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This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.
I’m on the board of advisors of the new school, which plans to accept ninth graders for fall of 2012. Here’s why I’m excited about this new school:
1. It’s a “limited, unscreened” school. That’s Board of Ed jargon. It means that any student who is interested can apply—their grades and attendence record are not taken into account in deciding whether or not to admit them, only their interest. I think this is the best thing about the school. A lot of kids are just not interested enough in other academic subjects to get good grades, but they would make great software engineers. A lot of immigrants (especially in New York) are not yet proficient enough in English to get good grades in all their subjects, but they’re going to make great software engineers, too. And in my humble opinion, a school that accepts a cross-section of students is bound to be more enriching than a school that only accepts academic superstars.
2. OMG do we ever need more software engineers. The US post-secondary education system is massively failing us: it’s not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry. Not even remotely enough. Starting salaries for smart programmers from top schools are flirting with the $100,000 mark. Supply isn’t even close to meeting demand. This school is going to be pretty small (in the 400-500 student range) but the Board of Ed has promised that if it’s successful it’ll be used as a template for more schools or for special programs inside larger schools. I predict that they will be overwhelmed with applicants and this will be the most popular new school in New York City in years.
3. And we need more diversity, too. One of the reasons the elite US colleges seem to turn out so few computer science majors every year is that they are only drawing from a narrow pool of mostly white and asian males. Minorities and women are embarrassingly under-represented. Hopefully an unscreened school in New York City can pump a lot more diversity into the pool.
4. It’s not a vocational school. Unlike traditional vocational schools, this new school will have a rigorous academic component and will prepare students for college. But college is not for everyone—many of the best programmers I know were just not interested enough in a general four year degree and went straight into jobs programming.
I’m pleased to be involved in this project, but it needs more help: they’re still looking for qualified computer science teachers and a principal. If you’re interested drop me an email and I’ll make sure it gets through to the right people.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.0 state.
Trello is new kind of development project for Fog Creek. It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an “installed software” version of Trello. That allowed us to modernize many aspects of our development process; I am happy to announce that there is absolutely no Visual Basic code involved in any part of Trello. What’s next, flying cars?
The biggest difference you’ll notice (compared to our previous products pitched solely at software developers) is that Trello is a totally horizontal product.
Horizontal means that it can be used by people from all walks of life. Word processors and web browsers are horizontal. The software your dentist uses to torture you with drills is vertical.
Vertical software is much easier to pull off and make money with, and it’s a good choice for your first startup. Here are two key reasons:
Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. It’s high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek.
Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991. (Yes, I know you were not born yet, but I assure you that computers had been invented. Just hop up here on my knee and shut up.)
Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like “if interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?” For example.
Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel.
We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the “number of injuries this week” spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility.
Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed ten facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries).
He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a three-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job.
Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
(Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called “derivatives.” They used Excel to maximize the bankers’ bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year. Something about black swans. Probably just a floating point rounding error.)
What was I talking about? Oh yeah... most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
Bing! A light went off in my head.
The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.
Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.
PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.
Some people saw Trello and said, “oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.
There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasn’t been a great “list-of-list” app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).
Once you get into Trello, you’ll use it for everything. I use about thirty Trello boards regularly, and I use them with everyone in my life, from the APs (Aged Parents), with whom I plan vacations, with every team at work, and just about every project I’m involved in.
So, ok, that was the first big difference with Trello: horizonal, not vertical. But there are a bunch of other differences:
It’s delivered continuously. Rather than having major and minor releases, we pretty much just continuously push out new features from development to customers. A feature that you built and tested, but didn’t deliver yet because you’re waiting for the next major release, becomes inventory. Inventory is dead weight: money you spent that’s just wasting away without earning you anything. Sure, 100 years ago, we had these things called “CD-ROMs” and we shipped software that way, so there was an economic reason to bunch up features before we inflict ‘em on the world. But there’s no reason to work that way any more. You already knew that, of course. I’m just saying—I stopped using Visual Basic about five minutes ago. Brave New World.
It’s not exhaustively tested before being released. We thought we could get away with this because Trello is free, so customers are more forgiving. But to tell the truth, the real reason we get away with it is because bugs are fixed in a matter of hours, not months, so the net number of “bugs experienced by the public” is low.
