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Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky — Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Fog Creek Software

Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow co-founder) on software management, hiring, and building great products.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
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One of the most influential programming blogs ever written. Joel Spolsky started writing here in 2000, years before "blog" was even a common word, and shaped how a generation of developers thinks about code quality, management, and building software companies. Many posts are over two decades old and still get cited in engineering discussions today.

Written by Joel Spolsky since 2000.

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Engineering Leadership

Guidance on managing teams, technical strategy, and growing as a leader

Progress on the Block Protocol

December 19, 2022

Since the 1990s, the web has been a publishing place for human-readable documents. Documents published on the web are in HTML. HTML has a little bit of structure, for example, “here is a paragraph” or “emphasize this word.” Then you stir in some CSS, which adds some pretty decorations to the structure, saying things like: make those paragraphs have tiny gray sans-serif text! And then people think you are hip. Unless they are older, and they can’t read your t...

Making the web better. With blocks!

January 27, 2022

You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page: This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense. We have seem to have standardized on one thing: the / key to insert a n...

Kinda a big announcement

June 2, 2021

The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete that it was impossible to find anyone who knew enough to work on it. And yet they still have this old COM code base, and they still have one old programmer holding onto their job by being the only human left on the planet with a brain big enough to manually manage multithreaded objects. I remember that CO...

HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world

June 18, 2020

Sometimes when you’re trying to figure out the way the world works, basic math is enough to get you going. If we increase the hot water flow by x, the temperature of the mixture goes up by y. Sometimes you’re working on something that’s just too complicated for that, and you can’t even begin to guess how the inputs affect the outputs. At the warehouse, everything seems to go fine when you have less than four employees, but when you hit five employees, they get in each...

So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?

December 5, 2019

For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, but I have freed up a lot of time. I’m also really enjoying discovering just how little I knew about running medium-sized companies, as I watch Prashanth rearrange everything—for the better. It’s really satisfying to realize that the best possible outcome for me is if he proves what a bad C...

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