Gadgetopia

Joel on Software - Book Reviews: Joel Spolsky has presented a fantastic bookshelf for programmers. I've heard of every book in this list. Someday, I'll read them all. So here it is Joel's Programmer's Bookshelf. This is the short list of all the books that I honestly think that ...

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code: Here's an oldie but a goodie from Joel Spolsky. It's a 12-item checklist of things you need to do right in a software development shop. Here's the first five: 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in ...

The Perils of JavaSchools: Spolsky goes ballistic on Java and the dumbing down of computer science instruction in colleges. If you don't deal with pointers and functional recurison, then don't even think about working at Fog Creek. As an employer, I've seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning ...

Rest in peace: Earlier this week, a well-known researcher of artificial intelligence posted a suicide note to one of Joel Spolsky's forums. Members of the Joel on Software discussion board [...] were unsure whether these suicide notes were a joke of poor taste, or legitimate cries for help. Nonetheless, many ...

Joel on Software - Friday, August 08, 2003: Joel Spolsky has fessed up to a big, fat loophole in CityDesk pricing. This is a great piece of software, so get it now to get it cheap. "...we promised to upgrade all CityDesk 1.0 Home or Pro Edition users to CityDesk ...

Perfectionism: Joel makes some good points about how we programmers have a tendency to try make things perfect beyond any practical benefit. He's touched on this before as well, with a story about the Netscape refactoring. Perfectionism is a very dangerous quality in business and in life, because by being ...

Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity: Joel Spolsky wrote the forward to the new book In Search of Stupidity. He has some interesting thoughts on the eternal struggle between the programmers and the marketing department: Netscape s monumental decision to rewrite their browser instead of improving the old code base ...

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that ...

Joel Spolksy has a reputation for hiring great people. He made a movie about his intern program, in fact, which cultivates the best of the best. He s distilled all of this hard-won knowledge in a new book, which is titled for his theory of good programmers: Smart and Gets Things ...

Joel on Software - Fixing Venture Capital: Here's a good article about why your company should or shouldn't seek VC money. It's long, but it gets very good down below the graphs the bit about the four curves getting out of whack makes a lot of sense. "VCs do ...

About Fog Creek Software: I wanted to send Joel Spolsky an email today, and I was prowling around the Fog Creek site looking his email address when I stumbled onto this "About Fog Creek" page. It's well-worth reading (which makes it a glaring exception to the average "worthless by definition" ...

We talked about this film way back when Project Aardvark was announced. Fog Creek Software had an idea for a piece of software, and they recruited four college students over the course of one summer to build it. And they filmed them doing it. (They may claim to have made ...

IT Conversations: Joel Spolsky - Joel on Software: This is a great MP3 interview with Spolsky. (I know, I'm pathetic -- I should just move to New York and start stalking him...) Towards the end of it (it's almost an hour), he talks about making sure you don't bind your ...

Bribing Bloggers: This is a really interesting post from Spolsky about the ethics of bloggers accepting free stuff from vendors. Apparently Microsoft offered to send Joel a new Ferrari laptop pre-loaded with Vista, for free. [...] I've decided that from this point forward I'm not accepting anything, full stop. Even ...

Five Lessons Open Source Developers Should Learn from Extreme Programming: A good article, summarized below. Test, Test, Test Practice Simplicity Refactor, Don't Rewrite (this bit reminded me of Joel Spolsky's comments) Release Frequently Be the Customer, When Appropriate

Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky): This a good post that discusses how Joel Spolsky changed his mind about user interfaces. I knew Spolsky was very thick-client oriented for a long time, but this post has some interesting insights and information on how and why he ...

Boing Boing gets a semi-extreme makeover: Boing Boing made some changes this morning. [ ] the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there s a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. But I m still beating both ...

Copilot is now free on weekends: I swear, Joel Spolsky is like the greatest guy, ever. Well, recently we figured out that we re paying for a lot of bandwidth over the weekends that we don t need, so we decided to make Copilot absolutely free on weekends. Yep, that s right free ...

"Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks": Aardvark'd, the movie by my hero Joel Spolsky, is available at Google Video for a $6.99 download. I don't know how this works -- if you get to watch it more than once, for instance -- but it's cheap compared to the $20 video and ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...

You know the "obidos" that you see in every Amazon URL? I've been seeing it for years, and always thought it was odd, but never knew what it was. Well, according to Joel Spolsky's book, "obidos" (little "o") is Amazon's custom-built e-commerce system that they've been laboring over since they ...

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): For a lot of people, this has been a "the less I know, the better" issue. A great tutorial here by Joel Spolsky. "I have an announcement to make: if you are a ...

Joel on Software: A really interesting point here. ...language designers never bother to put database integration features into their languages. As a tiny example of this, the syntax for "where" clauses is never identical to the syntax for "if" statements. And don't get me started about data type mismatches: just ...

Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap: This is great. This is a former editor of Gizmodo who wrote this rant that was printed in...Gizmodo. And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the ...

Project Aardvark: What a fun gig this would be, just to check out the legendary Fog Creek offices. I want to go. Do you live anywhere near Manhattan? Do you want to meet Joel, check out the Fog Creek Office, try out Fog Creek Copilot, and get paid $30 for ...

Joel on Software - Fire And Motion: I just found this two-and-a-half year old essay by Joel Spolsky, and I'm frankly aghast at how aptly it describes how I code. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's ...

New websites: Joel Spolsky just had both his Web sites Fog Creek and Fog Bugz redesigned by Happy Cog Studios. He has an interesting piece this morning about the process, and about how he incrementally destroyed one design and had to start over. That s when I knew we ...