We work in public. The rule on the Trello team is “default public.” We have a public Trello board that shows everything that we’re working on and where it’s up to. We use this to let customers vote and comment on their favorite features. By the way, while Trello was under development, it was secret. We had a lot of beta testers who gave us customer feedback so that the development team could use lean startup principles, but the nine months we spent building version 1.0 in secret gave us a significant lead in a competitive marketplace. But now that we’re shipping, there’s no reason not to talk about our plans.
This is a “Get Big Fast” product, not a “Ben and Jerry’s” product. See Strategy Letter I. The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. For example:
Trello is free. The friction caused by charging for a product is the biggest impediment to massive growth. In the long run, we think it’s much easier to figure out how to extract a small amount of money out of a large number of users than to extract a large amount of money out of a small number of users. Once you have 100 million users, it’s easy to figure out which of those users are getting the most value out of the product you built. The ones who are getting the most value will be happy to pay you. The others don’t cost much to support.
The API and plug-in architectures are the highest priority. Another way of putting that is: never build anything in-house if you can expose a basic API and get those high-value users (the ones who are getting the most value out of the platform) to build it for you. On the Trello team, any feature that can be provided by a plug-in must be provided by a plug-in.
(The API is currently in very rudimentary form. You can already use it to do very interesting things. It is under rapid development.)
We use cutting edge technology. Often, this means we get cut fingers. Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node. But at least they’re having fun. And in today’s tight job market, great programmers have a lot of sway on what they’re going to be working on. If you can give them an exciting product that will touch millions of people, and let them dig deep into TCP-IP internals while they try to figure out why simple things aren’t working, they’ll have fun and they’ll love their jobs. Besides, we’re creating a product that we’ll be working on for the next ten years. Technology that’s merely “state of the art” today is going to be old and creaky in five years. We tried to go a little bit beyond “state of the art.” It’s a calculated risk.
None of this is very radical. TL;DR: Fog Creek Software develops an internet product using techniques that every Y-combinator startup has been using since spez was sleeping with his laptop so he could reboot Reddit when Lisp crashed in the middle of the night. If you haven’t tried Trello yet, try it, then tell me on twitter if it worked.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They’re all pretty similar).
This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello, and both times, it was totally worth it.
First, a little background. There are three popular conferences where you can launch new products: Launch, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Demo. They all work the same way:
So, are these conferences worth it?
Let’s look, individually, at the two big promises of the conferences: exposure to VCs and exposure to the press.
Are VCs at these conferences? Absolutely. Does going to one of these conferences get you funded? It’s complicated.
I’ve been tossing around the word fundable without defining it. Every entrepreneur thinks their “Mint.com for Laundry Tickets” is the most fundable idea ever, and all VCs should be dying to invest, if they would only sit still for the brief 62 minute demo!
No. Technically, whether you’re fundable has to do with things like traction, the total size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, whether you build moats (?), and a bunch of other gibberish that VCs like to tell themselves in their heads so that they don’t think they’re just spinning bottles.
But it’s too hard for an entrepreneur to evaluate their own fundability. So here’s a working definition of fundable which is all that matters for you as an entrepreneur:
So, that said, if you don’t know any VCs and think you might have a fundable company, a conference like Launch or Disrupt will get you your first intros.
Now, on to the other promise: Press and publicity.
It is possible, nay, common, to launch at one of these conferences and get NO press whatsoever. Zero. Nada. At Disrupt you’re guaranteed at least one mention in TechCrunch, but you’ll soon discover that TechCrunch’s tech-industry insiders may not really be the audience you need.
Yes, there are a lot of journalists at these conferences. Disrupt probably had about 200. When we launched Trello this week, you know how much press we got?
Four stories.
And every one of those stories came because I knew the reporter and emailed them before we launched, and pre-briefed them on our product under embargo.
Yep. There was not a single reporter, from the 200 that were registered, at Disrupt who saw our presentation and said, “Oh cool, I’m going to write about that.”
You know why? Because there were dozens of companies launching in two days, and reporters usually file one or two stories a day, so they all focus on one or two companies they find interesting (and at this last conference, they mostly wanted to talk about Arringtongate).
That said, you can get exactly the burst of publicity you need from launching at one of these conferences, if you do it right. You have to:
We did all that and leveraged 6 minutes of fame into 130,000 eyeballs.
