Joel Spolsky @spolsky Twitter profile

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Joel Spolsky

3 years

New blog post: Kinda a big announcement

The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha…

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

"During peak traffic hours on weekdays, there are about 80 people per hour that need help getting out of Vim."

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

It's been about ten years since @codinghorror and I started building @StackOverflow so I decided to write a series of blog posts in retrospective! The first one is live here:

The Stack Overflow Age

I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

"You Suck at Excel" (video, 54m) in which I try to teach my team a bare minimum of non-incompetence at spreadsheets

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

I'm sad to announce that Taco died of cancer today.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Sorry Apple. After 10 years loyalty, this latest MBPro with useless touchbar and unreliable keyboard was last straw. Switched to Dell XPS13👋

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

5 years

We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board.

The next CEO of Stack Overflow

We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board.

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

President Trump’s executive order on immigration is extremely upsetting. It is immoral, unconstitutional, and fundamentally Un-American.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

you know I'm gay right?

Ellen DeGeneres

@EllenDeGeneres

7 years

It's #NationalComingOutDay ! Come out as gay. Come out as trans. Come out as supporting equality. We need your voices now.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Time to take a stand.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

5 years

Microsoft replaced an in-house Q&A system with Stack Overflow for Teams, and went from 900 to 70,000 employees using it. In a couple of years they have built up a knowledge base of 80,000 answered questions!

How Microsoft Uses Stack Overflow for Teams

More than 70,000 employees have answered over 80,000 questions since Microsoft launched its own internal version of Stack Overflow. The collaboration and kno...

www.youtube.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

literally just got pitched by thiel's investment firm if they can invest in trello. 😂 Nice fund you got there hope nothing happens to it

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Stack Overflow Documentation is live! This is the biggest thing since the original Stack Overflow.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

40 pages about software engineering, hiring developers and technical leadership. Free PDF!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

And, Stack Overflow is 10! Happy birthday!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

2 years

Making the web better. With blocks!

You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can inser…

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

There's this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work.

Strange and maddening rules

There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work.

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

Today’s new thing is called Stack Overflow for Teams. It lets you set up a private place on Stack Overflow where you can ask questions that will only be visible to members of your team, company, or organization.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

I seem to be the last person in the tech world who believes developers should have private offices. http://t.co/pD7PC70UbT by @df07

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

The real reason support for the EU is collapsing is that Europeans are exhausted from all those idiotic "this site uses cookies" pop ups 🇪🇺

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

3 years

Every team should have a a private version of Stack Overflow for questions about your own code base. Now, it's free for the first 50 users.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?

Developers’ side projects

If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Anil Dash is the New CEO at Fog Creek Software

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

I wish everybody would read this thing about Hungarian variable naming conventions again

Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

Way back in September 1983, I started my first real job, working at Oranim, a big bread factory in Israel that made something like 100,000 loaves of bread every night in six giant ovens the size of…

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

"Paste the error msg into Google…crossing your fingers in hopes that a website called Stack Overflow will come up"

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

whole new product.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Stack Overflow's entire data set is freely available, and now you can query it using Google's BigQuery.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

My answer to whether Stack Overflow should sport a rainbow logo for the day http://t.co/MtqdnsjloJ

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Also. After a few weeks with the "touchbar", it is worse than the function keys it replaced in every respect. worst apple purchase ever

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Peter Thiel's support of Donald Trump is unconscionable and abhorant. Thank you @msuster for explaining it so well

And Then They Came for Me …

Yesterday was Halloween in the United States where children dress up and try to scare people as they “trick-or-treat” for candy. Yet the…

bothsidesofthetable.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

For the first time ever, I'm not a part of the Trello team 😢 Good bye and good luck!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Hey! Stack Overflow is now 100% on https, after tons of work. The epic blog post by @Nick_Craver is here:

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

now you know why experienced developers are really conservative about technology choices http://t.co/FhFUaCQ6rL

Providence: Failure Is Always An Option

This post is part of a series on the Providence project at Stack Exchange. The first post can be found here. The last five blog posts have been a highlight reel of Providence’s successes. Don’t be...

jasonpunyon.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Let's all agree. Next time someone asks you to send a fax, tell them "I work in tech, you know they're shutting that down end of this year"

Matthew Hankins

@mc_hankins

9 years

'Could you fax over a copy?' 'No, I can't fax because of where I live' 'Where do you live?' 'The 21st century'

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

I can tell this is not going to end well

David Robinson

@drob

7 years

New blog post: "Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs" #rstats

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

13 years

50 free ebooks generated from StackOverflow topics: http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/ebooks/

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

3 years

Thanks and congratulations to @codinghorror , my cofounder, @pchandrasekar , the CEO, hundreds of current and ex-employees who helped build @StackOverflow , and literally millions of developers who have shared their knowledge freely and made programming a little bit better

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

"How to Land the Space Shuttle" by @bretcope was a huge hit at the Stack Overflow remote meetup last week. YouTube:

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

When you are in some app and you want to make a PDF file, why do you go to the Print menu? Shouldn't that be under Save As? kthx I'll let myself out

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook. But I did write a blog post.

Birdcage liners

My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook.

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

So, it's, like, H2O4 ? Chemistry is hard

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

5 years

I'm excited to announce that Prashanth Chandrasekar is taking over as CEO of Stack Overflow. Welcome aboard, @pchandrasekar !

Welcome, Prashanth!

Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growt…

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

If everything we tried worked out great, we wouldn't be trying bold enough things. 😥 farewell, Stack Overflow Documentation

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

10 years

Found in the design notebook of the iOS 7.1 shift key designer http://t.co/aE6XXQ2AF5

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

seriously it would save so much time if everybody just did things my way in the FIRST PLACE

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Every 10 years or so you might find that the world and tech have changed enough that a new app redesigned from scratch up is a good idea

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

12 years

If you're not into gay marriage, don't get gay married--but my marriage to Jared isn't hurting you and should be legal everywhere

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

My mom's first ACM journal article from 1974. Happy Mother's Day!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

running windows 95 in a dos emulator running in JavaScript in a web browser is blowing my mind right now. http://t.co/GLp2Xyiznx

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

The annual Stack Overflow developer survey is here and it’s huge!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Sixteen years after launching Joel on Software, it’s now running on WordPress.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

This will be the year I lose 10 pounds! walking around the house looking for the heckin' USB-C adapter

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

11 years

I prevented a dumb patent from getting granted http://t.co/cS0x2esDXv

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

Apple's personality flaw: every feature they don't have is a horrible idea, but when they finally get it, they INVENTED it and it's amazing

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

5 years

Every year, Stack Overflow surveys thousands of developers to see how they work, what tools they are using, and how they're feeling on a wide range of topics. The 2019 results are out today!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

10 years

Oh, Birmingham. I can't even http://t.co/yiFXQBm0Ws

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

10 years

Here is a video in which @sklivvz describes the architecture of Stack Overflow http://t.co/ZV6ge7jA0K

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

But you can make up for it by indenting with spaces

CNN

@CNN

7 years

People who eat fried potatoes two or more times a week double their risk of an early death, a recent study found

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

4 years

HASH is a free, online platform for assembling models of the world.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

congratulations! @trello FTW! whoooo

Trello by Atlassian

@trello

7 years

Exciting News! Trello is being acquired by @Atlassian . Read more here:

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

you guys I'm still gay #NationalComingOutDay

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

4 years

"In the interest of deflecting a million questions about what I’m doing nowadays, thought I’d update my long-suffering readers here."

So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?

For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, …

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

what the

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Are kids these days still writing text field validators? And getting them wrong? time for some abstractions.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

yeah let's just go ahead and implement a digital clock using Conway's Game of Life

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Anybody who thinks "The Office" invented cringe comedy needs to watch Fawlty Towers

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

been playing this ^%$@! game for six months now and I can't figure out how to get "2048"

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

Fog Creek Software is now Glitch -- after 18 years, it's time to move forward!

Fog Creek is now Glitch!

We’re saying goodbye to the Fog Creek name and betting our future on Glitch.

medium.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

We made a really cool video about Stack Overflow with Microsoft. It's just 2 minutes check it out!

Connect(); // 2016 - Stories: Stack Overflow

https://connectevent.microsoft.com#MSFTConnect

www.youtube.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

11 years

looks like Ballmer finally figured out how to make Microsoft stock go up.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Taco wishes you all a happy national puppy day 🐾

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Congratulations Australia 🇦🇺 #MarriageEquality

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

LinkedIn has become a great source of CVs which is nice, but the "social network" they built is just a septic tank 😐

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

@SaraJChipps I heard scrum has more RAM

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

This parrot drone has disobeyed all three laws of robotics in its short five minute lifespan

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

http://t.co/jZ2ezz0Ygz

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

"If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online." http://t.co/RtHJ71yfD4

Home

ReadWrite is a tech media publication focused on educating our audience on emerging tech like AI, Crypto & Gaming and reporting the latest news from the tech industry.

readwrite.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

read about stack overflow's architecture

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, writing bug tracker after bug tracker

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

Hey everyone! It’s time our annual developer survey—the world’s largest and most comprehensive!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

Imma make dinner any requests? @TacoTrello

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

I can't believe I wrote that. I've met many wonderful testers since then who love being great testers and take pride in their work.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

DID YOU KNOW you can run database queries against the Stack Overflow database? (tutorial: )

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

jeez, i used to be a real dick. 33 billion apologies to @dhh () I'm mortified at how rude I was

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

7 years

saw a metaphor

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

13 years

Joel's Totally Fair Method to Divide Up The Ownership of Any Startup http://t.co/liqAuPE

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

12 years

Best practices for implementing "forgot password" feature securely: http://t.co/PUQwPtQH (thanks @dpthanki )

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

4 years

Not a fan of . What was wrong with Visual Battle 6.0

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

5 years

Glitch, the simply app development tool that came out of Fog Creek Software, raised a $30m Series A.

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

6 years

@robconery @jonskeet Your 310 answers on Stack Overflow have helped 341,000 people, probably saving them each about 30 minutes. So let's call that 85 years of time that you've saved thankful developers :) Thanks for your contribution and don't let the idiots get you down

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

11 years

haha, still the best thing that has ever been on stack overflow :-) http://t.co/aPyPQqolL6

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

8 years

Common project management mistake, too

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

Today I got email from our thermostat. You're a thermostat! Get over yourself!

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

9 years

Stack Exchange raises $40m from @a16z , led by @cdixon . http://t.co/iHJICgYT5p

Stack Exchange Raises $40m

Today Stack Exchange is pleased to announce that we have raised $40 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz. Everybody wants to know what we’re going to do with all that money. First of all, of co…

www.joelonsoftware.com

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Joel Spolsky

@spolsky

11 years

Working remotely: http://t.co/DCvnpE3a

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Joel Spolsky