alt Hacker NewsFun piece of trivia, Joel published one of his functional specs.[0]
As a huge fan of Joel's writing and engineering ideas, I was actually underwhelmed by his spec. It wasn't bad but it also felt like he missed a lot of opportunities to articulate design decisions to the reader more quickly or clearly.
One obvious mistake is that there's over a page (in a 20-page spec) just dedicated to coding conventions and what prefixes variable names will have. I think Joel later conceded that it was a mistake to cover naming conventions in a spec, though I can't find a link now.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20051028171624/https://www.joelo...
I definitely agree that it's not perfect. I think he's a great starting point though, because when trying to get engineers to document stuff (something typically approached with similar enthusiasm to having their teeth removed with a hammer) it really helps if the "how to write a spec" doc is somewhat fun to read.
Unrelated - I really dig your "my [x]th year as a bootstraped founder" series.