Joel Spolsky Quotes

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.

We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a programmer working on the next Duke Nukem and we'll ship when we're good and ready. But for almost any kind of real business, you just have to know how long things are going to take, because developing a product costs money.

Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.

If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. It's a way to let our ideals shine through in our software, no matter how mundane the software is. You may think that you're stuck in a boring, drab IT department making mind-numbing inventory software that only five lonely people will ever use. But you have daily opportunities to show respect for humanity even with the most mundane software.

That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.

If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.

Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.

Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.

People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.

Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.

Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors.

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.

Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles ... they all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

It's harder to read code than to write it.

Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It's fashionable to make 'bet the company' decisions, but don't do it.

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.