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Joel on Software

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml (08.07.2008 03:40:43)

Hard link

Don't hide or disable menu items

A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don't do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

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01.07.2008 18:42:48 - Joel on Software

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Desks

A reader wrote in to ask what kind of desks we're going to be using for the new office.

The ergonomics experts always want you to have your feet flat on the floor. So you have to adjust your seat height first. Then, your arms are supposed to be horizontal while you're typing. This means you need an adjustable-height keyboard.

Most of the adjustable height keyboard trays are extremely annoying... they're floppy, flimsy, and limit the keyboard to one location. Therefore we decided to get desks where the entire worksurface can be raised and lowered.

Finally, a lot people praise the benefits of standing up for a part of the day, even if you spend the whole day at a computer, so we wanted desks where the worksurface could rise all the way to "counter height" so you could stand and work. And if you are going to be standing up and sitting down it's best to have a desk with a pushbutton, electric motor so you don't get lazy about doing it.

Eventually we settled on the Details adjusTables Series 7. We didn't like the desk surface that those came with (with rounded corners and a chubby profile, it's just too blah) so we ordered a custom desk surface from Steelcase with something called a knife edge profile. That makes the desk look paper-thin:

 

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06.06.2008 23:25:47 - Joel on Software

Hard link

StackOverflow podcasts moving to IT Conversations

Yes! I'm still doing those weekly podcasts with Jeff. We've already done eight of them.

We're moving, though, to IT Conversations, a huge network of terrific audio shows about technology. Just looking at all the great shows they have there makes me feel a bit like a kid in jeans and a T-shirt with a dirty slogan who just walked into Chez Panisse.

The new feed, IT Conversations-based feed is at http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.xml.

The easy way to subscribe is with ITunes, choose Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast, paste that URL in there, and you'll be all set.

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05.06.2008 18:21:45 - Joel on Software

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Adventures in Office Space

“We lost some time because a deal to expand at our current location fell through -- it turned out that the extra floor we wanted wasn’t actually, to use the real estate jargon, ‘available.’”

From Adventures in Office Space, my latest column in Inc. Magazine.

P.S.! Neil reminds me that you've only got until the end of the week to register for the Business of Software conference at the low early rate ($1395 instead of $1795).

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02.06.2008 18:33:29 - Joel on Software

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Architecture astronauts take over

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

What's Microsoft Live Mesh?

Hmm, let's see.

"Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It's a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

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01.05.2008 07:01:57 - Joel on Software

Hard link

Stack Overflow Podcast #2

The next podcast is up. Today we talked about why we're doing a podcast in the first place, took some questions/suggestions from listeners, and got into a fight over whether programmers should learn C. Guess which side I took.

There are some improvements, already.

First, there's an RSS feed, so you can subscribe and get each weekly podcast pushed to you. Here's how you would subscribe using Apple iTunes, for example:

  1. Run iTunes
  2. Choose Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast
  3. Paste in this URL: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/index.php?feed=podcast
  4. There is no step 4.

Now, depending on your settings (under Podcasts in Preferences), iTunes will download the latest podcasts and put them on your iPod when you dock it. You don't have to do anything special. I'm not going to post here every time there's a new podcast; you'll have to subscribe.

A couple of people volunteered to help by typing up transcripts for the hearing-impaired, the pressed-for-time, and search engines. That's a great idea! I opened up a wiki where anyone can contribute to the weekly transcript. If you can spare a few minutes to transcribe even a part of the podcast, that would be greatly appreciated by the many readers for whom an audio podcast is inaccessible.

Jeff has a new blog for the podcast at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ where the podcasts are posted. You can subscribe to that using a normal RSS reader and see the show notes, links to things we mentioned during the podcast, and there will be comments links for discussion.

If you have any comments, ideas, or suggestions record a short MP3 and email it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. If you don't have the equipment to record an MP3, check out blogtalkradio to find a shockingly easy way to do it with a phone.

I've been working on a way to improve the audio quality. I don't want to make any promises, but next week we'll try to do the show using Skype to get better-than-POTS voice quality.

 

 

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23.04.2008 04:10:01 - Joel on Software

Hard link

stackoverflow.com

What is stackoverflow.com?

Nothing, yet.

But here's the concept:

Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.

Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it's going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it's a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

And you won't even get an expert answer. You'll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it's hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.

Jeff Atwood and I decided to do something about it. We're starting to build a programming Q&A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free.

When I'm building a new product, my policy has always been to keep quiet about it until I have something to ship. But this isn't really a product. This is a free new community site for programmers around the world and we need your help to design it, to program it, and to build it. We want to hear your suggestions, hear your ideas, and we're going to build it right in front of your eyes. Thus, the vaporware announcement.

Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast. We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic, so the podcast may be interesting to you even if you don't want to hear about stackoverflow.com. The first episode is up right now. Eventually I imagine we'll figure out this newfangled "RSS" technology and you'll be able to actually subscribe and get fresh episodes delivered into your ears automatically. All in good time.

Jeff's Announcement

PS I'm still CEO of Fog Creek full time. StackOverflow.com is a joint venture between Fog Creek and Jeff Atwood. He's the full time CEO which means he's calling the shots. I'm sort of a consultant on this one.

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17.04.2008 04:43:39 - Joel on Software

Hard link

First Joel on Software conference

Registration is now open for Business of Software 2008 (the first ever Joel on Software conference). Neil has lined up great speakers:

  1. Seth Godin, Business Week's "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.
  2. Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" and the person who coined the term "Micro ISV"
  3. Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year's Software Idol competition
  4. Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment
  5. Paul Kenny is one of the UK's top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of others.
  6. Dharmesh Shah is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com
  7. Jessica Livingston is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator
  8. Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger
  9. Joel Spolsky, aka, "me," noted DJ, has over 600 karma points on the social news site "Reddit."

BoS2008 is in BOSton, September 3-4. Boston is absolutely beautiful in September. The weather is usually perfect. You can go kayaking on the Charles or take the duck tour if you're unambitious. Over 250,000 college students have just arrived, full of completely unjustifiable hope and optimism. The summer tourist crowd has mostly gone home so you can get into museums and historical sites. There are plenty of coffee shops that aren't NASDAQ-listed.

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14.04.2008 18:14:18 - Joel on Software

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