The thing entrepreneurs often forget about news media: It’s supposed to be news. They want new things. As a startup, you are only going to have two or three new things that happen, ever:
That’s it. Those are your chances to get news. Under no circumstances can you expect to be covered because you take a walk in the woods with potential employees... you’re not Mark Zuckerberg. (Unless you are, in which case, Hi Mark!) You’re not getting font changes on the home page covered, unless you used to work for Mark Zuckerberg.
In short, you only have two or at most three chances to got coverage unless there’s Mark Zuckerberg involvement.
Well, wait, there’s one more way. If you are very lucky, you will have some famous people involved in your company, and some of them will have tawdry affairs with prostitutes that are captured on video. That will get you a fourth story. Otherwise, you’re not news. Get over it.
Also important: the news cycle is 12 hours, tops. If you call journalists the day after you release your product, it’s not news. They won’t care. You have to call them two days before you launch, tell them you’re going to launch in two days, and offer to pre-brief them, so that they can run their story when it’s actually newsworthy. The bottom line is that you have to get all your coverage within a period of a few hours which means you have to plan ahead and work hard. This is not the time for incrementalism. Don’t worry about DDOSing your own server. There’s no choice: you can’t spread out the newsworthiness of your launch.
Because there are so few opportunities for a startup to get press, you have to make the most out of each one. That’s why I am still a big believer in “the big launch” even though the Lean Startup ethic today is all about trickling things out to your users bit by bit and pivoting a million times.
Here’s the story of Trello. We wrote the first line of code last January. By the time we hit 700 lines of code, the product was useful, and we immediately started dogfooding it in-house. We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.
We didn’t do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched.
I couldn’t stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I don’t want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.
Still, I do, firmly, believe that a completely new product has to go through what Steve Blank calls customer development to find “product/customer fit.” I.e., you have to get real people really using your product and you have to watch them and listen to them and make changes to make your product better, and you have to do this very, very early.
How did we reconcile this? Through the old fashioned method of a closed beta. We got a hundred of our best friends to use Trello and tell us what they thought while we iterated and polished and improved.
So the thing we launched, nine-month-old Trello, is really kind of slick. And we got a little initial bit of publicity for it, but then that publicity became massively viral. So those four news stories caused a few people to check out the product, and they liked it, because it was AWESOME NINE-MONTH-OLD TRELLO, and they wrote amazingly nice tweets. Thousands of amazingly nice tweets.
So, the story so far: if your product is really good, launching at one of these conferences is an incredible catalyst. If your product is “meh,” it won’t help.
But wait—there’s one important, bonus reason to launch at a conference, and it’s a good enough reason to do it even if you don’t need the publicity or the VC at all.
When you launch at a conference, you have an incredible hard deadline. This deadline forces you to ship. It forces you to make decisions about what has to be in version 1.0. It's actually an incredible team-building exercise to work your butt off, together, for the weeks leading up to the conference.
The morale boost you’ll get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We *made* something. People used it. It matters.
It's like sex, with clothes on.
The members of our team who came out to San Francisco for Disrupt (including two summer interns who skipped a week of classes to join us) had a blast. It was the best week, ever. The members of the team who stayed back in the office, watching the conference piped in over the Internet, had a blast. It was the best week, ever.
Work has to matter.
The stuff we create can’t just be bits on a hard drive.
Brett, Daniel, Bobby, Justin, Ian, and Aaron built something with their bare hands that will be a part of how the future works.
One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.
This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. That’s why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. It’s all about shipping.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Around the time of Fog Creek Software's ten year anniversary, I started thinking that if we want to keep our employees excited and motivated for another ten years, we were going to need some new things to work on. It occurred to me that we could easily afford to make four little two-person teams to launch four new products. That would give our developers more chances to move around from product to product when they got bored, which would make Fog Creek Software an even better place to work.
Each team, we decided, would be guided by the spirit of lean startups. They would ship early and often. They would listen to real-world customers instead of building things in an ivory tower. And they wouldn't be afraid to pivot endlessly until they made something that people wanted.
Next, we needed some business ideas. After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was "why the hell are you working on THAT?" So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.
We had an early idea called FIVE THINGS. Everybody would have a list of exactly five things that they were allowed to work on. The top two were things they were actively doing right now. The other three were things that they would do as soon as they finished the first two. But nobody was ever allowed to have SIX things assigned to them. If you have too many things on your to-do list, your motivation tends to sag.