Open House: I want to go so bad it hurts. Joel, send me a ticket. Great pictures at that URL of their new office space. Someone in New York needs to go and take pictures. Here at Fog Creek Software we recently finished a big expansion of our office space. ...

Fix your mom s computer for mother s day: Joel rules. What a great promotion idea. This Sunday is Mother s Day. Why not fix your mom s computer? You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn t pop up every 15 seconds. To make ...

Knobs and Trees: A great rant about how HTML hasn't really gone anywhere for years and Web UIs lag woefully behind client UIs, much as Joel Solsky stated about a month ago or so. I think the essential problem with browsers is that users have not demanded of vendors [...] ...

Introduction to Best Software Writing I: Joel Spolsky just published a new book. I loved his last book. And even though all of its content was contained on his site, just having it in a single text was great. Well, just like last time, all of the content of this ...

Creo Tokens - Creo: Found this via Joel Spolsky who explains it a little better than this marketing copy. "A Token is like a shortcut or alias that you can send via e-mail or instant message. With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large ...

Joel on Software - Tuesday, August 26, 2003: Fog Creek has eliminated their Home Edition of CityDesk, thus upping the cheapest price from $79 to $299, which I find awfully depressing. "We used to have both a Home Edition and a Professional Edition. That was a brave experiment, which was, ...

stackoverflow.com: With both Spolsky and Atwood involved, I suspect this will be huge. Jeff Atwood and I decided to do something about it. We re starting to build a programming Q&A site that s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain ...

How to Ship Anything: My hero Joel Spolsky details a fascinating journey down the road of creating a process to ship all the DVDs people have been ordering. My estimate was that it took about three minutes of labor per order, and we only got it that low because we ...

Biculturalism: Joel Spolsky Windows programmer extraordinare has written a lengthy review of Eric Raymond's book "The Art of Unix Programming." He expands beyond this, however, to examine the cultural differences between Windows and Unix developers in general. What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There ...

Oh, the emails you'll get...: Joel writes a funny diatribe about function points and management consultants. Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big ...

Meet the Life Hackers: Here is scientific proof that bigger computer screens make you more productive. The stats are buried in another article about general productivity (I think -- I didn't read all of it). On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - ...

Bionic Office: I've been waiting for this post for a while, ever since reading Joel's (hysterical) treatise on how he found his new office. He's now had it built out and here are the details and the pictures. "The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about ...

Off Topic - So what does a web suicide note look like?: I missed this when it actually happened two years ago. Chris McKinstry posted a suicide note to his own blog and to the Joel on Software off-topic discussion forum (since closed). He had taken a bunch of pills, ...

Architecture Astronauts Are Back: Joel Spolsky goes eloquently buckwild on the term "Web 2.0." Bonus points for the Adam Sandler reference. The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use ...

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Bill Gates, and I stumbled across this tidbit about his home: According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million. ...

I love reading Joel Spolsky. The guy is so smart it makes your eyes water sometimes. I just read his five-part series on The Road to FogBugz 4.0. It was actually just so-so for Spolsky, but that's still really good for anyone else. What's great about this stuff is the ...

A Whole Lotta Features: This is a good tutorial on how to run an entire site from MT, but it runs into a problem that I've written about before. "...and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a ...

Simplicity: This is a good essay that's a huge counterpoint to the "embrace limitations" philosophy that 37 Signals started pushing a few years ago when Basecamp came out. I think what Joel is saying is that you need features, but they need to appear simple to the end users. And ...

How Microsoft Lost the API War: This is an incredibly long, but very interesting, article from Joel Spolsky in which he explains why the venerable Windows API is dying. He spends 6,252 fascinating words and a couple of dozen tangents getting to this point at the end: [...] Microsoft's API ...

Wasabi: In response to comments from his post yesterday (which we discussed), Joel has released information about Wasabi, which is a compiler they wrote so they code generate code for FogBugz in VBScript (for Windows) or PHP (for Linux). Fog Creek used to write in VBScript and automatically convert it ...

A few months ago, I read Steve McConnell's book "Code Complete". It is, without a doubt, the best book on programming I have ever read. It doesn't matter what platform you code in, this book will help you do it better. An absolute goldmine. Besides down-and-dirty coding strategies, McConnell discusses ...

Developers Developers Developers Developers: This is one area where Microsoft has excelled: getting people to build software for its operating system. I have worked in an IT shop with the subscriptions Joel details below. It's overwhelming to have that much software. "If you're a software company willing to commit to ...

Lately, I've seen a couple "boutique job boards." Fog Creek just put one up, and so did 37 Signals some time ago. Prices are fairly high: 37 Signals is $250 for a month, and Fog Creek is $350 for three weeks. But therein lies the attraction I think: you get ...

I created a Microsoft Passport account some time ago so my son could play Asheron's Call on MSN's Game Zone (a fad which lasted about a day-and-a-half). With Passport, I could set it up so his account was a "child" account under my Password account, apparently giving me some control ...

The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part I: Joel Spolsky is running a series of articles about the development of FogBugz 4.0. I haven't even read the first installment, but the fourth paragraph contains a hysterically damning description of the RFP process. RFP stands for "Request for Proposal." It's a request ...

Here are two things that cut so many good ideas off at the knees. These two factors are the two biggest things that stop good ideas from getting implemented and make programmers pause when they should forge ahead. 1. The Urge to Generalize Say you come up with an idea ...

I've been putting off posting about The Building of Basecamp because I was trying to get my hands on a picture. Neither Joe nor I thought to bring a camera, and the workshop was the first thing we did in Chicago, before Joe bought a disposable to shoot this ...