Monday, March 22, 2010

happy trails Joel

My long time favorite tech blogger Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware has now signed off.

It was a great site in its heyday. Thanks for the memories and great articles Joel! And the forums were great in their heyday, the hub for those programmers who "get it".

Alas, like a great TV series the writers "ran out of things to talk about" and the last years weren't as good as the first. It was indeed time to shut it down on the 10th anniversary. The later years were OK, but like Seinfeld nobody says that the last 3 seasons were near as good as the first three.


It wouldn't be cool to bring it up in the forums but I was thinking of when did Joel jump the shark? Was it when he started requiring log in to post in the forums?

For me it was the "very special Joel" when he had this wrenching ethics crisis about accepting freebies from site sponsors such as Peer1 hosting. And going forward he would voluntarily begin paying for these things that previously he quite openly admitted he was getting for free in exchange for the product placement on his popular site. The site just wasn't the same after that.

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