Windows and SimCity

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows, where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case.

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software

Writing book benefits

One of the benefits of writing this book is that I get to put words into your mouth and you can't do a darn thing about it.

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software

Every morning

Until we're a company the size of Oracle, we don't have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software

Computers and human brains

One of the big differences between computers and human brains is that computers are willing to sit there patiently while you define the terms that you want to use later. But humans won't understand what you're talking about unless you motivate it first. Humans don't want to have to decode something, they just want to read it in order and understand it. For humans, you have to provide the big picture and then fill in the details. With computer programs, you start at the top and work your way to the bottom, with full details throughout. A computer doesn't care if your variable names are meaningful. A human brain understands things much better if you can paint a vivid picture in their mind by telling a story, even if it's just a fragment of a story, because our brains have evolved to understand stories.

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software

Funny spec

Software documentation should be funny.

Every time you need to tell a story about how a feature works, instead of saying:
The user types Ctrl+N to create a new Employee table and starts entering the names of the employees.
write something like:
Miss Piggy, poking at the keyboard with an eyeliner stick because her chubby little fingers are too fat to press individual keys, types Ctrl+N to create a new Boyfriend table and types in the single record "Kermit".
If you read a lot of Dave Barry, you'll discover that one of the easiest ways to be funny is to be specific when it's not called for. "Scrappy pugs" are funnier than "dogs." "Miss Piggy" is funnier than "the user." Instead of saying "special interests," say "left-handed avocado farmers." Instead of saying "People who refuse to clean up after their dogs should be punished," say that they should be "sent to prison so lonely that the inmates have to pay spiders for sex."

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software