Avram Joel Spolsky (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 product 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. In 2008, he launched the Stack Overflow programmer Q&A site in collaboration with Jeff Atwood. Using the Stack Exchange software product which powers Stack Overflow, the Stack Exchange Network now hosts over 100 Q&A sites.

Biography

Spolsky grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lived there until he was 15. He then moved with his family to Jerusalem, Israel, where he attended high school and completed his military service as a paratrooper. 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.