20 posts from: Joel On Software
Amnesia
(Indexed 2008-12-10):
[Image]Mysteriously, about a week ago, Dan, the program manager designing most of the new features in FogBugz 7, came to ask me what features I thought should go in the timesheet reporting plug-in.The timesheet reporting plug-in? Whats that?It sounded dangerously close to a feature that could be used by managers to see reports on developers timesheets. Like, something a weak manager would use to figure out who is the best developer on the team or to make sure everybody is pounding away at the co...(truncated)...
StackOverflow podcasts moving to IT Conversations
(Indexed 2008-06-06):
[Image]Yes! I'm still doing those weekly podcasts with Jeff. We've already done eight of them.[Image]We're moving, though, to IT Conversations, a huge network of terrific audio shows about technology. Just looking at all the great shows they have there makes me feel a bit like a kid in jeans and a T-shirt with a dirty slogan who just walked into Chez Panisse.The new feed, IT Conversations-based feed is at http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.xml.The easy way to subscribe is w...(truncated)...
stackoverflow.com
(Indexed 2008-04-17):
[Image]What is stackoverflow.com?Nothing, yet.But here's the concept:Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google.And sometimes, the first result looks like it's going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, a...(truncated)...
Martian Headsets
(Indexed 2008-03-18):
[Image]Youre about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. Itll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmothers and wrapped the Mustang around a tree. This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team thats going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decisi...(truncated)...
Where there's muck, there's brass
(Indexed 2007-12-06):
[Image]When I was a kid working in the bread factory, my nemesis was dough. It was sticky and hard to remove and it got everywhere. I got home with specks of dough in my hair. Every shift included a couple of hours of scraping dough off of machinery. I carried dough-scrapers in my back pocket. Sometimes a huge lump of dough would go flying someplace where it shouldn't and gum up everything. I had dough nightmares.I worked in the production side of the factory. The other side did packing and ship...(truncated)...
Talk at Yale: Part 2 of 3
(Indexed 2007-12-04):
[Image]This is part two of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one appeared yesterday.[Image]After a few years in Redmond, Washington, during which I completely failed to adapt to my environment, I beat a hasty retreat to New York City. I stayed on with Microsoft in New York for a few months, where I was a complete and utter failure as a consultant at Microsoft Consulting, and then I spent a few years in the mid-90s, when the Internet was fir...(truncated)...
Evidence Based Scheduling
(Indexed 2007-10-27):
[Image]Software developers dont really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. Itll be done when its done! they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten.Most of the schedules you do see are halfhearted attempts. Theyre stored on a file share somewhere and completely forgotten. When these teams ship, two years late, that weird guy with the file cabinet in his o...(truncated)...
Introducing FogBugz 6.0
(Indexed 2007-10-23):
[Image]At some point, while I was running around the country giving demos of FogBugz 6.0, the development team officially got it out the door, and I don't think I ever officially announced, "FogBugz 6.0 is now shipping," so, here it is:[Image]FogBugz 6.0 is now shipping!It has a ton of major new features: an integrated Wiki, an API, a completely overhauled search engine, and lots of Ajax to make things really snappy.Probably the most interesting part of 6.0 is Evidence-Based Scheduling, which us...(truncated)...
Stop the catalogs
(Indexed 2007-10-15):
[Image]I remember in college trying to call the catalog companies to get them to stop sending me mountains of paper catalogs. It was futile. Most of them had no way of doing that, and even if you got off the list, you'd always find your way back on again two months later.Catalog Choice (it's a .org) contacts catalog merchants on your behalf and gets them to stop sending you catalogs. For free.[Image]Great idea, excellent implementation (very nice Ajax UI and great graphic design), and I'll let y...(truncated)...
Strategy Letter VI
(Indexed 2007-09-19):
[Image]IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli.In the late 80s, Lotus was trying very hard to figure out what to do next with their flagship spreadsheet and graphics product, Lotus 1-2-3. There two obvious id...(truncated)...
Explaining Steve Gillmor
(Indexed 2006-12-24):
[Image]Nobody I know can understand a thing Steve Gillmor is talking about, mainly because he makes so many obscure references without explaining them. I thought as a public service I would provide a detailed exposition of his latest blog post, Bad Sinatra. My goal here was to explain just about everything, and I hope its not too tedious. It works like the Talmud. First Ive got a paragraph quoted directly from Steve. Ive taken the liberty of adding hyperlinks, which are not in the original artic...(truncated)...