Five Things wasn't the right idea, but it led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful. By the end of the summer we realized we had a hit on our hands: an incredibly simple, easy-to-understand way for teams to collaborate online.
So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Fog Creek's newest product: Trello.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
[UPDATE - September 6th - Regrettably, DevDays had to be cancelled. See the announcement on the Stack Exchange Blog for details.]
Stack Overflow DevDays, the universe's best conference series for coders, is back, and it's bigger than ever!
Here's the idea behind DevDays. You're a developer. You'd love to learn all the latest hot new technologies. Things like DVCS, HTML 5, Node.js, CSS3, Hadoop, etc. The stuff the cool kids are all talking about on the playground while you're stuck in the basement somewhere grinding away on Java Enterprise Visual Basic.
The idea behind DevDays is a fast, high-bandwidth, fire hose tutorial on at least ten interesting concepts. We'll assume that you're a developer, you know what a loop is, but each tutorial starts at the ground level and gives you a whirlwind tour through a technology by showing you actual code. Every presenter launches an editor and writes code from scratch and shows you what it does. There are almost no prepared PowerPoint slides with ten bullet items each containing 10 words explaining the ROI benefits of some new technology. There are not even any PowerPoint slides with cats and pandas doing hilarious things, such as this one:
Yes, DevDays contains precisely NO funny pictures of cats. We might have Jon Skeet with a sock puppet, though:
(That was Jon Skeet and Tony the Pony from London DevDays 2009.)
What we have instead is some great presenters from the community who will write code and compile code and explain it all while you watch, and you'll come away knowing enough about each new technology to know what it's good for, what it's not so good at, how to do the basics, and how to learn more. Bottom line: it's the best possible way to spend two days and learn as much as you would learn in two years of reading Twitter.
We have FOUR, yes FOUR different DevDays conferences coming up this fall. Each one is its own production, and they're all going to be spectacular. If you came to DevDays last time, prepare to get blown away. This time everything is DOUBLE. Two days instead of one. Better food and coffee. Better locations. Bigger screens to make it easier to follow along.
Lots of social activities. And, for the first time ever, we'll be visiting one city in Australia (shown at right), for an antipodean increase of infinity percent.
Anyway, registration is now open. The schedule is:
There are two! special! bonuses! you should know about before you choose a city:
So, go, sign up now. You can save $100 using discount code JOELONSOFTWARE.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
The Stack Exchange network is already up to 51 sites on diverse topics, from math to cooking to science fiction. Each site is a community on its own, and each community has its own needs and values. Pouring a big fat algorithm in equal measures on top of 51 different groups of people does not always work the way you might hope it would work. Maybe that’s why the super-algorithm companies (like Google) tend to suck when they try to build social applications.
Our goal as a company is to incubate each of these 51 communities—to get them to critical mass. Critical mass is that magic moment when the community has enough activity that it grows by itself.
Building communities on the Internet is a new kind of profession. There are an awful lot of technology companies, founded by programmers, who think they are building communities on the Internet, but they’re really just building software and wondering why the community doesn’t magically show up.
Stack Exchange is trying really hard not to suck at building communities. I would say we’re earning a solid B so far, but we’re working really hard at learning... doing little experiments and getting early results. And one thing we noticed is that the pure, algorithmic approach can’t possibly work for different communities: you need a political/social approach. That is, you need smart human beings to use smart human judgment and cultivate each community individually.
Or, to use a metaphor that has been on my mind, you can’t use a robot to train a puppy. Every puppy is different.
With 51 communities and a new one opening almost every week, our small team of four community managers are doing a great job but they just don’t have the bandwidth to help cultivate every site. So we depend on the most active, enthusiastic users to promote their own communities and help them flourish. But these users are usually domain experts, not community organization experts.
So what I plan to do is build a team of super-evangelists here at Stack Exchange to serve as backup. Sort of like Lady Gaga’s backup dancers, but probably without as many muscles, they are not onstage to lead; they’re there to fill up the stage with more hotness than one person can provide.
This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already kn0w how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally. Not that I know how to do this, but we’ll learn together. Every workday is going to start with a huddle at 9am and a plan for the day’s activities and an intensive six hours of work. Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning... reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.
