Joel Spolsky is a software developer, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential technical writers of the early commercial web era. He started the blog Joel on Software in 2000, where he wrote in plain, opinionated prose about software construction, project management, hiring, and the business of shipping products. The blog reached a wide audience of programmers and managers at a time when little practical writing about the craft existed outside of textbooks.
One of his earliest and most lasting contributions is “The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code,” published on August 9, 2000. It is a deliberately crude, twelve-question checklist for rating the health of a software team: Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule, a spec, a quiet working environment, the best tools money can buy, testers, and do candidates write code in interviews, with hallway usability testing? Spolsky’s scoring was blunt: twelve is perfect, eleven is tolerable, and ten or below signals serious problems.
Spolsky co-founded Fog Creek Software in New York, which produced the bug-tracking tool FogBugz and later incubated the project-management tool Trello. He was also an early advocate for treating programmers well, with private offices and good equipment, an unusual stance during the cubicle-farm norms of the period.
In 2008 Spolsky teamed up with the blogger Jeff Atwood to build Stack Overflow. In his launch post he framed the site as a fix for the broken state of programming search results, where a specific question returned paywalls and spam instead of answers. The combination of his audience and Atwood’s gave the new site the critical mass it needed on day one, and it grew into the Stack Exchange network. Spolsky later served as chief executive of Stack Overflow during its expansion.