Joel on Software is Joel Spolsky's blog, where he has been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet (ack) since 2000.
Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.
So far there are 32 informal proposals on meta.stackexchange.com. We’re weeks away from opening a site where these proposals can become real.
Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the sun? And who says we can’t run for Vice President of the United States of America?
The entire extended Stack Overflow team (including the Stack Exchange team) is meeting in New York in April to do some strategic planning. For example, we need to plan our Rock Band song lists, decide who gets to be on the drums and who is stuck with the USB cowbell, etc.
If you’re going to be in the city on Tuesday, April 6th, we’d like to invite you to join us for a party and a chance to meet the team. This is also a chance to see the new Fog Creek office if you haven’t visited yet.
<p>A while ago Jeff and I had <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/podcast-36/">Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast</a>, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>; and <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a>.</p>;
<p>In that podcast, I said, “To me, the fact that they make branching and merging easier just means that your coworkers are more likely to branch and merge, and you’re more likely to be confused.”</p>
<p><span style="display: block; margin: 0 0 0.25ex 1em; position: relative; float: right;"><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17taco2.JPG"><img style="border:1px solid #666;" alt="" src="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17taco2-thumbnail.JPG"; /></a><br /><span style="display: block; float: right; font-size: 60%; color: #666; margin-top: -1em; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif;">This is what Taco looks like n
Some of you may have seen my final column in Inc., in which I announce my retirement from blogging effective March 18th, the 10-year anniversary of <em>Joel on Software<.
Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words.
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meeting more VCs, and doing a road show for the other firms that might be interested in investing.
Jason (and his guest James Segil) both agree that we should take more time picking the right partner. We’re going to be in bed with these guys for years, they say, and we have to approach this like picking a spouse.
In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If you hire sales and marketing staff too early, they don’t really get much traction, and you may start to think that sales and marketing are a waste of time. This lead me, in the early years, to believe that a healthy software company should have a lot of real software developers and maybe no sales and marketing.
My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach it not to jump on people, not to poop in the house, to sit on command, and to never, ever, ever chew on the iPad. Never. Good girl.
With dogs the main trick to training is that feedback has to be immediate. If you come home to discover that, hours before, the dog tipped over the garbage can in the kitchen, it’s too late for training. You can yell at her but she just won’t get what you’re going on about. Dogs are just not that smart.
Microsoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!”
Original post
Is your desktop backed up?
Did you backup that server?
Are your backups on a different machine?
Do you have offsite backups?
All good questions, all best practices.
But let's stop talking about "backups." Doing a backup is too low a bar.
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