Joel on Software

2000/09/28

Coming next week: how to write specs!

Good service

I wrote to Starbucks. "The grease pencils which you use to mark up the coffee cups (in New York, at least) wind up leaving ugly black goo on my hands every time I order a Starbucks beverage," I said. "Please consider finding some kind of marker for the cups that does not come right off on my fingers."

(See what drinking too much coffee makes you do?)

"Cynthia B." in Starbucks Customer Relations replied promptly: "I shared your suggestion for using a different type of marking pen in our New York locations with the Retail Operations Department for their attention."

We'll see!

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!

Want to know more?

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, which lets you organize anything, together, FogBugz, enlightened issue tracking software for bug tracking, and Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.