Joel Spolsky

Co-founder, Fog Creek Software

Joel Spolsky is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process. His website Joel on Software (www.joelonsoftware.com) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. With over 340,000 unique visitors a month, Joel on Software is one of the most popular resources for software developers on the web. He has written two books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001) and Joel on Software (Apress, 2004).

In September 2000, together with co-founder Michael Pryor, Joel started Fog Creek Software in New York City. “We created Fog Creek on the simple idea that if we built a company that was a great place to work, we would be able to attract great talent. And once we had great talent, we could succeed at just about any software project we found interesting,” he says. At Fog Creek Software he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams, and CityDesk, an easy-to-use desktop content management system.

Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed the first version of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as a Program Manager on the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, where he was a technical manager of a team developing an Internet client used by millions of people every day. He spent the early days of the dotcom boom at Viacom, creating a highly optimized application server used for high traffic websites like MTV.com.

Joel graduated from Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude) in 1991 with a B.S. and honors in Computer Science. Before college he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

Joel is going to be relating his experiences in the real world to situations that we may face in the workplace as well he will be talking about cutting-edge software practives that he mentions on his site joelonsoftware.com