Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a popular weblog on software development translated into 29 languages. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994 and later founded Fog Creek Software.
Biography
Spolsky was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and lived there until he was 15. He then moved with his family to Jerusalem, Israel where he attended high school and did his military service as a paratrooper. He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton in Upper Galil. In 1987, he returned to the United States to attend college. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania for a year before transferring to Yale University, where he graduated in 1991 with a BS summa cum laude in Computer Science.
Spolsky worked as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team, where he designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy. He moved to New York City in 1995 where he worked for Viacom and Juno. In 2000, he founded Fog Creek Software and created the Joel on Software weblog.
Publications
- User Interface Design for Programmers, Apress, 2001
- Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity, Apress, 2004