Gadgetopia

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft): Here's a great rant from Spolsky about what makes good design and how hard it is to get there. He has a great bit in the middle about the conflicts present when deciding whether or not to put a mute button on a ...

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 ...

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 ...

Language Wars: Spolsky has a fun post on how to pick a language for your next Web app. [...] the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of ...

My First BillG Review: Here's a funny recollection from Spolsky about the day Bill Gates reviewed his spec for a Microsoft Excel programming language. During these reviews, someone was present to count the number of times Bill swore. "Four," announced the f* counter [when Bill left], and everyone said, "wow, ...

Architecture astronauts take over: This whole thing is great. Spolsky gets downright medieval further down. And what is this Windows Live Mesh? It s a way to synchronize files. Jeez, we ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, ...

Fog Creek Software - About the company: I noticed this on the new Fog Creek Web site. The average Fog Creek developer has 694 square inches of screen real-estate, 2 desktop computers, and an Aeron chair. Most have private offices with windows and doors. Related to this, I m reading Peopleware: ...

Biculturalism: This is old Spolsky, but it's still good Spolsky -- In this essay from 2003, Spolsky responds to Eric Raymond's just-published (at the time) book, "The Art of Unix Programming". That book is a classic that just drips with old-school Unix disdain for anything else. (Don't confuse that statement ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fog Creek Software Management Training Program: I wish I lived in New York. Can you just imagine how much you'd learn with these guys? Our latest thinking is just to train a new generation of leaders from the ground up. To that end, today we're launching an experimental new program, ...

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 ...

Hitting the High Notes: Spolsky has written another winner. He runs all over the place with this one, but hits on a very important point: the cost of quality in software is inversely propotional to units sold. This isn't true of manufacturing. To make a more quality car, it costs ...

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 ...

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

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 have some doughts in .net Please clarify me.: Some guy made a weak attempt to get posters on Spolsky s discussion group to answer a homework question for him. Hilarity ensued. Strong typing is hitting the keyboard with your fists. Weak typing is hitting it with so little force that ...

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 ...

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 ...

Project Aardvark: This is happening over at Fog Creek Software, the Spolsky joint in New York. I could only be so lucky. I can't wait for the film. Yes, it's true... there will be a filmmaker, Lerone Wilson of Boondoggle Films, working out of the Fog Creek office this summer ...

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 ...

Are programmers overpaid?: Someone posted this simple question on one of Spolsky's forums. The ensuing discussion was...rollicking. The first comment started off the goodness: I think the good ones are underpaid. If a medical doctor earns 200k to 300k a year, the good programmers should earn that. This comment added ...

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository: Here's a site full of Greasemonkey scripts for about everything you could ever imagine. I like this one, that automatically switches all Amazon affiliate links in the page you're viewing to your own affiliate ID. Sneaky. This one for Blogines continually checks your feeds in the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fastest web language: Interesting thread over on Spolsky's forums on the perennial question: which Web language is the fastest? Some points that jumped out at me (all from different posters): Once you scale up to the point at which performance actually matters, the database is usually the bottleneck. Using efficient ...

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 ...

In the comments on Deane's latest bit of Spolsky-worship, I had postulated that, given the idea that thick clients for the web can provide a better experience, and Firefox's increasing market share, 2006 could become the year of XUL. There was a great link posted on digg this morning that ...

EULA for a web service excluding law enforcement officials?: Here's an interesting post on one of Spolsky's forums: I built a google maps website that maps out all the skateboard parks in North America. [...] My fear is that if I offer this service, cops will use the website to ...

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 ...

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 - ...

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 ...

Realtime Soft UltraMon: I'm setting up a dual-monitor system for a client (take that, Spolsky). This program adds some really great functionality. UltraMon is a utility for multi-monitor systems, designed to increase productivity and unlock the full potential of multiple monitors. They have a tour with great screencaps. For instance: ...

Mozilla Bon Echo Alpha 1 Release Notes: The first alpha release of Firefox 2.0 is out. Some thoughts on it -- There are not a lot of new customer-facing features. There are two reasons for this, in my mind: Open-source projects are often more developer-friendly than customer/user-friendly. Spolsky has talked ...

It's L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System: The city of Tuttle, Oklahoma had a Web server crash and the OS (CentOS) had to be reinstalled. Apparently someone forgot to put the Web site back up, because the default Apache page started appearing where the Web site should have been (you ...

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 ...

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 ...

Programming Contest Pits World's Top Geeks In Battles Over Coding: TopCoder.com sponsors programming competitions, which are like geek cage matches: Each contest has three programming problems -- none of which are easy to describe in a short amount of space -- that must be solved in 75 minutes. In the ...

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 ...

A convoluted Mambo: Why open source software needs usability Nazis: A good rant over at TeleRead about the state of usability in open-source software -- Mambo, in this case. I also wonder if the Geek Snobbery Factor may have been at work. So often, leadership within open source efforts is ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Announcing FogBugz On Demand: Fog Creek moves into the world of hosted software. I’m happy to announce that FogBugz On Demand is now available. This is a professionally-hosted version of FogBugz 5.0, previously only available as a download. In the end, $21 per user per month is not a phenomenal ...

On PHP: There have been a lot of blogs jumping around on PHP in the last few days, and I've finally tracked it back to its source. Tim Bray -- one of the "pillars of the Web," if I can be so bold -- posted about PHP a week ago. ...

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" ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...

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 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 ...

Update: See the comments. I have found a way around this in both IE and Mozilla. I thought about deleting the post, but if taken with the comments, it's still a pretty good tutorial of how to do this. Another Update: One of our commentors points out that Mozilla 1.7 ...

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 ...

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 ...