I'm trimming my subscription list, removing feeds that haven't updated since last summer, and noticed that Joel On Software is one. He's one of the prolific influential bloggers. | Continue reading
Since the 1990s, the web has been a publishing place for human-readable documents. Documents published on the web are in HTML. HTML has a little bit of… Read more "Progress on the Block Protocol" | Continue reading
Adam Barr writes about Workplace Advantage, a new project going on at Microsoft to rethink how offices are arranged. “This is the plan to have people working in flexible space that can be qui… | Continue reading
Joke: A poor Jew lived in the shtetl in 19th century Russia. A Cossack comes up to him on horseback. “What are you feeding that chicken?” asks the Cossack. “Just some bread crumbs,” replies the Jew… | Continue reading
Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun. It’s easy… | Continue reading
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and… | Continue reading
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people … | Continue reading
When you go into a restaurant and you see a sign that says “No Dogs Allowed,” you might think that sign is purely proscriptive: Mr. Restaurant doesn’t like dogs around, so when he… | Continue reading
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.… | Continue reading
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl… | Continue reading
One more thing… It’s been awhile since we launched a whole new product at Fog Creek Software (the last one was Trello, and that’s doing pretty well). Today we’re announcing the public beta of Hyper… | Continue reading
I’ve been rather quiet lately on this weblog — mainly because we’ve been working so hard at Fog Creek getting ready for the beta of CityDesk, our flagship product. But I’d l… | Continue reading
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&… | Continue reading
You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can inser… | Continue reading
Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjus… | Continue reading
Have a look at this little chart: [Source: Iris Associates] This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 thro… | Continue reading
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (… | Continue reading
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme… | Continue reading
The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha… | Continue reading
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r… | Continue reading
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp… | Continue reading
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. … | Continue reading
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u… | Continue reading
Sometimes simulating complex systems is the best way to understand them. | Continue reading
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin… | Continue reading
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir… | Continue reading
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re … | Continue reading
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. At any given time, I can only remember two bugs. If you ask… | Continue reading
A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and… | Continue reading
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to … | Continue reading
Ask any software CEO these days what their biggest problem is, and they’ll usually complain about how hard it is to find good programmers. “There’s just nobody out there,” t… | Continue reading
For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, … | Continue reading
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks… | Continue reading
For some reason, Microsoft’s brilliant and cutting-edge .NET development environment left out one crucial tool… a tool that has been common in software development environments since, o… | Continue reading
Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growt… | Continue reading
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&… | Continue reading
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of … | Continue reading
Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of… | Continue reading
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo… | Continue reading
Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintess… | Continue reading
Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna … | Continue reading
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi… | Continue reading
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 coupl… | Continue reading
Mystery: why is it that some of the biggest IT consulting companies in the world do the worst work? Why is it that the cool upstart consulting companies start out with a string of spectacular succe… | Continue reading
We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. | Continue reading
The management training program we’re starting up here at Fog Creek will take about three years and will be relatively intensive. Among other things, there will be a required reading list con… | Continue reading
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP… | Continue reading
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E… | Continue reading