If you or someone you know is enthusiastic, energetic, super-outgoing (a social connector), a great communicator (capable of sending 50 personal emails in an afternoon), with some training in psychology, political science, economics, philosophy, or the humanities in general, and you’re looking for an alternative to a dead-end mailroom job at a PR agency, this is a rare opportunity... please apply.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

How realistic is Steve’s fear?
We’re working on a series of two-day Stack Overflow conferences for the fall:
“What’s this conference about? The idea for the original DevDays was to have high-bandwidth, intensive introductions to a wide variety of new technologies… the kinds of technologies that everybody wants to learn but doesn’t necessarily need to use on a project right now. Last time, it was things like iPhone development, Python, jQuery, Google AppEngine, etc. This year, we’re asking you. So far, there’s a lot of interest in DVCS, HTML5, and Node.js.”
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom?
I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome. I’ve been on teams that don’t, and lunch every day is, at best, lonely.
A lot of big tech companies have cafeterias, either free (Google) or cheap (Microsoft). At these companies, some teams actually make an effort to eat together every day. But a lot of teams don’t. If you wander around these places at lunchtime, you’ll see some large groups, a lot of pairs of people who have scheduled a “lunch meeting,” but you’ll also see a distressing number of loners eating by themselves. Maybe they’re reading a book or checking their email while they eat so they don’t look sad. Maybe they took their lunch back to their desk so they wouldn’t have to sit in the cafeteria by themselves. Maybe they genuinely don’t like people and they’re happy to eat alone. Or maybe they’re just telling you that.
At Google and Microsoft, the cafeterias can get so crowded that the loners really have to sit with other groups because there isn’t enough room to sit at a table by themselves. Occasionally, the group they sit down with makes an effort to include the loner in their conversation. More often, the loner is obligated to pretend to be utterly engrossed in playing Farmbook on their smartphone, so as to provide a pretext to avoid having to make social contact. Excuse me, I’d love to introduce myself to you, but it’s very important that I update my cabbage.
Where and with whom we eat lunch is a much bigger deal than most people care to admit. Obviously, psychologists will tell us, obviously it goes back to childhood, and especially school, particularly Junior High, where who you eat with is of monumental importance. Being in any clique, even if it’s just the nerds, is vastly preferable than eating alone. For loners and geeks, finding people to eat with in the cafeteria at school can be a huge source of stress.
The importance of eating together with your co-workers is not negotiable, to me. It’s too important to be left to chance. That’s why we eat together at long tables, not a bunch of little round tables. That’s why when new people start work at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves in a corner. When we have visitors, they eat together with everyone else.
Even though Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are completely separate companies, we take advantage of the fact that our offices are in the same building to eat together every day. I’m glad that we have a chance to do this, even though a lot of people tend to clique-up and sit with the same people day after day.
There’s a lot of stuff that’s accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange, but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Jeff Atwood and I have resumed our weekly podcast, formerly known as the Stack Overflow Podcast, now known as the Stack Exchange Podcast!
Here are some ways to find us:
Special thanks to Special Agent Alex Miller, who is, in his spare time, the new producer of the podcast. We’ll be making lots of technical improvements to the podcast over the next couple of months, so stay tuned... it’ll be really fun.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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| The Monroe Doctrine has had an important role in forming American attitudes about winning and losing. |
The snack room at Stack Exchange got a wee upgrade today:
Find out why (and read to the end to find out how to get your own StackExchange sticker) at the Stack Overflow Blog.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.


One day, you’ll be telling your grandchildren about getting a programming job, version 1.0. You would send a “resume” to a “recruiter.” It included all kinds of silly information required by the esoteric resume ritual (foreign languages spoken, whether or not you play ultimate Frisbee, Microsoft-veteran status). This so-called “information” was utterly useless at determining whether you could program or not, but if you spelled everything right and used suitable fonts, you could come in for a day of interviews at which you would be asked to perform mundane programming tasks on a whiteboard.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
A couple of weeks ago some of us at Real Change were talking about how the rise of internet background-check services has hurt poor people. Years ago it was a pain to run background checks. If someone wanted to rent an apartment from you, you had to take their application materials to an agency run out of a trailer and hand it over to a guy named Rocky. You didn’t do it because Rocky smelled like cigarettes, stale peanuts, and three day old fish, and he charged too much.
There’s a surprising amount of misinformation out there about whether software companies own the work that a programmer does in their spare time.
From my answer to the question on answers.onstartups.com:
Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.
Read the whole thing here:
If I'm working at a company, do they have intellectual property rights to the stuff I do in my spare time?
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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| Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers. |
Whenever there are great occasions of public oration, I miss them. They always happen in prime-time, and I’m accustomed to averting my eyes during prime-time. In fact, I always arrange to sleep through prime-time.
If I could see the Sputnik overhead maybe I could figure out how Obama gets from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to “I want be one of the 80% of Americans riding in high-speed trains powered by 80% clean energy.” I don’t see that as much of a career, but then, maybe I just don’t know what the word “career” means. Is it like “careen?” What’s this 80% fetish?
If you weren’t able to make it to the FogBugz/Kiln world tour, a video of my presentation is up now on YouTube.
(If you have a high bandwidth connection, try the “720p” option, which shows the screen more clearly.)
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
My point this week: Eastern Washington should thank Seattle in writing for being so liberal.![]() |
| Not a sociology class; a sociology experiment. |
(reposted from the Stack Overflow blog)
2010 was an absolutely amazing year here at Stack Overflow. We grew from 7 million visitors to over 16 million, putting us in Quantcast’s top 400. We raised $6 million in venture capital, and we went from three full time employees to 27. We built a 7500 square foot office in New York, and we launched a ton of new features and sites, like Stack Exchange, a network of 33 Q&A sites on diverse topics from cooking to computer science. Stack Exchange grew 51% in December alone. Wow.
The expert Q&A model that Stack Overflow pioneered is really working. The statistic I’m proudest of is the percentage of questions that get a good answer, over 80% (and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100% answer rates!)
TrafficThe true measure of success for any Internet company is how often people come up to me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is a great deal of disagreement as to how to measure that, we track a reasonable proxy called “eyeballs,” on the theory that if a site is useful, people will load it up in their browsers and eyeball it.

Traffic to Stack Overflow grew 131% in 2010, to 16.6 million global monthly uniques. *Uniques* are counted by cookies, so the number of human beings is less. We also measure the number of page views (top level pages loaded, which doesn’t count images and supporting files), which has similarly grown from 31.8 million per month to 72.8 million per month, i.e. 129% growth.
Based on the number of people who do come up to us in hotel lobbies, we’re pretty sure that ALL the programmers in the world use Stack Overflow. (Source: completely made up. But seriously, when was the last time you met a programmer who didn’t use “El Stack”?) In order to keep growing and making the Internet more awesome, we have to expand into new subject areas, like Molecular Biology and Harley Davidson Belt Buckles. That’s what Stack Exchange is all about. Stack Exchange growth is insane. In six short months, we’ve gone from zero to 1.5 million monthly visitors, growing 51% in December.

If, as planned, we continue growing at 51% a month, we will be bigger than Facebook in 15 months. We’re ALREADY bigger than ocn.ne.jp (No, I’ve never heard of that either. But we’re bigger). Jeff and I are already planning who will play us in the Aaron Sorkin movie. (Tyler Labine and Zac Efron, obviously.)
Now, obviously, all this TRAFFIC isn’t worth a thing if people aren’t getting answers to their questions. That’s why our favorite thing to measure is “percent of questions answered.” And not just any answer will do, either: to count a question as “answered”, either the original poster has to accept the answer, or a third party has to upvote the answer. This is where Stack Overflow really shines compared to other Q&A sites: we actually get questions answered. Three of our sites actually have 100% answer rates!
New SitesLast summer, we relaunched Stack Exchange as a democratically-driven network of sites on topics chosen by our users. Some of these sites are directly related to programming (for example, Game Development), but some are quite far afield, from English Language toCooking.

We call it the Stack Exchange network, and at StackExchange.com you’ll find a directory of all of them, along with some hot questions, statistics, leaderboards, and other tools so that you can follow the sites and tags that you’re interested in.
We learned a long time ago that the only way to get questions answered promptly is to have a critical mass of knowledgeable users, so we have an onerous process called Area 51 where sites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn’t have critical mass, we just won’t create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we’ll close it down.
So far, 13 sites have gone all the way through the Area 51 process and launched. Dozens more are already in beta. Hundreds more are in active discussion and will launch when they reach a critical mass of interested participants.
The development team has been knocking out new features at a constant pace. They built an amazing web-based chat system, and we’ve added literally hundreds of new features and improvements to the core Stack Overflow engine which we roll out continuously.
