Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy – Joel on Software

Skip to content

Customize -> Theme Options) -->

Your host<br>I’m Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.

Search

Read the archives in dead-tree format! Many of these articles have been collected into four books, available at your favorite bookstore. It’s an excellent way to read the site in the bath, or throw it at your boss.

Careers

Ready to level up? Stack Overflow Jobs is the job site that puts the needs of developers first. Whether you want to take control of your search or let employers discover you, we’re on a mission to help every developer find a job they love.

Looking to hire smart programmers who get things done? Stack Overflow Talent is a fully-customized sourcing solution that helps you understand, reach, and attract developers on the platform they trust most. Find the right candidates for your jobs. Learn more.

For my day job, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and level up. Each month, more than 40 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow to ask and answer questions and find better jobs. Stack Overflow is also the flagship site of the Stack Exchange network, 160+ question and answer sites dedicated to all kinds of topics from cooking to gaming. According to Quantcast, Stack Overflow is the 30th largest web property in the United States and in the top 100 in the world.

I also founded Fog Creek Software, one of the most influential small tech companies in the world. As an independent, privately-owned company, we’ve been making customers happy since the turn of the century. We share what we've learned about how to make great software, both by writing about our ideas and by creating products, like FogBugz, Trello and Gomix, that help others make great technology. As a result, Fog Creek's impact on the world of developers rivals companies a thousand times our size.

Twitter! Twitter!<br>My Tweets

Software designer, Uibook

Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun.

It’s easy because you usually don’t need algorithms more sophisticated than how to center one rectangle in another. It’s straightforward because when you make a mistake, you immediately see it and can correct it. It’s fun, because the results of your work are immediately visible. You feel like you are sculpting the program directly.

I think most programmers’ fear of UI programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphics design: the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-dressed-in-black people with interesting piercings produce cool looking artistic stuff. Programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers: strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment. So they think they can’t do UI design.

Actually, I’ve found UI design to be quite easy and quite rational. It’s not a mysterious matter that requires a degree from an art school and a penchant for neon-purple hair. There is a rational way to think about user interfaces with some simple, logical rules that you can apply anywhere to improve the interfaces of the programs you work on.

I’m not going to give you "Zen and the Art of UI Design". It’s not art, it’s not Buddhism, it’s just a set of rules. A way of thinking rationally and methodically. This book is designed for programmers. I assume you don’t need instructions for how to make a menu bar; rather, you need to think about what to put in your menu bar (or whether to have one at all). There is one primary axiom I’ll teach you which guides all good UI design, and it’s not hard to understand at all.

My first real job was in a big, industrial bakery. The bakery was designed to have six bread production lines. For every two production lines, there was a dough mixer, which produced 180 kg lumps of dough that could be dumped to the left or the right:

Well, this was the design. In reality, Mixer C hadn’t been built yet, nor had lines 3 or 5. So the arrangement was:

Alert readers will be wondering, "how did the dough get from Mixer B to production line 6?" Well, that’s where Wee Joel came in. My job, if you can believe this, was to stand on the left of Mixer B, then catch the giant 180 kg lumps of dough as they flew out of the mixer in a big bathtub-with-wheels, then roll the bathtub over to production line 6, and, using a winch-like device, heave the dough onto line 6. I had to do this once every ten minutes, from about 10 PM until 4 AM.

There were other complications. Line 6 couldn’t really handle 180 kg of dough all at once, so I had to slice it with a giant knife into about 10 pieces. I don’t even want to go into how absurdly difficult that was.

The first few days, of course, I was terrible at this job. It seemed...