Joel on Software

2001/04/21

Spring in New York City

It was a beautiful day; I went out with Jared, Ami, and Hagit and took some pictures in Central Park. See them here.

Debugging Tip

About half of our customers are in the US, and half outside. On my primary laptop, I finally decided to permanently set my regional settings to France to smoke out the last of the internationalization ("i18n") bugs in our applications. (For example, did you know that in France large numbers are written with spaces as the thousands separator? For example 1 000 000 is a million. And 3,14 is pi. And 4/1 is January fourth). Anyway, if you see email from me with dates in French, that's why!

Even web-based applications should be written to respond to locale settings. FogBUGZ shows you dates according to the web browser's settings, not the web server. If you set your computer's regional settings to Denmark, Google appears in Danish.

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!

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, 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.