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Topic: Joel Spolsky

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Microsoft Excel

2003

In the News (Thu 31 Dec 09)

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	The Shlemiel way of software - Salon
		Author Joel Spolsky talks about what Microsoft has in common with his grandparents and what Isaac Bashevis Singer has to do with code-generating schemes.
		The connection between software and Yiddish humor may not have been evident until Joel Spolsky began writing his Joel on Software essays and blog in 2000.
		For starters, Spolsky's writing is a lot more fun to read than most of the mountain of verbiage under the "how to write software" rubric.
	dir.salon.com /story/tech/feature/2004/12/09/spolsky/index.html (583 words)

	Joel Spolsky at CUTC 2005 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Joel claimed that this additional freedom that is provided to the user makes him/her feel more in control, and thereby more happy and satisfied with the process, even though both processes, eventually, produce the same result.
		Joel picked a quote from G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French born anthropologist and psychiatrist to illustrate how something as insignificant as a coffee cup holder could contribute to a sense of safety in a vehicle.
		Joel used these as examples to illustrate how it is almost as important to think of people's emotions and their reaction to what they experience through the product, as it is to develop a good quality and functional product.
	www.ugt.ca /joel.html (1261 words)

	Dev Source: A Q&A With Joel on (Microsoft) Software
		But Spolsky (known in Microsoft circles as just-plain Joel, or "The Joel") is one of the characters whose words have had serious impact on Microsoft, especially this past year.
		Spolsky's blog, known as "Joel on Software," is a must-read among many Microsoft employees, as well as among the development/programming community in general.
		Joel: One of the reasons I get read there is the people I worked with on the Excel team are (or have been), to a large extent, the leadership of the company now.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_zddvs/is_200410/ai_n7181336 (460 words)

	Joel Spolsky and the Temple of Doom \| PHP Everywhere
		Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.
		Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning.
		Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility.
	phplens.com /phpeverywhere?q=node/view/18 (735 words)

	Java - Keeping Up Appearances
		Using news service Web site examples and other multimedia, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software got EclipseCon 2006 off to an entertaining start with his keynote address on what it takes to develop products that become best sellers, primarily by focusing on the superficial natures of consumers.
		Spolsky zeroed in on the substantial role that appearances and emotions play in determining buyer attitudes toward products, which mirrors closely the obsession with celebrity that the media and news sites serve up to appeal to the public's voracious appetite for such content.
		Spolsky said about Somerhalder: "He is a very good actor and is equally talented, but nobody has ever heard of him and nobody really wants to put him in movies."
	www.ftponline.com /channels/java/2006_03/jspolsky (506 words)

	ACHUKASTORE - The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky - Book
		Joel Spolsky is not only a bestselling author, but also a software industry veteran and one of the most respected figures in computing today.
		Joel Spolsky's writings are known for their insightful analysis, enjoyable light humor, and dare I say wisdom.
		Joel on Software (his Web site slash blog) fans won't be disappointed in the selection of authors as they deal with the concepts he writes about on his site.
	www.achuka.co.uk /amstore/info.php?asin=1590595009 (1282 words)

	SOFTLETTER: An Interview with Joel Spolsky (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Joel worked at Microsoft from 1991 to 1994 and has over ten years of experience managing the software development process.
		Joel: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
		Joel: While I was on the Excel team, Borland cut the MSRP on QPro from around $500 to around $100.
	www.softletter.com /SMS_archives/joel_spolsky.shtml (3979 words)

	Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Joel says teaching Java is bad for CS students
		Joel Spolsky writes a very interesting essay about why teaching Java in colleges is actually bad for the computer industry (and for the students themselves).
		Joel Spolsky’s article is not about C programmers being better than Non-C programmers, its about increasing the quality of Computer science education.
		Joel Spolsky is ranting about The Perils of JavaSchools: Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.
	scobleizer.wordpress.com /2005/12/29/joel-says-teaching-java-is-bad-for-cs-students (5278 words)

	Ned Batchelder: Joel Spolsky is a crotchety old man
		Joel Spolsky's latest essay is The Perils of Java Schools.
		So Joel's got the concepts he likes (pointers and recursion), and laments their decline, but doesn't seem to notice that there are newer concepts that he's never caught on to, which the Java kiddies feel at home with.
		Joel draws an analogy to Latin and Greek being required by universities in 1900.
	www.nedbatchelder.com /blog/20060101T073856.html (956 words)

	Shorewalker.com - Simplicity and ubiquity matter (or, How reality mugged Joel Spolsky)
		Joel Spolsky, eloquent proponent of Microsoft's 'rich client' vision of computing, has reluctantly changed his mind.
		Spolsky argues that this has happened just when the bulk of users have computers that will run what they really need (Word, Excel, email, Web browser) but won't run the very latest and greatest from Microsoft (.Net applications that require a 22MB.Net download).
		Spolsky is not the first to see the advantages of the "unrich" browser interface.
	www.shorewalker.com /section1/webui.html (1622 words)

