Bringing Joel to WordPress

This post is more than 3 years old.

One of the fun projects I've been involved with in my work at Automattic is bringing Joel Spolsky's esteemed writings at JoelOnSoftware.com to a WordPress-powered site. That site went live earlier this week just in time for a big announcement from Joel's company Fog Creek Software.

Joel's blog was one of the first that I ever read with any regularity, and it had a big influence on my thinking when I was building the web development company that I co-founded in 1997 and managed for 16+ years. I think if you talk to anyone who has been creating web software for very long, you'll find that they've been affected in some way by Joel's thoughts on development best practices, navigating getting hired in tech, learning from what other companies do well or poorly, and how to build great products, services and organizations. And if you've ever dragged cards around on a Trello board or copy/pasted someone's code from a Stack Overflow answer, you've used his creations too.

So it was a delight to be a part of the ad hoc team that helped bring his site from an old CityDesk instance to a WordPress site hosted at Pressable. There's a bit of irony in that the software I wrote to scrape the old site and generate an import for the new site is a monolithic, thousand-line Perl script that probably violates many of the aforementioned best practices (don't tell Joel) but it got the job done. 

Hooray for giving new life to old things!

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