The CompanyAt the beginning of the year, Stack Overflow LLC was just three developers working from home. In the spring, we raised $6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and a long list of celebrity angel investors, which allowed us to expand rapidly. We hired a team of great people, including several of the high-reputation users that you know from Stack Overflow.
We now have community managers, a sales team, two full time system administrators, and Very Important Administrative Overhead like myself, but most importantly, we have a great team of developers, in New York and around the world, building the next generation of cool features, like the important “wheel of blame” feature, which we can run at any time to calculate precisely who is responsible for anything that went wrong. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always Jason Punyon.)
To make room for all these people, or, at least, those who live in New York, we rented a 7500 square foot, class A, super-elite batcave in New York and then fixed it up to be nice, with cool furniture including Aeron chairs and height-adjustable desks, and lots of glass to bring views and daylight deep into the batcave. And of course, we have private offices with a half dozen gigantic 453-inch monitors for each developer. And there’s an amazingly cool Star Trek couch. Does your company have a Star Trek Couch? *I didn’t think so.* We also have Rovio, a little robot that our remote developers can use to visit the office “virtually.” (There. I said “virtually.” Are you happy now?)

Overall 2010 has been a real breakout year for Stack Overflow, which is now the largest programmer website in the world (source: me) and the best, fastest-growing Q&A website in the world (source: also me). We’ve got an incredible team firing on all cylinders, so we’re really looking forward to 2011.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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| The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil. |
What matters is, with a huge federal deficit hanging over us all, the Republican Party decided it was important for taxpayers paying Congresspeople’s salaries to see them demonstrate that they know the document (or most of it) that is the basis for their jobs. This proves that US Congressbeasts are indeed human with at least 2nd grade educations, and not horses, as they were (well, one of them was) the last time end-times were rumored. Hooray.
“Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites?”
— From The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions, over on the Stack Overflow blog.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
It seems like Stack Exchange is the perfect platform for questions about Jewish observance. After all, most of the Talmud reads just like Stack Overflow: a question, followed by multiple answers, usually with the highest ranking answer appearing first. The number of questions is infinite.
If you would be interested in participating in such a thing, please commit to the proposal today.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Due to unexpected demand we’ve been working with the venues for the upcoming FogBugz World Tour 2010 (incorporating DVCS University) to find more room. We already have more than 3154 people signed up and in some cities, we moved to a larger venue to accomodate everybody.
That means there’s still room in most cities if you haven’t signed up.
If you come, you’ll see me give a demo of FogBugz 8.0 and Kiln 2.0, and we’ll give you a one hour introduction to distributed version control ... how it works, how it’s different than the version control you know and love, and how to set it up to make your life easier. There will also be coffee and cookies, and a chance to meet Fog Creek people and other techies from your town.
Sign up now, it’s free! Hurry up—it all starts next week. I look forward to meeting you in person.
PS: If you get waitlisted, don’t despair. The night before each event, we will email everybody begging them to cancel if they know they can’t make it, so that we can let in people from the waitlist. What happened last year is that a few people cancelled the night before allowing us to let in all or most of the waitlist.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
The first Stack Exchange site to make it all the way through the community creation process is now live and out of beta!
webapps.stackexchange.com is a place to get help with web applications. Want to know how to email huge files? How to delete your Facebook account? How to secretly follow someone on Twitter? How to backup Wordpress blogs, ahem, Jeff? This is the site.
(Updated: Only days after launching, we changed the name from "nothingtoinstall.com" to "webapps.stackexchange.com" because nobody really liked that name!)
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Thanks to the hard work of the Fog Creek team, including ten great summer interns, we have just released amazing new upgrades to FogBugz and Kiln.
To kick off the new releases, we’re about to start another one of our famous world tours. I’ll be flying to 20 (yes, twenty) different cities to demo FogBugz 8.0 to anyone who wants to come see it in person.
As an added bonus, I’m also going to bring along someone from the Kiln team to teach a one-hour course in distributed version control. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a painless way to learn the basics of the new generation of version control.
The events are absolutely free but they always fill up right away, so go sign up now!

Map generated by the
Great Circle Mapper -
copyright © Karl L. Swartz
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously niche proposals, overlapping proposals, and proposals that are already covered by an existing site.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of an existing community. For example, our WordPress answers site (now in beta) covers the exact same material as WordPress.org’s existing forums.
