

Free subscriptions

Enter your email address to receive an occasional email when there’s a major new article. I will never share your address, period, and there's a link to unsubscribe in every email.

Appearances

• Waterloo CS Club 22 Jan, Waterloo
• DLD 25-27 Jan, Munich
• Future of Web Apps 23-24 Feb, Miami
• Business of Software 2009 9-11 Nov, San Francisco

Podcast

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.

Jobs

The exclusive Joel on Software job board has the best jobs and the best developers.

Community

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

Get answers to programming questions at StackOverflow, a site I co-founded with Jeff Atwood.

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.

Translations

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?

български (Bulgarian)
Catalan
简体中文 (Chinese - Simplified)
繁體中文 (Chinese - Traditional)
Czech
Croatian
Danish
Dutch
Español
Esperanto
Estonian
فارسی (Farsi)
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
Ελληνικά (Greek)
עברית (Hebrew)
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
日本語 (Japanese)
ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
한국어 (Korean)
Lithuanian (lietuviškai)
Malayalam
मराठी Marathi
Norwegian
Pig Latin
Polish
Português
Português Brasileiro
Romanian
Русский (Russian)
Српски (Serbian)
Slovak
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Türkçe
Ukrainian