I’ve been with 37signals as a remote system administrator for a month now and thought I would share some observations on Operations:
User Experience
I’ve been thoroughly impressed by how much everyone genuinely cares about the user experience with the applications they maintain. Everything from page response times increasing by a few milliseconds to minimizing interruptions during deployments or even the impact of the number of http redirects on load times – it’s all constantly being discussed and debated. This is often supplemented with hard data in logs and pretty graphs (thanks Noah!) from the multitude of resources made available internally to help diagnose issues.
It’s more than just observation and discussion, though – frequently these chats morph into immediate direct action in code or configuration changes.
Communication
37signals definitely embraces remote employees and treats them like any other. In my first month I’ve used Campfire, Basecamp, Jabber, Skype, Gmail, Github, Confluence, Google Docs, and more to stay connected and learn how some of the pieces fit together. Thanks to the resources made available from day one and the accessibility of the other Operations team members, I honestly haven’t felt left out in the slightest when working from home.
Accountability
Operations definitely sets the bar high for accountability to users and the rest of the company. Every issue I’ve seen raised by support, programmers, or other admins is looked into and taken as seriously as any other.
When larger production issues are dealt with, detailed postmortems are made available so the same mistakes aren’t repeated. These have been great for learning what not to do.
Monitoring
The amount and depth of monitoring at 37signals is impressive. They have thousands of checks for everything from hardware issues, application error rates, backups, and scheduled jobs. On top of this, we have remote monitoring and systems in place for notifying users of ongoing issues.
Overall I’ve been impressed with the high standard of work in the Operations group and I’ll be doing my best to live up to it.
It’s been an interesting and enjoyable first month with 37signals, largely thanks to everyone who’s made me feel so welcome and valued, especially Taylor, John, Eron, Will and Anton. Thank you!
Daniel
on 29 Feb 12That sounds horrible and confusing to use so many different systems.
Travis
on 29 Feb 12Matthew, 37signals uses Confluence? Is that a competing product to your very own Backpack product?
Travis
on 29 Feb 12Matthew, 37signals uses Confluence? Isn’t that a competing product to your very own Backpack product?
Edit: typo.
Taylor
on 29 Feb 12@Daniel,
It’s actually great. We use the right tool for the job where appropriate.
@Travis,
We host our own Confluence instance offsite for things that we need to keep around if our own stuff is having problems. We still manage our projects via the entire suite (like the rest of the company).
Anonymous Coward
on 29 Feb 12Taylor
Does that mean 37signals does not have active-failover in place today?
Essentially, if you don’t trust your own active failover system to ensure you don’t lose data or have downtime, why should I trust 37signals with my company’s data?
Travis
on 29 Feb 12(last comment by me)
DHH
on 29 Feb 12Travis, information that helps us deal with an outage should obviously not be stored on the same system. It’s not about not trusting our own systems, but about having access to the information to deal with a problem in case there’s a problem.
We’re trying our best to have 100% uptime, but so far I don’t think anyone have actually achieved that. So until nirvana appears, we’ll be positioned for the reality of occasional outages.
You can follow the process on all our uptime sites: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3067-lets-get-honest-about-uptime
Travis
on 29 Feb 12DHH
Credit card companies have for decades.
If you think your different because you’re a “web” company, AOL/Yahoo/Comcast don’t seem to have troubles achieving 100% uptime.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
Davis
on 29 Feb 12Travis: You’re a putz and an instigator. Move on.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying your job, Matthew.
Radex
on 29 Feb 12They? :)
Steve
on 29 Feb 12@Travis Actually, banks & credit card companies have close to 100% uptime, but its impossible to get to that 100%.
For each part of a % closer to 100% they try to get costs them more & more money
Travis
on 29 Feb 12Steve, if you read the link DHH posted – it’s anything but near to 100%. More like 99%. See the link I posted.
Steve
on 29 Feb 12I saw the downtime stats when they were originally posted.
99.93% availability, 6 hours a year. Thats a big difference from 99%, 3.65 days.
If you rely on one of their systems and its down for 6 hours straight, you’d lose a day which is a pretty big impact on your business.
But if those 6 hours are split a minute per day over 360 days, thats a different impact entirely.
Maybe details of downtime windows, scheduled or otherwise, for a particular app would be worth posting.
Andrew
on 29 Feb 12@Travis: What are you talking about?! Comcast cable stops working many times over the average year. And Yahoo certainly does. What are you trying to say? Prove? by hijacking this post about Matthew’s new job?
Douglas Jarquin
on 29 Feb 12Thanks for sharing Matthew. Always looked up to Operations at 37signals.
I am curious, of all the new tools or technologies you are using, which are you most excited about and why?
Matthew
on 29 Feb 12Travis, thanks for reading my post!
Douglas, I think I’m most enjoying the 37signals Campfire setup and it’s tight integration with monitoring, github and Basecamp. Great for keeping up with the workflow from home here.
Henry G.
on 01 Mar 12I too as beginning to lose hope in 37signals :(
Seems like the very things that got them noticed years back are now coming back to hurt them (e.g. MVP, simple product, unreliable services, etc).
I’ve definitely outgrown their software. I was hoping that Basecamp Next was a more feature full product (dare I say “enterprise” software) ... instead, it’s just the same features implemented differently.
I’ve recently switched to Asana.com – I can’t say enough good things about it, if you’re like me and have outgrown Basecamp.
aju george
on 01 Mar 12Thanks for posting this blog post its really useful to me .I also read the comments of other people who posted her.
DHH
on 01 Mar 12Henry, I’m glad to hear that you found a product that’s a better fit for you. It’s OK that some customers will outgrow Basecamp. We had this same discussion back in 2006 and Jason wrote it up: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/growing_in_vs_growing_out.php.
You’re wrong about unreliable service, though. Basecamp has never been more reliable than it is today. Never had less downtime as measured over a year (in fact just from last year to this, we cut downtime in half!). The current uptime over the last trailing 12 months is 99.94%.
We’ve also never had more customers and we continue to grow rapidly. So while some customers will outgrow Basecamp, it stays simple enough that many new ones can get into it. That’s entirely by design.
Henry
on 01 Mar 12DHH, was any thought every given to creating a more feature-packed version of Basecamp? That way, for people who outgrown the product – we can migrate to the more “advanced” version of Basecamp.
Essentially, have two products (1) Basecamp Basic (current product), and (2) Basecamp Advanced (current product + a lot more features).
JF
on 01 Mar 12Henry: Yes, but that’s not the direction we want to go in. We want to build the simplest, easiest, clearest product that solves problems that most people have most of the time. People are people – most of us have very similar basic needs when it comes to project management and collaboration. For those who need highly advanced functionality for special cases or special industries would be better served by someone in those industries who knows those specific problems really well.
JF
on 01 Mar 12Henry, I would also add that the new Basecamp has dozens of features that Classic doesn’t have. It does different things, better. It’s not about more or less, it’s about a new set of ideas and opinions about what this product should be.
Michael
on 01 Mar 12Henry, all the 3rd-party apps go a long way to extend Basecamp as well, and the API can extend it even further for custom needs.
Mario
on 02 Mar 12I used to think also as Henry, that a WebApp should satisfy everybody and I did not understand why basecamp didn’t do this “simple thing” or the other simple thing. But then I understood that every person wants basecamp to feature a different “simple thing” to make them more productive.
As I “thought” I wanted basecamp to do those extra “simple things”, I searched and found teamworkpm which is basically a basecamp clone with a couple of extras (basically the most part of the competition where Basecamp moves are clones which manage things differently), if you see teamworkpm website they listen to everybody and have a roadmap which you can see what are they going to implement next.
And you know what? I started to understand that that is not the way, it becames a never ending story, people want more and more features and then it is ok for advance users but things start to get complicated for basic users and code and UI get more complex to deal with.
I understood this very well when I read Re-Work. And I must say you in 37signals are damn right about this.
At the end I got back to Basecamp and started to appreciate that the simpleness of how it handles everything is exactly is strength. Everybody understand it’s concept in 15 min and small to middle tech and non-tech teams can start using it straight away because the UI is so simple, elegant, welcome and Intuitive.
I could not use basecamp in 3 months and every time I come back, I feel right at home. That does not happen to me with other programs, in which I find the UI is always on the way.
37signal products deal with let’s say 90% of what most small companies and Freelancers need, the other 10% are much more advance users than need things like Jira with bugtracking stuff and things like that, things that 37signals are not interested to cover because would only be used by a very small percentage of users and would stand in the middle of the big percent who do not need it and don’t want it.
At the end of the day you realize that many of the things basecamp users or potential users cry about are things they “think” they need, but they don’t really need them to manage their projects.
I see 37signals products as those solid Toyota Land Cruisers, they were not Formula 1, not trucks, they did not fancy all those extras, are where not the most comfortable ones but you can do almost anything with them and drive them into any territory or land and you know it will always work and do the job and you find parts for them in almost any country, city or town in the middle of nowhere.
37signals built a huge ecosystem and you can communicate with many other apps again, in a very simple and reliable way. Something no one else really manage that well. Outgrow? try to communicate or handle the data you have in other Webapps with the rest of the world and let’s see who outgrows who.
Again what I see of Basecamp NEXT is one of the best concepts and UI I have ever seen, simple, intuitive, condensed, elegant, practical… and those are concepts that they guys in 37signals manage and understand as very few other do in this market.
And once again I’m pretty sure the competition will “copy” them one more time, 37signals innovate, the rest copy the concept, even the 37signal marketing strategies have been duplicated to extenuation, like the price website design with those prices in boxes have been copied by almost everybody.
More features is not always better, I don’t know what you guys mean as Outgrow, but 37signals outgrow all the rest in UI design and elegance.
This is Apple vs the rest. This is iPod vs all those fancy do anything no one understand MP3 players. This is iPhone vs Nokia-Samsung-Blackberry-HTC-Windows do not connect with anything else SmartPhones. This is elegance, reliability & great support vs chunky we promised to do anything poor supported apps.
For me, 37signals is an example to follow and I try to apply their concepts in my own company and the projects I do, I learn from their blogs, from their stories, from their software, I learn from the way the do things, it is one of most innovative cross lateral zen thinking companies I’ve ever seen. Which is mostly criticized by those who do not understand those concepts and think complexity is better.
Thanks Jason & Co for your creativity and inspiring us with your innovation…!
BTW
There is only one single feature I (and many many other users) really really miss:
Dated tasks on main calendar. A promised and announced and really really useful feature that, unfortunately, never saw the light… I hope it sees the light one day.
Mario
Spain
Hrvoje Zlatar
on 03 Mar 12I’d really like to know how do you use Basecamp and Backpack for operations.
Do you use writeboards for documenting procedures and “where’s what?” kind of notes? Or, do you use Backpack notes? How do you organize those?
We’re using suite version for managing our projects in development, but we’re quite puzzled what to do for the operations.
This discussion is closed.