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Best Of Joel

Author: Pankaj Kumar
Last Revision Date: 9/18/05, Publication Date: 9/18/05

Abstract

Best of Joel is a collection of links to top 20% of Joel's witings, ranked by number of backlinks to each page.







Joel Spolsky is one of the leading thinkers and authors on contemporary commercial software development practices. Though I have read through only some of his copious writings available at JoelOnSoftware site, his thoughts and experiences have profoundly influenced my own ideas about software development, emerging trends, importance of user expereince, business of software development, what works and what does not, and stuff like that.

To make sure that I don't miss something really good, I wrote a small script to scrape the archive page, extract the links to articles, use Google Web API to determine no. of backlinks for each article, and then sort the entries based on no. of backlinks. The script itself, written in Server Side JavaScript and E4X, is an interesting piece of software, but I will talk about that in a separate article. The focus of this article is a sorted list of Joel's links. Assuming that the number of backlinks do indicate relative popularity of an article and Google correctly reports this number, the list ranks Joel's articles in decreasing order of popularity.

This list helped me a lot in prioritizing what I should read first. Hope you find it useful as well.

Best of Joel
Serial No. Back Links Title Date
0 593 Hitting the High Notes Jul 25 2005
1 475 The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) Oct 08 2003
2 330 How Microsoft Lost the API War Jun 13 2004
3 189 The Law of Leaky Abstractions Nov 11 2002
4 173 The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code Aug 09 2000
5 165 New Server at Peer 1 Network Feb 03 2003
6 153 Making Wrong Code Look Wrong May 11 2005
7 124 Camels and Rubber Duckies Dec 15 2004
8 117 Biculturalism Dec 14 2003
9 116 Advice for Computer Science College Students Jan 02 2005
10 96 Things You Should Never Do, Part I Apr 06 2000
11 90 Bionic Office Sep 24 2003
12 88 Fire And Motion Jan 06 2002
13 86 It's Not Just Usability Sep 06 2004
14 84 The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing Mar 23 2000
15 80 Strategy Letter V Jun 12 2002
16 72 Painless Software Schedules Mar 29 2000
17 63 Getting Your Résumé Read Jan 26 2004
18 56 The Project Aardvark Spec Aug 17 2005
19 56 Building Communities with Software Mar 03 2003
20 48 Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You Apr 21 2001
21 47 Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother? Oct 02 2000
22 44 Mike Gunderloy's Coder to Developer May 05 2004
23 38 Platforms Aug 30 2002


