Nick Quaranto joins 37signals as our eighth programmer today after impressing everyone during his trial month. Nick is not only a manager of one, but also eager to leave everything better than he found it. That’s a valuable instinct when you’re working with applications old enough to talk back!

Nick’s work on creating the modern-day rubygems.org was certainly no minus either. I’m constantly amazed at how easy it now is to create, distribute, and update Ruby libraries and frameworks through the gem system. It almost feels like cheating after living through a former era of zip files, rubyforge, and other more manual approaches.

So we welcome Nick to our small troupe of programmers and hope he’ll stay long. He’ll be in great company. Sam Stephenson just celebrated his sixth birthday with 37signals today. Jamis Buck has been here for close to seven years. Jeremy Kemper for almost five years. As a company, we’re in this for the next twenty years and beyond, so it’s wonderful to have a crew to grow old together with.