Oh, the emails you'll get...
(Indexed 2006-11-10):
[Image]A management consultant at Bain wrote me a nice email, that included the following sentence:"Our team is conducting a benchmarking effort to gather an outside-in view on development performance metrics and best practice approaches to issues of process and organization from companies involved in a variety of software development (and systems integration)."I didn't understand a thing he wrote. The email contained a lot of words (benchmarking, outside in, performance metrics, best practice, ...(truncated)...
Book Review: Beyond Java
(Indexed 2006-10-13):
[Image]Programmers under the age of thirty probably dont realize why Aged Senile Programmers like me are so slow to adopt exciting new programming languages the day they come out, and why we roll our eyes at hip bandwagon ideas that sell books and consulting engagements (forgive me if I dont seem excited enough about your new book, Extreme UML Refactoring Patterns).Its probably because we read No Silver Bullet, a stunningly important essay from way back in 1986, by Frederick P. Brooks (he of Myt...(truncated)...
Commissioned Headhunters on the Job Board: Good or Bad?
(Indexed 2006-09-08):
It was only a matter of time beforethe new job board got its first policy violation: a recruiter posting a job without disclosing the name of the company that it was for.The reason we require a company name, as opposed to a recruiter's name, is because I think that job seekers are sick of looking at generic lists of seemingly anonymous companies. The reason recruiters don't like to post company names is because they don't get a commission unless they refer the employee, so they don't want to tak...(truncated)...
Wasabi
(Indexed 2006-09-02):
I think some people thought I was joking earlier today when I said that we have our own compiler, Wasabi, for FogBugz.Yes, Wasabi is real. Because FogBugz is sold to customers who run it on their own servers, it has to run on hundreds of thousands of web servers "in the wild," unlike most web apps where the programmer completely controls the deployment environment. We have to ship code that runs out-of-the-box, which means lowest common denominator.This is kind of unusual. Most web developers ar...(truncated)...
Language Wars
(Indexed 2006-09-01):
An old friend emailed me to ask:“I wanted to get your response to some basic questions concerning technologies available for creating an enterprise level application that is built upon a Web Server, Web based applications, and a large distribution model and collection model. The project is starting from scratch and so there is no legacy code involved but other than that I won't bore you with the details...“Would you head down the .NET route or J2EE?“Which Web Server (Apache, II...(truncated)...
My three favorite Firefox extensions
(Indexed 2006-08-26):
Here are three Firefox extensions I can't live without.IETabIETab takes advantage of the fact that Internet Explorer is available as an ActiveX control, which is available to be embedded in any Windows application, to open certain websites in Firefox using Internet Explorer. Whenever a website comes up complaining that you need to get "Netscape 4.0 or some other modern browser" you can just right click on the tab and it'll pop up right in Firefox being rendered by Internet Explorer. You can set ...(truncated)...
Can Your Programming Language Do This?
(Indexed 2006-08-02):
One day, you're browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they're exactly the same, except that one block refers to "Spaghetti" and one block refers to "Chocolate Moose." // A trivial example: alert("I'd like some Spaghetti!"); alert("I'd like some Chocolate Moose!");These examples happen to be in JavaScript, but even if you don't know JavaScript, you should be able to follow along.The repeated code looks wrong, of course, ...(truncated)...
Processing Internship Applications
(Indexed 2006-02-10):
[Image]The senior developers at Fog Creek are spending much of this week evaluating the 400+ applications we received for our five available summer internships. We got about half as many applications as last year. This is mainly because we were careful to keep our job listings off of Monster.com and eRecruiting. I'm not 100% sure of this, but it seems like when you post an internship to Monster or eRecruiting, candidates can apply for that job simply by clicking one link. As a result, last year ...(truncated)...
Too Many Ajax Calendars
(Indexed 2006-02-08):
For all the Ajax calendars that are appearing, it's a shame I can't find one which really meets my needs.I tried out Trumba, Kiko, 30 Boxes, Yahoo! Calendar, and Spongecell. I couldn't recommend any of them. My needs are probably weird, but not that weird. Here's what I need a calendar to be able to do:Enter flights. Many of these calendars only lets me enter things that start on 15 minute intervals, and flights are just not scheduled that way. Many of these calendars insist I specify the durati...(truncated)...