I know some people don't like Joel Spolsky and I know some people do. I'm in the latter camp and I don't care what other people think. Sure some of the things he writes and posts about aren't of a whole lot of interest to me. But then he'll post things like this and it makes up for all the posts of his that I only skim or skip over.
If you have time go read his most recent post (as of my posting this) here:
Strategy Letter VI
This article was particularly largely for the history of computing and software aspect. Being rather young in the grand scheme of things I don’t have the amount of experience and perspective that he has. Given that fact I appreciate hearing about things like the rise and fall of Lotus 1-2-3 and the changes in the business of writing software as a result of the progression of hardware. It’s even more interesting when patterns can be identified.
I'm not sure what happened to Strategy Letters 1 - 5 but I'm sure they were at the very least somewhat interesting. I may have to go dig those up at some point.
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That was a fun article. I don't have time to keep up with blogs, especially ones where the posts are consistently long, but I like the level of depth he goes into while still staying focused on a key point.
ReplyDeleteI also totally agree with him. I remember in like 1997 someone write space invaders using some cool new IE features and I found my staff totally obsessed with it, playing it for hours and talking about how much of a breakthrough it was. And at the same time it's like "That was so 20 years ago." The internet is the coming of age of client-server technology and it has totally put us back two decades in terms of most of our daily work.
I mean, it's an age of multi-gigabyte word processors and yet I'm typing in a window that doesn't even do spell check, nonetheless WYSIWIG, grammar check, tables, etc. It's like typing into WordStar 1.0.