Sharing Can Be Good

Let me compare and contrast the Joel model to what I like to refer to as the Hacker model. Jeol who, which hacker, what model? Bare with me, it will all be clear after I tell you this story.

Few months ago, a friend of mine invited me to dinner at his house. I knew my friend from Symantec where I used to intern and he used to work as a lead engineer. My friend managed to file 2 or 3 patents in his one year there so that should tell you something about him. After an excellent dinner, instead of offering me dessert, my friend offered to show me some of his Windows kernel hacking skills. For those who don't know the kernel is the core component of the operating system. Windows does not publish any of its internal OS implementation details so hackers spend alot of time trying to figure out how it works to be able to break it. Security engineers, like my friend, spend an equal amount of time but to prevent against hackers' attempts. I was very impressed with what my friend showed me. I asked him if any of that information is published somewhere. My friend smiled and I saw that look in his eyes that kinda says you are too naive kid. He told me that security engineers spend most of their day trying to figure out this information and obviously no one is gonna reveal this information publicly as they maintain a career out of it.

The Joel model is in reference to Joel Spolsky. Mr. Spolsky is the author of the famous blog: JoelOnSoftware.com that became very popular among software engineers and geeks in general. Joel Spolsky became very famous to the extent that he gets frequently invited to speak at every major software conference. He was the keynote speaker for my company's annual engineering conference last year. He even published a book off his blog that was a top seller on Amazon. Joel founded a very small company in NYC that does bug tracking software. Despite his fierce attempts to make his product look sexy or high profile its a bug tracking software afterall. So, where did all this popularity come from? I attribute his fame solely to his blog. Joel decided to follow the complete opposite of the Hackers model. He shares the lessons and tricks that he learned over the years. He publicly describes his business strategies, how he runs his company, his management style and more. Of course his unique humorous writing style helped but I am sure that required time and effort from his side. In return for his efforts, Joel earned his name which I claim is much more valuable than any business advantage he could have from not sharing his personal insights.

I like the Joel model better. For one thing, It provides value to other people. Second, it gives you credibility if you have a product that you wanna advertise. Its the best marketing strategy you could ever have. I am gonna try to follow the Joel model in my own blog. Instead of JoelOnSoftware, its gonna be AhmedOnEverything. I don't really expect it to be popular or anything, I would just like to share the things I learn from my every day life that I think would be useful to others.