About Joel Spolsky

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.

The Story So Far

Born in the USA, I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and moved with my family to Jerusalem, Israel when I was 15 years old.

After high school, like most Israel 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 spend 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 attended the University of Pennsylvania for one 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, which was a dialect of C in which the programmer could declare functions as being "user" functions which would cause the compiler to automatically generate a user interface allowing the user to invoke those functions.

Into the Work World

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 did in those days was to replace the Excel macro language (XLMs) with Excel Basic, and provide 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 10 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.

Fog Creek Software

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.

Joel on Software

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 published two books which are mostly just edited versions of this website.

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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