Joel Spolsky on the future of web apps
Sweet, sweet prognostication: Joel Spolsky (“Joel on Software”) has a new piece on where the web is going: specifically, how the history of the computer industry up to now will repeat itself in the development of Ajax apps. It’s very smart, and seems to me perfectly sensible.
For some reason I used to think Spolsky was a wanker. Now I’m confused why I thought that. He labeled Groove (my former employer) “architecture astronauts”, which turned out to be perfectly correct (at the time; they learned their lesson). His standard for whom to hire — “smart, and gets things done” seems to me quite correct. (I should hunt around to see what he has to say about technology management. My colleague Martin Martin has some excellent thoughts on the matter.) Spolsky’s piece on “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” is educational, lucid and fun.
So I don’t know what my problem was. Spolsky seems to rock pretty hard. Maybe I should check out his book.
P.S.: The Ajaxian blog looks on Spolsky’s piece with bemusement.
You’re not the only one who is (was?) hard on Spolsky. I think this is because he’s one of those people that people either hate or fellate. So the haters, hate him all the more for the fellation, if you will.
I think, at the end of the day, I think he’s just mostly OK. He’s got some good chestnuts, but he’s not some kind of god either. For instance, I think he’s dead wrong about asking “impossible questions” on an interview. I find nothing more annoying as both an interviewer and interviewee than questions like that. Theoretically, people will show you how great they are at general problem sovling but I find that many creative people may not be functioning at 50% creativity level during an interview. Rare candidates can be 100% creative in an interview, but this doesn’t mean their 100% is much better than the nervous guy’s 100% when they aren’t in an interview setting.
Etc. The point is, he’s just another engineer with some opinions. Some good ones. Some not so good ones. ’nuff said.
Comment by mrz — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am