Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff. So I’ve come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. With all the time you save, you can go to medical school.

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

Russian

Sedelnikov Andrei has started translating my User Interface book into Russian! The cool thing is, since I have Windows 2000 and the latest IE, I can just go to that site and see the page appear in the original Russian without thinking about fonts, code pages, or encodings. It’s all automatic. I read Hebrew newspapers, too, and the fact that it “just works” is fantastic!

My latest wishlist for Manila (the software that runs Joel On Software — quite well, I should point out)