This is nothing new to us at Stack Overflow, which purported to cover the exact same material as hundreds (if not thousands) of other programming sites. There’s no rule that says that there needs to be exactly one Q&A website per topic.
There is, however, a compelling case for the Stack Exchange technology. WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem. They don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible. You have to log on to ask or answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher. Stack Overflow is simply better than traditional forums, which is why it largely replaced proprietary forums. I remember hours of discussion with John Resig and the folks at jQuery who couldn’t decide whether to replace the jQuery Google Group with a forum or with a Stack Exchange. Ultimately it didn’t matter that much, because most of the jQuery Q&A activity happens on Stack Overflow anyway.
One day, the features that are standard on Stack Exchange will be copied everywhere. Until then, we’ll keep churning out new sites.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just more complicated.
Here’s the video from a talk I gave at the Business of Software conference last year:
I’ll be speaking again at this year’s conference in Boston, October 4th-6th.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week!
We’ll have three more for you next week, too.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
“We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.”
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?
Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network, so it has the clean, elegant design that made Stack Overflow a phenomenal success.
The newest member of the Stack Exchange Network is the first one to go through the community site-creation process called Area 51. There are more great sites in the pipeline, but they have to demonstrate that they can reach critical mass or we won’t create them.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.
“Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.
“Which button do you press?”
It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.
The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.
Benofsky from Hacker News writes:
Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
Also, how are they going to make money?
I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.
Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:
I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.
We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:
Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.
You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.
Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:
The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily basis.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a slide making fun of Stack Overflow’s terrific new VC-backed business model. She even got the unicorn!
Watch the whole talk here. The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
“And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.”
Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Dear TechSmith,
Thank you very much for all the pictures of your pets:
Also thanks for the toys, which were great. I especially like the iPhone.
Yours,
Taco.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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.
S
o far there are 32 informal proposals on meta.stackexchange.com. We’re weeks away from opening a site where these proposals can become real.
From my answer to the Firearms proposal: “The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, ‘long-tail,’ highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that it’s clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.”
From my answer to the Law proposal: “There are only 200 easy law questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on Mahalo and Yahoo!Answers. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only professionals can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.”
Our core mission at Stack Overflow is:
Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.
The “expert” part of that mission is important, otherwise we’re just building another place for the same questions that every other Q&A site has. We want the law Stack Exchange to attract lawyers, the movie Stack Exchange to attract filmmakers, and the aviation Stack Exchange to attract pilots. What makes a community great is great people... that is, real experts. And the experts want to hang out with other experts.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
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?
We tried making our software available as a hosted white label product called Stack Exchange. We thought that other people would create awesome sites on every imaginable topic. Some people did (yay!), but it wasn’t the flood of high quality sites we were hoping for.
So we’re making a few changes. Briefly:
If you’ve already created a Stack Exchange site, be sure to read the announcement in more detail to hear about our transition plan. Don’t be alarmed; we’d never do anything to mess with Stack Exchange sites that are already working.
Read all the details on the StackExchange Blog.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
| Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter? A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.* The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed. Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines? A We do it from our homes, and we refuse to let them in, no matter how many times they knock. There's a contract, and a deadline for delivery of the completed manuscript. That's actually a really scary deal: a contract, and a deadline, and nobody there in the morning to tell you to get to work. Or to start gazing at your shoe. Q I guess there's less pressure on established writers, whereas newbies are pushed harder? Time management: do you place yourself under a strict regime? A The arrangement forces you to manage your own time. In the old days, in Hollywood, screenwriters in studio employ were contractually obligated to turn in a specific number of pages per day. There is nothing like that in the world of professional fiction-writing, and if there were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have been published. I have to force myself to turn up every day, in case the writing also decides to. Often, it doesn't choose to. There is more of that at the start of a book than later, mercifully. The book builds its own momentum, though each one has a different momentum. That momentum is what calls the shots, imposes the regimen. The part of me that's writing this, now, is utterly incapable of writing a novel. The part of me that just wrote a novel is profoundly unavailable, right now, and will remain so until the next time I have to go out and walk for miles, whistling for it, convinced its finally run away for good and all. People don't ordinarily meet the part of me that writes novels, and when they do, they must assume I'm not not doing very well. Which as a human being, right then, I'm not. In direct proportion to how well I might be doing, right then, as a novelist. | ||
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