Joel Spolsky

Founder of Fog Creek Software, which makes an HTML editor/content manager called CityDesk, and, in many people's opinion, exceptionally nice bug tracking software called FogBugz?.

• http://www.fogcreek.com

His weblog, JoelOnSoftware, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/, has lots of great articles on software.

• I love how the name makes people refer to Joel as "Joel on Software." -- DanielBrockman
  • That fact probably has more to do with "Spolsky" than "On Software". I bought his book before I ever remembered the name Spolsky long enough to tell it to a friend. -- SteveJorgensen

He likes BigDesignUpFront:

• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/AardvarkSpec.html,

and HungarianNotation, but no one's perfect.

• Specifically, he likes good Hungarian, as opposed to the nonsense people seem to have perpetuated in its place.

He does something similar to XP's PlanningGame - it's more-or-less the prioritization part without the scheduling.

• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.html

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Reviews:

JS has a clean and vivid writing style - a major acheivement considering the subjects. The drawback is when he's completely wrong he is very hard to counter. --PhlIp

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His essay on "Five Worlds" -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html -- sheds a lot of light on his skepticism about XP. XP methodologies are very effective in corporate-internal development like the storied C3 project, where requirements can change at any time over the course of the project, but they don't exactly add a whole lot when writing shrink-wrap software (his preferred world), and they'd probably be actively obstructive in embedded-software and game development. (There's a reason embedded and games are almost exclusively CeeLanguage and CeePlusPlus.)

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