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… Read more "Progress on the Block Protocol"
Joel Spolsky
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ · 110 posts · history since 2009 · active
19 Dec 2022
27 Jan 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… Read more "Making the web better. With blocks!"
2 Jun 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… Read more "Kinda a big announcement"
18 Jun 2020
Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. Read more "HASH: a free, online platform for modeling the world"
5 Dec 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… Read more "So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?"
24 Sept 2019
Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who… Read more "Welcome, Prashanth!"
28 Mar 2019
We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Read more "The next CEO of Stack Overflow"
3 May 2018
New product: Stack Overflow for Teams lets you direct questions to members of your own team, company, or organization. Read more "Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams"
23 Apr 2018
There's this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work. Read more "Strange and maddening rules"
13 Apr 2018
I had to think for a minute to realize that Stack Overflow has “gamification" too. Not a ton. Maybe a dusting of gamification, most of it around reputation. Read more "A Dusting of Gamification"
6 Apr 2018
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. Read more "The Stack Overflow Age"
12 Jan 2018
My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook. Read more "Birdcage liners"
9 Dec 2016
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time? Read more "Developers’ side projects"
Last week I was invited to Slush in Helsinki, where I gave a keynote called “Developers are Writing the Script for the Future.” Here’s a 20 minute video… Read more "Developers are Writing the Script for the Future"
Sixteen years after launching Joel on Software, it's now running on WordPress. Read more "RIP CityDesk"
6 Dec 2016
For the first time since Fog Creek Software was founded more than sixteen years ago, we have a new CEO, Anil Dash. Read more "Anil Dash is the new CEO of Fog Creek Software"
I've moved to WordPress. There may be some bugs! Read more "Oh look, a new site!"
31 May 2016
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well).… Read more "Introducing HyperDev"
20 Jan 2015
Today Stack Exchange is pleased to announce that we have raised $40 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz. Everybody wants to know what we’re going to do with… Read more "Stack Exchange Raises $40m"
24 Jul 2014
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last… Read more "Trello, Inc."
22 Jul 2013
There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes… Read more "Victory Lap for Ask Patents"
30 Apr 2013
Trello has been out for less than two years and it’s been growing like wildfire. We recently hit 1.5 million members, of whom about 1/3 perform some… Read more "Free as in Fortune Cookies"
2 Apr 2013
The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding… Read more "The Patent Protection Racket"
11 Mar 2013
The team at Fog Creek is releasing a major new version of Kiln today. Kiln is a distributed version control system. One of the biggest new features… Read more "Town Car Version Control"
9 Jul 2012
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with… Read more "Software Inventory"
17 Apr 2012
The folks over at UserVoice are using Trello quite extensively throughout their development process. Founder Richard White describes it all in detail.
27 Mar 2012
My friend Noam Wasserman at Harvard Business School has spent years researching startups. His work is great, because he actually does real, quantitative research on the kinds… Read more "The Founder’s Dilemmas"
13 Feb 2012
“The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young ‘incubator twerps’ strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine… Read more "The Management Team"
13 Jan 2012
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The… Read more "New York City gets a Software Engineering High School"
6 Jan 2012
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong,… Read more "How Trello is different"
15 Sept 2011
Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They’re all pretty similar). This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello,… Read more "Should you launch at a conference?"
13 Sept 2011
Around the time of Fog Creek Software’s ten year anniversary, I started thinking that if we want to keep our employees excited and motivated for another ten… Read more "Announcing Trello"
27 Jun 2011
[UPDATE – September 6th – Regrettably, DevDays had to be cancelled. See the announcement on the Stack Exchange Blog for details.] Stack Overflow DevDays, the universe’s best… Read more "Stack Overflow DevDays is Back!"
24 Jun 2011
26 May 2011
The Stack Exchange network is already up to 51 sites on diverse topics, from math to cooking to science fiction. Each site is a community on its own,… Read more "Modern community building"
9 May 2011
We’re working on a series of two-day Stack Overflow conferences for the fall: “What’s this conference about? The idea for the original DevDays was to have high-bandwidth,… Read more "Help us organize the next Stack Overflow conference"
28 Apr 2011
What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom? I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome.… Read more "Lunch"
27 Apr 2011
Jeff Atwood and I have resumed our weekly podcast, formerly known as the Stack Overflow Podcast, now known as the Stack Exchange Podcast! Here are some ways… Read more "The podcast is back!"
9 Mar 2011
The snack room at Stack Exchange got a wee upgrade today: Find out why (and read to the end to find out how to get your own… Read more "Stack Overflow (the company) is now Stack Exchange"
23 Feb 2011
One day, you’ll be telling your grandchildren about getting a programming job, version 1.0. You would send a “resume” to a “recruiter.” It included all kinds of… Read more "Careers 2.0 (by Stack Overflow)"
11 Feb 2011
There’s a surprising amount of misinformation out there about whether software companies own the work that a programmer does in their spare time. From my answer to… Read more "Does your employer own your side projects?"
