38 Quotes by Joel Spolsky

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

If you can’t understand the spec for a new technology, don’t worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won’t be that important.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to the competition. They’re not relevant to you.

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 something to devote your life to, then it’s not worth it.

Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It’s fashionable to make ‘bet the company’ decisions, but don’t do it.

Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.