| Joel Spolsky | |
|---|---|
Joel Spolsky speaking with demonstration attendees, after presenting his company's FogBugz software in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. |
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| Born | 1965 Albuquerque, New Mexico |
| Nationality | American, New Zealand, Dual citizenship[1] |
| Occupation | Software developer CEO, Fog Creek Software |
| Religion | Jewish |
| Website | |
| http://joel.spolsky.com | |
Avram Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog. In 2008 he launched the now successful Stack Overflow programmer Q&A site in collaboration with Jeff Atwood. Using the Stack Exchange software product which powers Stack Overflow, The Stack Exchange Network now hosts over 60 Q&A sites.
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Spolsky grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and lived there until he was 15.[2] He then moved with his family to Jerusalem, Israel, where he attended high school and did his military service as a paratrooper.[2] He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton in Upper Galilee.[3] In 1987, he returned to the United States to attend college. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania for a year before transferring to Yale University, where he was a member of Pierson College and graduated in 1991 with a BS summa cum laude in Computer Science.[2]
Spolsky started working at Microsoft in 1991[4] as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team, where he designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.[5] He moved to New York City in 1995 where he worked for Viacom and Juno.[2] In 2000, he founded Fog Creek Software and created the Joel on Software weblog[4]. Joel on Software was "one of the first blogs set up by a business owner".[6]
In 2005 Spolsky co-produced and appeared in Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, a documentary documenting Fog Creek's development of Project Aardvark, a remote assistance tool.[7]
Spolsky also co-founded Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood,[8] a question and answer community website for software developers.
He is the author of five books, including User Interface Design for Programmers and Smart and Gets Things Done. He is also the creator of The Joel Test.