Quotes from Joel Spolsky

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

Listen to your customers, not your competitors.

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.

An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it.

The Joel Test 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you have a bug database? 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 7. Do you have a spec? 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? 10. Do you have testers? 11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? 12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.

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.

When you're designing for extremes with software, the three most important "extremes" to remember are: 1. Design for people who can't read. 2. Design for people who can't use a mouse. 3. Design for people who have such bad memories they would forget their own name if it weren't embossed on their American Express

I've grown to think that keeping your desk clean is actually probably a sign that you're not being effective.

In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.

Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.

The confidence you get from knowing about every crash, anywhere in the world, is crucial to delivering a high-quality product that needs to be used in the wild. In the consumer software business, you can't rely on your customers to tell you about crashes—many of them may not be technical enough, and most of them won't bother to take time off of their own important work to give you a useful crash report unless you make it completely automatic.

An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

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.

Nothing works better than just improving your product.

Design adds value faster than it adds cost.

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