Joel on Software

News

“It’s at this point you typically say, ‘Blistering Barnacles, we’ve got to get some consistent coding conventions around here!’ and you spend the next day writing up coding conventions for your team and the next six days arguing about the One True Brace Style and the next three weeks rewriting old code to conform to the One True Brace Style until a manager catches you and screams at you for wasting time on something that can never make money, and you decide that it’s not really a bad thing to only reformat code when you revisit it, so you have about half of a True Brace Style and pretty soon you forget all about that and then you can start obsessing about something else irrelevant to making money like replacing one kind of string class with another kind of string class.”

Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

College students: my company has paid summer internships in New York City, including free housing, free lunch, and the chance to develop software people will really use, with great mentors on interesting projects. Don't miss this chance of a lifetime. We only have a few spaces and they always go fast, so apply today.

Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.