Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)
Is it just me or did this not age entirely well? I really appreciate Joel’s writings, but in a kind of very specific way .Net did actually turn out to be the big deal it set out to be, along with Java. Modern spreadsheets are just message-passing machines, and somehow Messaging companies are gigantically valuable. Yes, astronauts are expensive, perhaps overcelebrated and often wrong… but somebody has to do it right!? I for one am glad we’re not still emailing Master-Spreadsheet-FINAL(1)(1).xls back and forth to get things done. I rather like millennials like Ryan Dahl that saw the potential for Javascript to be more than a browser scripting language. I may have even been something of an astronaut myself (an “idea man”… my team would jeer)- but I’ve come down to the earth and dig my hoe into the soil these days. I think we’re better off with some good astronauts out there, at least sparingly.