Joel on Software

Business of Software Conference

The Business of Software conference coming up at the end of October is new this year, but it's got a pretty phenomenal line-up of speakers:

• Guy Kawasaki practically invented the field of high tech evangelism working at Apple in the 1980s, and has written some of the best books about marketing I've read (my personal favorite is The Macintosh Way.)
• Rick Chapman wrote the encyclopedia of software marketing, The Product Marketing Handbook for Software, and the hilarious In Search of Stupidity, which makes the quite convincing argument that success in software is a matter of just not doing stupid things. (My foreword to In Search of Stupidity).
• Hugh MacLeod does those great cartoons, which is reason enough to listen to him, but he's also the marketing strategist for the only Web 2.0 wine company.
• Tim Lister needs no introduction to this crowd. He's the author of Peopleware, the first and last thing you have to read about managing software teams. That's really all you need to know.
• Eric Sink, moderator of our own Business of Software forum, co-founder of SourceGear, the classic small software company success story.

Also speaking: Dan Nunan, Jennifer Aaker, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bill Buxton, and me. Register here.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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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, co-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 Trello, easy web-based collaboration software, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, and Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.