“Joel Spolsky is changing the world. Maybe not your world, but the world of programmers and software companies and the people who work for them.” Opening lines of Seth Godin’s Tribes When we last left our hero (whom BTW I finally met last week when the FogBugz / Kiln tour hit Tel Aviv), Stack Overflow […]
What a week for content farms! Here’s the brief overview: On Friday Matt Cutts acknowledged some influential bloggers’ criticisms that Google had a faustian deal with Content Farms that were making Google worse. IMO Matt’s statement boiled down to: You’re wrong, Google is getting better, not worse, and we keep trying to keep up with […]
[Reminder / Disclosure: I work at Answers.com, which is in some ways a competitor] Congrats to Joel Spolsky on getting funding from an all star team of investment bankers. Having this combination of great entrepreneurs and great VCs certainly increases this companies’ chances. But the company’s current plan seems to based on two (long shot?) […]
Joel Spolsky has long been one of my role models. Some Spolsky highlights: Joel Spolsky Was thrown out of airplanes while serving in the Israeli army Helped found Kibbutz Hanaton Studied at Penn, graduated from Yale Worked as Program Manager for Microsoft Excel Biked across the US Founded 2 successful companies: FogCreek Software, and (with […]
Fantastic post today by Joel Spolsky Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? I could feel Joel’s pain. Essentially he was jettisoning the basic premises that had guided him for a decade. Joel came to the painful conclusion that there was only room for one big company in his market, and that if he continued only […]
Entrepreneurs, Product Managers and other otherwise intelligent people often get distracted by their ambition. Everything from Disney to these Out of the Box management (I mean leadership) books keep hitting you with hyperbole about dreaming big. Which is only OK if you also have the discipline to think and act small. Take Google. They have […]
It’s easier and more fun to criticize and discuss negatives, but let me describe what work is like when it’s going well, so we can remember what our goal as managers is, and why it’s worth it. You look forward to going to work every morning. You already know what you’re going to accomplish today, […]
Hey Joel, You don’t know me but you’ve been a mentor to me. I love your writing. I love your software. And you left a (virtual) paper trail of years’ worth of great posts that I can use as conversation starters. So I expect to be covering your stuff a lot. But it’s the good […]
This Hall of Fame Blog Post review begins my public stalking of Joel Spolsky. Among other things, Joel co-created FogBugz and Stack Overflow and writes Joel on Software. I’ll do a later post on Spolsky’s work and philosophies, this post will focus on a single excellent and ancient post from Spolsky. Post: FogBugz 4½ and […]