Joel lost his job six years ago and started a job search service called JibberJobber. Since then, that's been his job, together with a number of books, speaking tours, and so on.

Often on his blog, Joel returns to why many people are on a job search in the first place - they were laid off or fired. He gets some good comments on this thread, when he asks why this one things hurts us more than most things.

"About a month ago, I watched Scott Hanselman's awesome productivity talk, It's not what you read, it's what you ignore, and it spurred me to take a hard look at my daily Internet usage. As a result I've finished several projects that were previously languishing on my todo list, and I've improved my focus."

"I’m a student at the University of Texas, and two weeks ago, another UT student was hit by a bus (video embedded below, he made it out without serious injuries). As soon as I saw the video start going viral, I decided I would make a game for it. 24 hours later, the game was complete and went viral itself. In just a few days, the game had 25,000+ unique visitors, 1,500+ likes, and articles on sites like Kotaku, News.com.au, and the Statesman."

"This doesn’t mean you’ll fail. It means you need to be smarter and harder working, and surround yourself with extraordinary people."

Very cool stuff.

"This describes everything wrong with Enterprise IT. Process over rationale."

"I still remember my first open-source project: I didn't tell a soul about it until I had used it in production for over a year and was very confident that I'd addressed the majority of common use cases. It was a .net object relational mapper called NORM, and it was released in 2005. No, you haven't ever heard of it. I polished it for months, and no one cared. After that I never waited to release anything. I now believe that it's highly unlikely that whatever I create will ever gain any traction, so I might as well get it out there, fail quickly, and move on."

"Now when you leave school you move back home. You take public transportation or borrow your parents car. The only thing new you buy is the cheap work outfit you need. Savings ? Forgettaboutit. It’s not happening. Your entire focus is on hitting your monthly nut for school debt , credit card and maybe a car or apartment. The crush of college debt has taken an entire generation of graduates, current and future out of the economy. Which is exactly why the economy hasn’t grown and won’t grow beyond microscopic growth rates we have seen so far."

"A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java.

How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times. On the basis of my own personal experience with the two languages, I agree with this estimate."

RMS is a GOD. And he invented Emacs.

"I said, "Are you asking me to lie?" She said, "No, I am asking you to sign a piece of paper." I said. "I cannot sign a statement that is not true." She said, "You can reschedule your appointment for some other time." I suggested, "How about if I add 'not' to make it a true statement?" She accepted this. So I had my appointment."

A salesman and a developer go on a bear hunting trip...

"It’s a 2D scene containing 2 lights and 13 different objects rendered in real-time by a Javascript library ... called Illuminated.js.

The library is designed to add some awesome effects to your existing applications. Adding a cool atmosphere for your applications and games can make the difference!

Try the editor and Get the source code."

"In the 2009 film "Up in the Air," the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.

Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.

"I can't even remember when I cracked 10 million," said Vroom, 67, a big, amiable Texan, who at last count had logged nearly four times as many. Rothstein, 61, has notched more than 30 million miles."

"There are growing number of people
who have decided to live light on the earth
to not be a part of problem anymore
I spent the last few years with four of them
striving for harmony with nature
in the most pristine corners of United States."

"…This is where someone usually says, 'Look, this may work for some people, and that’s great. But that’s not the kind of life I want to lead.'

To which I reply… 'Okay—then I guess you don’t want it that bad.'"

Nice wrap-up of the OpenClinica Global Conference by Clinovo CEO Ale Gicqueau, including some good words about the presentations and people.

"When did it become a requirement to have advisors – any advisors?"

"'Oh, that’s not my job,' is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making sh*t work."

"What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate."

Productivity, Greek Myth Style

"An agile project culture has an empowered team, a team who knows that they must leave the code base a little cleaner than they found it the day before. A team who knows that they must improve the automation every day. A team who knows the story is not done until the entire story is done, and that includes the automated tests and the automated test framework. A team who knows they have to work together to deliver business value every day, not just at the end of the iteration."

"One of the key myths of startups, especially in Silicon Valley, is that they are for the young."

"Record labels and Hollywood have described The Pirate Bay as one of the biggest threats to their business, but thousands of artists clearly disagree with this view. In recent weeks more than 5000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site."

"Last week we discovered that the owner of SEOnix.org hacked in to our backend and threw himself a sweet SEO party. The only invitee was obviously his own website, but he still managed to have a good time all alone. In the last 3 months he got a couple of nice gifts from us in the form of juicy links and an occasional canonical tag."

Keep calm and carry an extra compiler...

JDK (Java Development Kit) 10 and releases beyond it are intended to have a unified type system, in which everything would be made into objects, with no more primitives, according to an Oracle slide presentation entitled "To Java SE 8 and Beyond!" posted on the QCon conference website.

"Keep it simple. When in doubt, use the simplest solution. William of Occam stated this principle (Occam’s razor) in the 14th century. Put in modern terms: fight features. If a feature is not absolutely essential, leave it out, especially if the same effect can be achieved by combining other features."

"For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient!

I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material."

"In life you’ll be faced with many situations like this – moral dilemmas. You’ll learn that there are many bad actors. You’ll find that there are very few people who still believe in honor. When you find those people they’ll be lifetime friends and business associates.

But you can start with yourself."

"A cursory look at the data shows that location pretty much doesn’t relate to the long-term success of a startup. Which, if you think about it for even a second, makes perfect sense. How many of our corporate behemoths have their home offices in unlikely towns and cities? How many of those towns and cities have grown up around companies, and not the other way around?

There are good reasons to start a company in a particular place, or to move your company from one place to another. “Because everyone else has” is not one of them."

"If you don't have an AARP card, you're apparently too young to read westerns."

"I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose."