Joel Spolsky
American blogger
Avram Joel Spolsky (Hebrew: אברם יואל ספולסקי; born 1965) is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog.
Biography
Spolsky was born to Jewish parents and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lived there until he was 15. His family then moved with him to Israel, where he attended high school and completed his military service in the Paratroopers Brigade. He was one of the founders of the kibbutz Hanaton in Lower Galilee. In 1987, he returned to the United States to attend college. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania for a year before transferring to Yale University, where he was a member of Pierson College and graduated in 1991 with a BS summa cum laude in computer science.
Spolsky started working at Microsoft in 1991 as a program manager on the Microsoft Excel team, where he designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Joel Spolsky” is american blogger. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Joel, Spolsky and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2387083. VIAF identifies the subject as 65974723. The Library of Congress control number is nb2001040731. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 1991, 1994 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joel Spolsky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.