one Bits and Bytes: The Practice of Programming -- one Choosing a Language -- two Back to Basics -- three The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code -- four The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) -- five Painless Functional Specifications Part 1: Why Bother? -- six Painless Functional Specifications Part 2: What's a Spec? -- seven Painless Functional Specifications Part 3: But How? -- eight Painless Functional Specifications Part 4: Tips -- nine Painless Software Schedules -- ten Daily Builds Are Your Friend -- eleven Hard-Assed Bug Fixin' -- twelve Five Worlds -- thirteen Paper Prototyping -- fourteen Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You -- fifteen Fire and Motion -- sixteen Craftsmanship -- seventeen Three Wrong Ideas from Computer Science -- eighteen Biculturalism -- nineteen Get Crash Reports From Users-Automatically! -- two Managing Developers -- twenty The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing -- twenty-one Incentive Pay Considered Harmful -- twenty-two Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers -- twenty-three Human Task Switches Considered Harmful -- twenty-four Things You Should Never Do, Part One -- twenty-five The Iceberg Secret, Revealed -- twenty-six The Law of Leaky Abstractions -- twenty-seven Lord Palmerston on Programming -- twenty-eight Measurement -- three Being Joel: Random Thoughts on Not-So-Random Topics -- twenty-nine Rick Chapman Is In Search of Stupidity -- thirty What Is the Work of Dogs in This Country? -- thirty-one Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt -- thirty-two Two Stories -- thirty-three Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef -- thirty-four Nothing Is As Simple As It Seems -- thirty-five In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome -- thirty-six Strategy Letter I: Ben & Jerry's vs. Amazon -- thirty-seven Strategy Letter II: Chicken-and-Egg Problems -- thirty-eight Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back! -- thirty-nine Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth -- forty Strategy Letter V: The Economics of Open Source -- forty-one A Week of Murphy's Law Gone Wild -- forty-two How Microsoft Lost the API War -- four A Little Bit Too Much Commentary on .NET -- forty-three Microsoft Goes Bonkers -- forty-four Our .NET Strategy -- forty-five Please Sir May I Have a Linker? -- five Appendix -- appendix The Best of Ask Joel.