Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development.

Spolsky grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lived there until he was 15. He then moved with his family to Jerusalem, Israel, where he attended high school and did his military service as a paratrooper. He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton in Upper Galilee. 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.

Spolsky was a Program Manager at Microsoft from 1991 to 1994 on the Microsoft Excel team, where he designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy. He moved to New York City in 1995 where he worked for Viacom and Juno Online Services. In 2000, he founded Fog Creek Software and created the Joel on Software blog. Joel on Software was "one of the first blogs set up by a business owner."

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.

Spolsky also co-founded Stack Overflow in 2008, a question and answer community website for software developers, with Jeff Atwood. He is now CEO of the resulting Stack Exchange Network.

In 2011, Spolsky launched Trello, an online project management tool inspired by Kanban methodology.

He is the author of five books and also the creator of The Joel Test.