Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky at the Stack Exchange London office, June 2014.
Born	1965 (age 52–53) Albuquerque, New Mexico
Nationality	American, New Zealand, Israeli, Dual citizenship
Alma mater	Yale University
Occupation	Software developer CEO, Stack Exchange Network Co-founder, Fog Creek Software and Trello
Website	joelonsoftware.com

Avram Joel Spolsky (born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog. In 2008, he launched the Stack Overflow programmer Q&A site in collaboration with Jeff Atwood. Using the Stack Exchange software product which powers Stack Overflow, the Stack Exchange Network now hosts over 170 Q&A sites.

Spolsky was born to Jewish parents and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lived there until he was 15. He then moved with his family to Israel, where he attended high school and completed his military service in the Paratroopers Brigade. He was one of the founders of the kibbutz Hanaton in Lower 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 started working at Microsoft in 1991 as a Program Manager 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".