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I'm curious: How did Joel Spolsky gain such clout and influence?
by dpflan 7y ago
I'm curious: How did Joel Spolsky gain such clout and influence?
- francisofascii 7y agoInitially his blog, Joel on Software. Then his books. A big part of Stackoverflow's success was programmers already knew who Joel and Jeff were.
- strikelaserclaw 7y agoHe co-invented the website which all developers use on a day to day basis?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Wildgoose 7y agoA site that is occasionally useful but regularly has questions I am interested in just closed by some pompous administrator.
- astura 7y agoHe was famous before stackoverflow; the success of stackoverflow was attributed to it's creators having a large audience to seed it with questions and answers.
- DanFeldman 7y agoHe and his team created Stackoverflow, a site used by every developer every day. He's a prolific writer around software engineering & managing software engineering. He's got an incredibly blunt writing style w/o any fluff and his writing on topics such as interviewing, refactors, and technical debt are shared around often.
- paxys 7y agoHe has been industry famous since before Stack Overflow, mainly through his blog (joelonsoftware.com). Some of his writing from the early 2000s is still amazingly relevant.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoA good site, but: Every developer every day? Hardly.
- the_af 7y agoObviously the generalization is wrong, but I bet it's not too far off the mark. All* developers google things. Google often places at the top StackOverflow hits for programming related questions. I bet that's how most "non-nerd" programmers arrive at SO. *again a generalization, but even less off the mark.
- sbayeta 7y agoI use it every day. I feel bad now...
- Koshkin 7y agoDon’t. HN is no better.
- dmamills 7y agoTwo decades of experience building great software. Including Microsoft Excel, Trello and his obviously most important contribution: Stackoverflow.
- tim333 7y agoAlso his blog was big in its day "1114 posts over 16 years" https://www.joelonsoftware.com https://www.joelonsoftware.com
- niccl 7y agoHe cane up with the Joel Test (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...). It's still incredibly relevant. A few years ago job vacancies would include things like 'we score 11 on the Joel test, come work for us'. I haven't seen it for a while, but I still do it mentally when I go to a new gig
- goatinaboat 7y agoHe was very skilful at telling developers things they wanted to hear in his blog. But until Stack Overflow I didn’t know a single person who used any of his products (FogBugz, CityDesk) and it didn’t seem plausible that the hottest developers in the world would be beating down his door to work on them. The current stupidity of the hiring process, the inane whiteboarding, the take-home tests and all that, is all down to him.