Joel on Software

Goals

Seth Godin reminded me about having goals. “Having goals is a pain in the neck,” he says, but “the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact... those people have goals.”

OK, good point. Here are Fog Creek Software’s goals for 2009, in no particular order:

• Ship FogBugz 7.0 for all platforms
• Ship Copilot Desktop for all platforms
• Release the next documentary about software development
• Build a kick-ass new product from the ground up with the summer interns, and get the first dollar of customer revenue before they go back to school
• Put on a fantastic Business of Software conference
• Relive the glory days with another FogBugz World Tour

I like what Seth said about how “if you don't have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it.”

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, easy web-based collaboration software, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, and Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.