Geodog

Berkeley on Joel Spolsky

One of the great things about living in Berkeley is that a lot of interesting people come to town, from political figures giving talks on campus to writers at Cody's to musicians playing at Freight and Salvage, and if you are at all adventurous you can hear and meet many of them. Tonight Berkeley was host to a leading light from the small world of software product and project management, (which also happens to be my profession, to the extent I have one), Joel Spolsky, who writes a well-regarded weblog on software management, Joel on Software. The venue was a funny one, a cafe called Au Coquelet that also served as my alternative office and favorite lunch spot for the eight years that I had an office around the corner. It is a business person's lunch place and a student's dinner and study and hang out place.

So I walked into the cafe tonight and looked around for the Joel group -- like any other geek, I was too shy to ask anyone, but when I spotted a big table lined entirely with males, mostly in their mid-twenties to early forties, not too well dressed, predominantly European-American, I knew that I had found the geek gathering. It was a curious scene. Joel was ensconced at the first table, attempting to swallow bites of foot between responding to questions. Latecomers like myself were filling in the table around the corner, where we slowly warmed up to each other by discussing computers in education and citing favorite Joel essays like The Law of Leaky Abstractions, 12 Steps to Better Code, and Fire And Motion. The crowd included its share of local luminaries, such as Berkeley tech writer Scott Mace, Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg, Ten Speed Press founder Phil Wood, Perl Guru Sriram "Ram" Srinivasan, plus the usual crowd of dot-com crash victims, cashed-out retirees and survivors looking for the next interesting thing that I run into at any tech gatherings these days. Next to us were two undergraduate women, who slowly got more and more alarmed as more men kept arriving and hauling over tables, eventually enveloping them on three sides, at which point the women got up and left.

It is always fun meeting someone whom one knows only through their writing, and to compare their online persona to their physical one. In his writing in Joel on Software, Joel always comes across as a little Olympian, delivering his deep insights from his vast experience. Actually, I suspect that he just thinks more analytically about his experience than most of us, and he writes very well. His online persona is calm, considered, and wise. As another Californian reviewer noted, even though his website sports a picture of the skyline of Seattle, Joel Spolsky in person definitely comes across like a New Yorker, especially when surrounded by a sea of Californians. He spoke rapidly, intensely, bobbing his head as he held forth with opinions on all matters technical, changing topics with every other sentence, and punctuating each topic with a wisecrack. Although claiming exhaustion from his travels, he was the most energetic person in the room, and he was clearly performing, and performing well. He seemed to enjoy his performance as well, and he was good at it. Talking to him, it was clear that he would be very hard to best in an argument, because, as anyone who reads Joel on Software knows, he has a lot of intellectual horsepower and can express himself very well, but also because he clearly has a lot of stamina for arguing, and would be hard to outlast. The major deviation that he exhibited from the New York stereotype was his politeness. After he finished his meal he got up and moved to another table to talk with some of the other folks who had come, then after a while moved to the next table. He was as attentive to the questions of the twenty-something programmers as he was to those of the local luminaries.

One of the things that was curious was to see the crowd (myself included) surrounding Joel and treating him like a Delphic Oracle, asking him "what are Mozilla/Firebird's chances of establishing browser competition again(good), how do you decide what features to put in the next version of Fog Buzz (whatever features the lack of which clearly blocked sales of the last version), what would you use for developing a cross-platform GUI desktop app (don't know). After all, even if he is smarter than I am he probably isn't any smarter than many of the people I've worked with over the years. What's the difference? He writes, frequently and well. It's nice to know that writing still can bring authority, as well as a bit of celebrity.

All in all, a very pleasant and informative evening. Thank you Joel for organizing it.

Cross posted on The Berkeley Blog