Those that are already in the computer business must have heard of Joel Spolsky. He writes a blog at www.joelonsoftware.com which is full of useful information and well, basically the guy is a legend in the computer field. I have recently purchased a copy of Aardvark’d on DVD, which is about a group of summer interns who over 12 weeks create a great product called CoPilot which allows you to control another persons computer without having to install any software, and without worrying about configuring firewalls, NAT or proxies. It is very impressive and shows you the kind of quality Internship that they have managed to create over at Fogcreek Software (which he is a partner of). It reminds me of my year’s placement at Intergral GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany. I had an absolute blast there and learned how software development should be done from Darren Pywell who is the company partner and CTO . He is a genuinely nice guy and an absolute genius when it comes to computers. He can read binary like most people read novels and that is no lie . I would recommend to any university student who wants to actually learn something, visit another country (unless you live in Germany of course ) and create something that will end up shipping to customers to contact Intergral and try to fix yourself up on a placement there. Be warned though, only good developers and quick learners should apply as they expect a lot from you, but in return for some excellent training of course.

Anyway, back onto Joel. I cant tell you just how useful his blog has been to me in the last few months. Every time that I work on our business plan I keep coming across many problems (and its usually the mundane stuff that originally never even entered my head) , I usually end up at a post on Joel’s website. What I like about the man is that he honestly tells it like it is, rather than pretending that he never came across any problems. The truth is, and I am quite sure about this, that anyone who has ever started a company has come across a million problems and everyone else has probably had exactly the same problems too. It seems strange that not that many people have come forward before to share their pearls of wisdom, except of course from the obvious people.

Now, there are other problems between myself and Joel such as border issues because he resides in the USA and myself in England, but other than local issues such as company rules and tax every other problem seems pretty much the same, and I am sure that is the same for everybody else no matter which country they are from. So that neatly brings me onto the purpose of my blog. I am hoping that over the coming months I will be able to share with you my trials and tribulations of trying to successfully start-up and manage a tech business. I also hope to share with you any information/reviews that I think may be of interest to someone similar in my shoes. Other than Joel’s blog I know of a few more sites that are really useful and over time I hope to list these and any more that I find to build up a useful collection of info. For now, get reading Joel’s blogs and start browsing for any other sites that will be useful.

P.S I would just like to add that Joel also has some excellent books out that were created from posts in his blog. The book that everyone should read is “Joel on Software: . . .” – ISBN-10: 1590593898.