[3] He then moved with his family to Israel, where he attended high school and completed his military service in the Paratroopers Brigade.

[8] In 2008, Spolsky co-founded Stack Overflow,[9] a question and answer community website for software developers, with Jeff Atwood.

[10] After Stack Overflow's sale in June 2021 for $1.8 billion, Spolsky stepped down as the company's Chairman.

[11] In 2011, Spolsky launched Trello, an online project management tool inspired by Kanban methodology.

[16] He is the author of five books, including User Interface Design for Programmers and Smart and Gets Things Done.

"[20] Spolsky made an appearance at the WeAreDevelopers Conference 2017, stating how developers are writing the script for the future.

The term was coined in 2001 by Spolsky, who used a Yiddish joke to illustrate a certain poor programming practice: Schlemiel (also rendered Shlemiel) is to paint the dotted lines down the middle of a road.

[25] The inefficiency to which Spolsky was drawing an analogy was the poor programming practice of repeated concatenation of C-style null-terminated strings.

In Spolsky's example, the "Schlemiels" occur when multiple strings are concatenated together: After "Paul" has been appended to "John", the length of "JohnPaul" (or, more precisely, the position of the terminating null character) is known within the scope of strcat() but is discarded upon the end of function.