	How Microsoft Lost the Joel War (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Joel writes in a way that suggests he is your friend.
		The harshest conclusion is that Joel's article is a piece of FUD from a very frightened ISV (Independent Software Vendor), who has decided to try and invent the future.
		Joel is a very clever man. The way that the has built a community around him and his great writing skill is a great feat, and one that plenty of wannabe ISVs are trying to replicate as part of the "blog explosion" (stand more than forty feet away at all times).
	secretgeek.net /joelapi.asp (2410 words)

	The Old Joel on Software Forum - Who's Joel Spolsky anyway?
		Joel is a popularizer of the classic notions of software engineering.
		Joel is one of a rare breed - technical people who can write coherently.
		As others have said, Joel is a real engineer who has well-thought-out-opinions who can present those opinions coherently and entertainingly.
	discuss.fogcreek.com /joelonsoftware?cmd=show&ixPost=18030 (480 words)

	Tailrank - The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Joel Spolsky reminds us that Microsoft's marketing has never been particularly good; he says the key factor is protecting your creative, technical staff from the abrasive details of the air conditioning delivery contracts.
		Joel on Development Abstraction - Joel's a prentenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he's talking about.
		Joel on the DAL - Yet again, Joel Spolsky has a great piece of writing.
	tailrank.com /posts/562949953556209/The_Development_Abstraction_Layer (733 words)

	Aardvark'd \| Gadgetopia
		As a software developer and startup vet, I’m a big fan of Joel’s, and would have loved to see more of his philosophy/presence in the film; instead, I don’t think he comes off particularly well and perhaps seems the opposite of the process-oriented mentor that we see in his blog.
		Joel talked about his hiring philosophy and these amazing shining resumes and made it sound exciting and interesting but that was the last we heard of it.
		On his website Joel compares this to startup.com and another film which I haven’t seen, and how they pale in comparison, but in my opinion startup.com was a hundred times better than this film.
	www.gadgetopia.com /post/4702 (1548 words)

	Bloglines \| Citations
		Avonelle points out Joel Spolsky's comment in a discussion about being a one-man shop and Christopher Hawkin's response.
		Joel Spolsky Insults The Little Guy: ” I’m not one for public bickering, but I simply cannot let this pass without comment.
		Joel Spolsky posted an opinion in his discussion forum yesterday regarding one-man consultancies like mine.
	www.bloglines.com /citations?siteid=303028&itemid=72 (555 words)

	Kareem Mayan's Weblog: customer experience, emerging technology, media, and more - ETech: Joel on Misattribution
		I attended Joel Spolsky's talk this afternoon, which was supposed to be on community building.
		Spolsky spoke about learned helplessness, which can contribute to depression because those afflicted have learned that anything they do is futile.
		Spolsky used the example of having to pee really badly during the last half of a movie.
	www.reemer.com /archives/2005/03/17/etech_joel_on_misattribution (1552 words)

	ewbi.develops: Joel Spolsky in Error
		Spolsky's position (see here, here, and here for starters).
		Spolsky will soon recognize and expound on the virtues of well-mannered structured exception handling, or he will say "just kidding!" while explaining that he only meant to create a topic about which all of us obscure bloggers could cross-link and trackback to ourselves in order to increase our intra-community traffic.
		Spolsky's comments and realized that they were in fact confined to "both Java and C++".
	ewbi.blogs.com /develops/2003/10/joel_spolsky_in.html (635 words)

	BookBlog: Joel Spolsky is dead wrong for once
		Joel Spolsky is usually insightful, smart, and lucid.
		To be fair, Spolsky is writing about Eric Raymond, who epitomizes the ubergeek arrogance of a class of unix infrastructure hackers.
		Spolsky may be succumbing to a stereotype of UNIX culture but it's the same stereotype that the book describes, and it's a book review.
	alevin.com /weblog/archives/001275.html (288 words)

	Save $9.25! Save Â£6.12! The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
		Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity
		While this particular collection of essays is not by Joel, nor were they originally published by Apress, I think that the effort put into identifying, collecting, and editing (yes, Joel provides nice introductions to each and every essay) transform these already great parts into an excellent whole.
		You may not always agree with the authors (or Joel), but this book provides such a breadth of approach and perspective that you are bound to learn something - even if you have read all of these before.
	www.hackcraft.net /bookref?urn:isbn:1590595009 (677 words)

	Joel Spolsky: The Development Abstraction Layer (reddit.com)
		Joel might as well try to explain what you need to do to write great literature while he is at it (how to arrange the furniture in your work area, when to go to bed, when to get up,...)
		Joel might as well try to explain what you need to do to write great literature while he is at it (how to arrange the furniture in your work area, when to go to bed, when to get up,...) Software is a lot more like literature than it is like manufacturing.
		Shakespeare to Spolsky: "You are tedious!" Although I think the "engine room" analogy works and his point is valid, there's something about this that doesn't work: >the very best thing that infrastructure can do is disappear completely But that huge infrastructure that makes Dolly sing doesn't want to disappear.
	reddit.com /info/493d/comments (3828 words)

