A Conversation with Joel Spolsky
John Stanik · Queue · 2007
Joel Spolsky has never been one to hide his opinions. Since 2000, he has developed a loyal following for his insightful, tell-it-like-it-is essays on software development and management on his popular Weblog “Joel on Software”. The prolific essayist has also published four books and started a successful software company, Fog Creek, in New York City, a place he feels is sorely lacking in product-oriented software development houses. Spolsky started Fog Creek not with a specific product in mind, but rather to create a kind of software developers’ utopia, where “programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy.” So far, he has succeeded. The company has maintained a 100 percent employee retention rate while shipping several profitable software products. Its latest release, Fogbugz, is a comprehensive, Web-based project-management system that uses a technique called EBS to help software developers better predict their release dates.