Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

Life is just too short to hate your job

Customers don't know what they want. Stop expecting customers to know what they want.
It's just never going to happen. Get over it.

This is, incidentally, the same performance characteristic of garbage-collected systems, surprise surprise, so all the claims people make about how garbage collection imposes a performance penalty are not entirely true, since typical malloc implementations had the same kind of performance penalty, albeit milder

When you call malloc, it walks the linked list looking for a block of memory that is big enough for your request.

It was the number one cause of hacks and worms in the olden days before Microsoft Outlook made hacking easy enough for teenagers to do

Whenever something seems like it should have linear performance but it seems to have n-squared performance, look for hidden Shlemiels. They are often hidden by your libraries.

think that some of the biggest mistakes people make—even at the highest architectural levels—come from having a weak or broken understanding of a few simple things at the very lowest levels

Specs are good, but not if nobody reads them. As a spec-writer, you have to trick people into reading your stuff, and you should also probably make an effort not to cause any already-too-small brains to leak out through eye sockets

Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a three- to five-page essay once a week. Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you'll be able to write.

Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a three- to five-page essay once a week. Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you'll be able to write.