	Berkeley on Joel Spolsky
		One of the great things about living in Berkeley is that a lot of interesting people come to town, from political figures giving talks on campus to writers at Cody's to musicians playing at Freight and Salvage, and if you are at all adventurous you can hear and meet many of them.
		Joel was ensconced at the first table, attempting to swallow bites of foot between responding to questions.
		In his writing in Joel on Software, Joel always comes across as a little Olympian, delivering his deep insights from his vast experience.
	www.thebishop.net /geodog/archives/1297.xml (552 words)

	Salon.com Technology \| The Shlemiel way of software
		The connection between software and Yiddish humor may not have been evident until Joel Spolsky began writing his Joel on Software essays and blog in 2000.
		For starters, Spolsky's writing is a lot more fun to read than most of the mountain of verbiage under the "how to write software" rubric.
		Spolsky, a professor's son who grew up in New Mexico and Israel (where he served in the armed forces), worked as a program manager on Microsoft Excel in the early '90s and later for the free e-mail provider Juno before cofounding Fog Creek Software.
	archive.salon.com /tech/feature/2004/12/09/spolsky/print.html (5307 words)

	Antigravitas - Joel Spolsky is wrong
		Joel Spolsky has a new essay up on the perils of teaching Java in Computer Science schools.
		Let's start with where Joel is right: Forcing students to learn pointers and functional programming is a good way to weed out the kids who don't have the natural talent to be great programmers.
		If you are focused on creating stars (or, as Joel is, on recognizing and recruiting stars as employees) you need some way to separate the sheep from the goats, and sheep who have problems understanding recursion are never going to understand doubly de-referenced pointers or continuations.
	jackwilliambell.livejournal.com /113877.html (2252 words)

	Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Some Thoughts on Joel Spolsky's "Microsoft Losing the API War" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		I read Joel Spolsky's How Microsoft Lost the API War yesterday and found it pleasantly coincidental.
		Some of the issues Joel brings are questions I've begun asking myself and others at work so I definitely agree with a lot of the sentiments in the article.
		My main problem with Joel's piece is that it doesn't have a central theme but instead meanders a little and lumps together some related but distinct issues.
	www.25hoursaday.com /weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=49250729-fd67-4dd1-a960-2a6a8f55d9cb (1074 words)

	IT Conversations: Joel Spolsky
		Joel and his family bought the first IBM PC in Israel, and when he moved back to the U.S. and completed college, he went to work on Microsoft's Excel development team, still a strong influence on his opinions on software development.
		And Joel has plenty to say about Microsoft: the impact of the cast-in-stone file formats for Word and Excel, the split between the so-called Raymond Chen and MSDN Magazine camps, why some developers may not move to Avalon/XAML/WinFX, and what will happen to Win32.
		Though you probably won't agree with everything Joel says about the development and use of software in the technology realm, he presents his viewpoints in a way that will make you think through your argument and come out on the other side with a more thorough understanding on the subject and its role in business.
	www.itconversations.com /shows/detail207.html (393 words)

	Jonathon Delacour: There ain't no such thing as plain text
		I wish Joel Spolsky had published his excellent introduction to Unicode and character encoding a week earlier, because then I wouldn’t have wasted a couple of hours trying to write a snippet of PHP code to convert Japanese characters to Unicode character entities.
		But PHP started out in 1995 as a series of Perl scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf who was born in Greenland, lived in Denmark for much of his childhood, then spent a number of years in Canada before moving to the United States.
		Joel Spolsky wrote that he has been using UTF-8 for all the translations of Joel on Software (currently translated into 28 languages) and “has not had a single person complain about not being able to read it”.
	weblog.delacour.net /archives/2003/10/there_aint_no_such_thing_as_plain_text.php (2526 words)

	Bookpool: Joel on Software
		Joel Spolsky has quite a bit of experience in the software development industry, ranging from a few years spent working at Microsoft to running his own software company.
		Joel is one of those guys that has an opinion on everything and sometimes he's even right.
		Joel's articles are organized into three major sections and two minor ones.
	www.bookpool.com /sm/1590593898 (1480 words)

	The Fishbowl: Taking Exception to Joel Spolsky
		OK, so usually Joel Spolsky is a pretty bright guy, and even when his ideas seem wacky or overstated, there's something true and useful about them.
		Disagreement with Joel: In his most recent article, Joel Spolsky declares that exceptions are bad.
		Spolsky a fair amount of credit on his opinions.
	fishbowl.pastiche.org /2003/10/14/taking_exception_to_joel_spolsky (1110 words)

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