Joel On Software

Joel On Software

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We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand.
We're not excited...
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is.
No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff....
To make people happy, you have to let them feel like they are in control of their environment.
To do this, you need to correctly interpret their actions....
There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over.
The reason is that they think the old code is a mess....
TRS-80 Level-I BASIC could only store two string variables, A$
and B$. Similarly, I was born with only two bug-storing-slots in my brain....
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule.
It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features....
Whenever somebody gives you a spec for some new technology, if you can't understand the spec, don't worry too much.
Nobody else is going to understand it, either, and it's probably not going to be imp...
When I was 6 and my dad brought home one of the world's first pocket calculators, an HP-35, he tried to convince me that it had a computer inside it.
I thought that was unlikely. All the computers o...
Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country.
Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors. Some...

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