Spolsky has been pumping out great, engaging content in his blog for years; I remember spending countless hours with my friends arguing over it. Then he wrote a couple of mediocre posts and stopped blogging altogether. Had it ended there, it would have been merely an astounding feat of self-awareness.

But it didn't end there. Joel had then converted his entire audience to seed Stack Overflow - the one invention that had the biggest impact on the programmer productivity in the 21st century. That's one hell of way to jump the shark, a gold-medal level performance. We would be lucky beyond measure if that sort of "disaster" happened to us every four years, or even each decade. But we're not so lucky.

Hats off to Joel Spolsky.