For the last couple of days, I've been reading on Joel Spolsky blog quite regularly. Just a bit introduction on the guy, He's the CEO of FogCreek Software and one of the team member of the guys on StackOverflow.com. His past experience includes Program Manager of Microsoft Excel team, working in Viacom Interactive Service, and Juno Online ISP.

I enjoyed his blog alot. Well written and very concise articles, which includes examples that is easy to understand. He even used real life example that has happened in the IT industry in the past. For example in his article "Things You Should Never Do, Part 1", which says that we should never start over from scratch. He gives an example how Netscape lost its market share when netscape decided to ditch their code and started from scratch. Some of his example also includes from big companies like, Microsoft, Sun, and IBM.

His articles include best practices in software development, team management, software product management, and software company management. In this article, he describes 12 questions that test a quality of a software development team. I have to say I agree with most of them, except for the last one which i think not necessary. He mentions the importance of functional specifications in this articles, couldn't agree more with this. He also has a business strategy related articles for software development company. Since its always been my dream to run my own software company, I enjoy the article a lot.

Moreover, He has articles that describes his philosophy in building his company. He has done a great job in creating a very desirable work place, which he describes here. If you're lazy to read up his post, you can just see the pictures of it here. It amazes me how he's willing to invest so much on it (considering that his company is not even classified as med-size company), and that he does it for the sake of his programmers. I honestly thought only google does this.

His blog is by far the best blog I've ever read. Not even one article I've read was badly written. Highly recommended, adding him to my blogroll.

RWendi