If you read through all of thie top 20%, here is the complete list.
All of Joel
Serial No. Back Links Title Date
0 593 Hitting the High Notes Jul 25 2005
1 475 The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) Oct 08 2003
2 330 How Microsoft Lost the API War Jun 13 2004
3 189 The Law of Leaky Abstractions Nov 11 2002
4 173 The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code Aug 09 2000
5 165 New Server at Peer 1 Network Feb 03 2003
6 153 Making Wrong Code Look Wrong May 11 2005
7 124 Camels and Rubber Duckies Dec 15 2004
8 117 Biculturalism Dec 14 2003
9 116 Advice for Computer Science College Students Jan 02 2005
10 96 Things You Should Never Do, Part I Apr 06 2000
11 90 Bionic Office Sep 24 2003
12 88 Fire And Motion Jan 06 2002
13 86 It's Not Just Usability Sep 06 2004
14 84 The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing Mar 23 2000
15 80 Strategy Letter V Jun 12 2002
16 72 Painless Software Schedules Mar 29 2000
17 63 Getting Your Résumé Read Jan 26 2004
18 56 The Project Aardvark Spec Aug 17 2005
19 56 Building Communities with Software Mar 03 2003
20 48 Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You Apr 21 2001
21 47 Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother? Oct 02 2000
22 44 Mike Gunderloy's Coder to Developer May 05 2004
23 38 Platforms Aug 30 2002
24 37 Usability Testing with Morae Jul 30 2005
25 34 Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity Aug 01 2003
26 32 Back to Basics Dec 11 2001
27 32 The Iceberg Secret, Revealed Feb 13 2002
28 31 Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. Jul 21 2001
29 31 Introduction to Best Software Writing I Jun 20 2005
30 29 Five Worlds May 06 2002
31 27 Please Sir May I Have a Linker? Jan 28 2004
32 26 In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome Oct 14 2001
33 26 Fixing Venture Capital Jun 03 2003
34 25 Project Aardvark Midterm Report Jul 07 2005
35 25 What is the Work of Dogs in this Country? May 05 2001
36 22 Painless Bug Tracking Nov 08 2000
37 22 Lord Palmerston on Programming Dec 11 2002
38 21 Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef Jan 18 2001
39 21 Rub a dub dub Jan 23 2002
40 20 Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back! Jun 03 2000
41 17 Craftsmanship Dec 01 2003
42 17 Does Issuing Passports Make Microsoft a Country? Jul 26 2000
43 17 Converting Capital Into Software That Works Mar 21 2000
44 16 Daily Builds Are Your Friend Jan 27 2001
45 16 Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas? Apr 19 2000
46 16 Picking a Ship Date Apr 09 2002
47 15 Contents of Joel on Software, the Book Aug 19 2004
48 14 Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon May 12 2000
49 14 Human Task Switches Considered Harmful Feb 12 2001
50 13 Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth Mar 23 2001
51 13 Finding an Office in New York City Mar 28 2003
52 13 Incentive Pay Considered Harmful Apr 03 2000
53 12 Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers Apr 30 2000
54 12 Painless Functional Specifications - Part 4: Tips Oct 15 2000
55 11 Working on CityDesk, Part Five Nov 13 2001
56 11 Wall Street Survival 101 May 20 2005
57 11 The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part I Mar 28 2005
58 11 Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test Mar 02 2004
59 11 Microsoft Goes Bonkers Jul 22 2000
60 11 Command and Conquer and the Herd of Coconuts Mar 23 2000
61 11 Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt Dec 25 2001
62 11 Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems May 24 2000
63 10 The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part IV Mar 31 2005
64 10 The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part II Mar 29 2005
65 10 Up the tata without a tutu Dec 02 2000
66 9 Our .NET Strategy Apr 11 2002
67 9 Nothing is as Simple as it Seems Mar 04 2002
68 9 Wasting Money on Cats Sep 12 2000
69 8 What Does CityDesk Do? Oct 12 2001
70 8 The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part III Mar 30 2005
71 8 Two Stories Mar 19 2000
72 8 Mouth Wide Shut Jan 15 2003
73 7 REALBasic Jun 12 2000
74 7 Painless Functional Specifications - Part 2: What's a Spec? Oct 03 2000
75 6 Working on CityDesk, Part Four Oct 29 2001
76 6 Painless Functional Specifications - Part 3: But... How? Oct 04 2000
77 6 Reading Code is Like Reading the Talmud May 26 2000
78 5 Working on CityDesk, Part Three Oct 17 2001
79 5 Working on CityDesk, Part One Oct 12 2001
80 5 Colo Expansion Version 2.0 Feb 05 2005
81 5 Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? Jun 15 2000
82 5 A Hard Drill Makes an Easy Battle Nov 20 2001
83 5 Fog Creek Compensation Aug 30 2000
84 4 NDAs and Contracts That You Should Never Sign Mar 28 2000
85 4 Ask Joel Aug 22 2001
86 4 Hard-assed Bug Fixin' Jul 31 2001
87 4 Documentary Filmmaker Wanted Mar 23 2005
88 4 How Many Lies Can You Find In One Direct Mail Piece? Mar 24 2001
89 4 Netscape Goes Bonkers Nov 20 2000
90 4 Product Vision May 09 2002
91 3 Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy Jun 21 2001
92 3 Foreword to Painless Project Management with FogBugz, by Mike Gunderloy Feb 11 2005
93 3 Worst Project Ever? Sep 25 2002
94 2 Three Wrong Ideas From Computer Science Aug 22 2000
95 2 The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part V Apr 01 2005
96 2 Are the Groove Designers Architecture Astronauts? Apr 22 2001
97 2 The Wireless Web: Spacesuits Needed Jul 31 2000
98 2 Spring in Cambridge Mar 19 2001
99 2 Anonymous Response Jul 25 2000
100 2 International Readers Nov 14 2000
101 2 More on Sabbaticals... Mar 18 2000
102 1 How do You Compensate Programmers? Aug 27 2000
103 1 Wordsworth Responds Aug 07 2000
104 0 Feedback on Programmer Compensation Aug 28 2000
105 0 Working on CityDesk, Part Two Oct 13 2001
106 0 Auto motion in Excel? May 12 2000
107 0 Free Desktop Pictures! Aug 04 2000
108 0 Juggling Tasks in Excel May 08 2000
109 0 The //comment FAQ! Dec 09 2004
110 0 Passport Responses Jul 28 2000
111 0 The Book Club Oct 16 2003
112 0 The Ricochet Wireless Modem (a Review) Dec 20 2000
113 0 CityDesk Entity Classes Jan 03 2003
114 0 Another Business Model That Doesn't Seem to Work Oct 25 2000
115 0 Let's Take Sabbaticals! Dec 24 1999

© 2005 by Pankaj Kumar. All Rights Reserved. You may use the content of this article, including the source code, in your programs and documentation. In general, you do not need to contact me for permission unless you are reproducing a significant portion of the article or code for commercial purposes. For example, writing a program that uses the code for personal or company use does not require permission. Republishing this article, even with proper attribution, does require permission. Similarly, incorporating the code in a program that you sell for profit requires permission.

You are welcome to send me comments, suggestions or bug fixes. I will look into those as and when time permits and may even publish the good ones on this page.

You can contact me by sending e-mail to pankaj.kumar@gmail.com.