Joel Spolsky is easily one of my favorite bloggers. He’s a software developer / manager of a software development company that he grew himself. On top of being a very insightful guy, he’s a great writer: he tells stories and comes up with all sorts of quips and analogies. Here’s an example from his latest post:

Near as I can tell, Chandler’s original vision was pretty much just to be “revolutionary.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t code “revolutionary.” I need more details to write code. Whenever the spec describes the product in terms of adjectives (“it will be extremely cool”) rather than specifics (“it will have brushed-aluminum title bars and all the icons will be reflected a little bit, as if placed on a grand piano”) you know you’re in trouble.

If you have anything to do with software development, you need to be reading Joel. If you have anything to do with business or customers or users, you should probably be reading him too. And if you like to know about how people and the world really works, reading him wouldn’t be a bad idea.