OK, a brief break from cycling to look at something from another part of my life: the work life. Being a programmer, and managing programmers.

I've looked at Joel Spolsky's site, Joel on Software, a few times, but I didn't spend enough time reading it to really see what he was offering.

Joel obviously has a lot of experience and tallent, and insight. His story called The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code has really opened my eyes. Not really the test at the top, which is really just an intro, but the explanations that come later.

I really need to see what we can do to improve on some of those areas at Macrobyte. We're a strange beast, because we're so dispersed, but many of those things still apply to us and we've ignored them (not all of them, thankfully) for too long.

Jim Roepcke reminded me today that Computers Suck, and Operating Systems suck, and that they're both much easier to work with if you remember that (this was part of a broader conversation, trust me).

However, in my opinion:

Nothing sucks on a computer as much as email clients.

They suck infinitely.

I've never seen or used an email client with more than "great potential". They always disappoint, and those with the most potential (like MailSmith, from BareBones) end up discontinued (sometimes unofficially) before the potential is realized. Why? Probably because the lowest-common-denominator free app, Outlook Express, has killed the market.

(Update: thankfully, I was wrong about MailSmith, it wasn't discontinued. BareBones just went a long time without updating it.)