3 Feb 2011
If you weren’t able to make it to the FogBugz/Kiln world tour, a video of my presentation is up now on YouTube. (If you have a high… Read more "FogBugz/Kiln Demo"
24 Jan 2011
(reposted from the Stack Overflow blog) 2010 was an absolutely amazing year here at Stack Overflow. We grew from 7 million visitors to over 16 million, putting… Read more "Stack Overflow 2010 recap"
5 Jan 2011
“Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites?” — From The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions, over on the Stack… Read more "The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions"
9 Dec 2010
It seems like Stack Exchange is the perfect platform for questions about Jewish observance. After all, most of the Talmud reads just like Stack Overflow: a question,… Read more "Stack Exchange for Jewish Life and Learning"
21 Oct 2010
Due to unexpected demand we’ve been working with the venues for the upcoming FogBugz World Tour 2010 (incorporating DVCS University) to find more room. We already have… Read more "World Tour – last chance"
30 Sept 2010
The first Stack Exchange site to make it all the way through the community creation process is now live and out of beta! webapps.stackexchange.com is a place… Read more "WebApps.stackexchange.com nothingtoinstall.com now live!"
29 Sept 2010
Thanks to the hard work of the Fog Creek team, including ten great summer interns, we have just released amazing new upgrades to FogBugz and Kiln. To… Read more "FogBugz and Kiln (coming soon to a city near you)"
21 Sept 2010
17 Sept 2010
Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously… Read more "Merging Season"
2 Sept 2010
The Stack Overflow Blog: “The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it ‘the… Read more "Fork it!"
31 Aug 2010
We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of… Read more "A new WordPress Stack Exchange"
19 Aug 2010
Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just… Read more "Simplicity vs. Choice"
16 Jul 2010
We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week! Gaming Cooking Pro Webmasters We’ll have three more for you next week, too.
12 Jul 2010
“We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and… Read more "Domain Names"
7 Jul 2010
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email? Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange… Read more "Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta"
28 Jun 2010
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year… Read more "Don Norman at the Business of Software 2009"
22 Jun 2010
Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites. Benofsky from Hacker News writes:… Read more "Area 51 is now in beta"
9 Jun 2010
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much… Read more "My secret weapon for setting executive compensation"
8 Jun 2010
Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek… Read more "Paul Kenny’s talk at the Business of Software 2009"
18 May 2010
FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily… Read more "News"
10 May 2010
I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a… Read more "Kathy Sierra’s talk at the Business of Software 2009"
4 May 2010
“And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.” Announcing the… Read more "News"
30 Apr 2010
Dear TechSmith, Thank you very much for all the pictures of your pets: Also thanks for the toys, which were great. I especially like the iPhone. Yours,… Read more "Note from Taco"
19 Apr 2010
Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.… Read more "Sites for experts"
13 Apr 2010
Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a… Read more "Stack Exchange 2.0"
31 Mar 2010
There is a new book out by Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month)! The Design of Design
The entire extended Stack Overflow team (including the Stack Exchange team) is meeting in New York in April to do some strategic planning. For example, we need… Read more "Stack Overflow Party"
17 Mar 2010
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed… Read more "Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby"
14 Mar 2010
At right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week! Some of you may have seen my final column in… Read more "Puppy!"
18 Feb 2010
New StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if… Read more "Facebook / LinkedIn importers"
14 Feb 2010
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into… Read more "Raising money for StackOverflow"
11 Feb 2010
In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If… Read more "Headcount"
26 Jan 2010
My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach… Read more "Why testers?"
25 Jan 2010
Steve Krug has written a follow up to his usability classic Don’t Make Me Think. The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun… Read more "Rocket Surgery Made Easy"
22 Jan 2010
“As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a ‘keep everyone on the same… Read more "A little less conversation"
30 Dec 2009
Microsoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve… Read more "Secret language"
14 Dec 2009
Is your desktop backed up? Did you backup that server? Are your backups on a different machine? Do you have offsite backups? All good questions, all best… Read more "Let’s stop talking about “backups”"
13 Dec 2009
The higher someone’s Stack Overflow reputation, the more likely they are to have submitted a CV to Stack Overflow Careers: This is not entirely surprising, of course:… Read more "Stack stats"
9 Dec 2009
“Like most entrepreneurs, Ryan and I are still learning about how to manage people and teams. And we’re both used to hiring very smart and dedicated people… Read more "When and how to micromanage"
2 Dec 2009
For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing… Read more "Programmer search engine"
5 Nov 2009
Do you like your job? Do you enjoy the people you work with? Would you want to have lunch with them? Every day? Alex Papadimoulis thinks that… Read more "Upgrade your career"
3 Nov 2009
My new Inc. column is up. “For a guy who wrote a book on how to hire great programmers, it’s mortifying how incompetent I’ve been at enlarging… Read more "Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?"
