Joel Spolsky Quotes

26 quotes in 419 categories

• Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
• So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing…
• A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.
• Good software, like wine, takes time.
• Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a programmer…
• Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.
• We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.
• Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.
• There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code…
• Design adds value faster than it adds cost.
• Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.
• If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.
• An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is…
• Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time,…
• If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation…
• It's harder to read code than to write it.
• Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
• Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles … they all sounded to me like…
• Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.
• Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty…

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