1 Nov 2009
What is your company about? Recently I got inspired by Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users and Head First series of books revolutionized developer education. She… Read more "Figuring out what your company is all about"
31 Oct 2009
Adam Bosworth: “All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.” Required reading.
26 Oct 2009
It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers,… Read more "Capstone projects and time management"
8 Oct 2009
Why does WiFi work so poorly at tech conferences? Marcus GriepI assume that WiFi wasn’t really designed to handle a big ballroom with 2000 people, all trying… Read more "The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem"
23 Sept 2009
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who… Read more "The Duct Tape Programmer"
8 Sept 2009
This month we’re starting to get organized for StackOverflow DevDays, a series of one-day, mini conferences in ten different cities. Because of the packed schedule, keeping on… Read more "Countdown challenge"
2 Sept 2009
I’m organizing a half-day startup workshop in San Francisco. This would be a terrific event to attend if you’ve recently started a software company and feel dazed,… Read more "Upcoming startup workshop in San Francisco"
1 Sept 2009
At last year’s Business of Software conference, I gave a talk about designing products that are more than just adequate. How do you make a product that… Read more "Being Number One"
13 Aug 2009
Red Gate Software has launched a startup incubator in Cambridge. Free office space, internet access, room, board, advice, and pocket money. (I’m one of the people giving… Read more "New startup incubator in Cambridge, England"
31 Jul 2009
Seth Godin: “If you’re going to interrupt everybody with an ad, it better be something everybody wants to buy. So what do you end up with? Average… Read more "Seth Godin at the Business of Software Conference"
23 Jul 2009
“Every single industry was going to be turned upside down! New industries would be created! Start-ups would make people rich! Which is really nice, because it’s awesome… Read more "The Day My Industry Died"
Congratulations to Bob Walsh on publishing his Web Startup Success Guide (to which I wrote the foreword). His interview with GTD Guru David Allen, which is chapter 8,… Read more "Web Startup Success Guide"
Brett Kiefer describes Evidence Based Scheduling 2.0 on the FogBugz Blog: “EBS 2.0 gives you the vocabulary of strict dependencies and start dates. You can now say… Read more "EBS 2.0"
20 Jul 2009
A year ago today, FogBugz development was in disarray. The original roadmap was too complicatedWe had done this big offsite at a beach house in the Hamptons… Read more "Fruity treats, customization, and supersonics: FogBugz 7 is here"
9 Jul 2009
Mencius Moldbug: “They create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains. Of course, since the giant electronic brain is a… Read more "Why Wolfram Alpha fails"
23 Jun 2009
Clear just closed down. Here’s how it worked while it was in business. You paid $200 for a one-year membership. You underwent a big, complicated background check… Read more "The eternal optimism of the Clear mind"
10 Jun 2009
Dave Winer (in 2007): “Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor.… Read more "Platform vendors"
From my latest Inc. column: “Giant corporations such as Google and Microsoft are like cities full of relatively anonymous people: You don’t actually expect to see anyone… Read more "A visit to Microsoft and Google"
Andrew emailed to ask why we don’t have a StackOverflow DevDays day in New York City. That’s a fair question! There’s a big software development community here.… Read more "Conferences in New York"
9 Jun 2009
Whoa. Less than a month ago, we announced first Stack Overflow DevDays and opened registration to 300 people in each of five cities. Well, that sold out… Read more "StackOverflow DevDays: Five New Cities"
3 Jun 2009
The Joel on Software Job Board has been working well since we launched it almost three years ago. It logs about 220,000 unique visitors every 21 days,… Read more "Get a job"
29 May 2009
Server Fault is now in public beta! When Jeff Atwood and I launched Stack Overflow last fall, we really wanted it to be a site for and… Read more "Server Fault now in public beta"
12 May 2009
Stack Overflow has been going nuts—after just six months in business, we’ve had 3.5 million unique visitors per month. We’ve starting thinking about how to get that… Read more "Stack Overflow DevDays"
5 May 2009
“Even as competitors like Circuit City go bust, B&H remains packed with loyal customers. And that makes me very happy. For a business owner, there’s nothing more… Read more "Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives"
29 Apr 2009
Here’s a video of a talk I gave at Google last week about StackOverflow.
7 Apr 2009
Three years ago, I was invited to New Zealand to speak at Webstock, the local web conference. Now, let me tell you honestly, I go to a… Read more "The Business of Software 2009 speaker lineup"
3 Apr 2009
We’re always looking for good programmers at Fog Creek, but right now we could really, really use a top notch Win32 (C/C++) developer to join the Copilot… Read more "Win32 programmer needed"