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Enough with the USB-key swag already!

David
David wrote this on 44 comments

It seems that every conference I go to some company thinks it hip to use USB keys for swag. I’m sure it was hip. In 2001. Now it’s just such a waste.

Especially because the keys usually aren’t even a remotely useful size. If you’re going to splurge the marketing budget on a swag key, then 256MB is just not going to cut it.

I’d rather have a squeeze ball or a yoyo!

Chicago Thunderstorm

Jason Fried
Jason Fried wrote this on 32 comments

We had a pretty wicked line of thunderstorms roll through Chicago last night. I propped my Flip video camera up on the windowsill to capture the hot lightning action. It gets worse as time goes on. Close strike around 3:58.

Product Blog update: Wedding planning (Backpack), tracking miles (Basecamp), Getting Real one of the 77 best business books, etc.

Basecamp
Basecamp wrote this on 2 comments

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Keeping track of miles with Basecamp time tracking
“What we are doing now is using a project folder called mileage log and instead of recording time, we record miles. As a manager, it is easier for me to generate reports per person and date range and attach those to the accounting department for reimbursement purposes.”

Basecamp helps barn converters
“For me, the cornerstone of project management isn’t a gantt chart or a risk register, but lists. In Basecamp, I find the ability to create and maintain all the lists that I need to keep track of my barn conversion. It also provides you with the ability to share files, text, and messages and track time & tasks with other members of a project team. The emphasis is on project collaboration and communication.”

Backpack
Two examples of using Backpack to plan a wedding
“Our wedding was an informal affair at a beach-side kiosk location in South Australia. To co-ordinate people involved in the event, friends and family mostly, we used this Backpack public page. It worked wonderfully well and the day was a huge success.”

wedding

Continued…

37signals Live debuting tomorrow (Tues) at 3pm CDT

Jason Fried
Jason Fried wrote this on 55 comments

Over the years we’ve received hundreds (thousands?) of emails asking us our opinion on this, how we’d do that, what we think of this idea or that idea. People ask about Getting Real, entrepreneurship, business models, hiring, collaboration, design decisions, tech-related stuff, questions about our products, etc.

We also really enjoy the Q&A sessions at the end of our talks whenever we present at a conference or workshop. We always try to leave ample time to answer as many questions as we can. We’ve always believed live Q&A is the best part of any talk (and unfortunately there never seems to be enough time left over at the end to get to everyone’s questions).

So we’ve been thinking: How can we make Q&A more a part of our business? We enjoy it, people seem to get a lot of value from it, so we should do it more often.

We could certainly write more “Ask 37signals” blog entries, but it’s hard to find the time to write ‘em all up. We also seem to give better answers when we talk them through rather than when we write them down.

So we’ve decided to take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book and do a 37signals Live Q&A session on the web. We don’t know how well it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a shot.

The first session will be tomorrow (August 5th) at 3pm CDT (what’s that in my time zone?). We’ll plan for an hour but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll have a live video feed and people can ask us questions via a live text chat that’ll run alongside the video.

We’re excited to see what happens. If it works out we’d love to do them on a regular basis. If not, we’ll chalk it up to experience.

So, ask us anything tomorrow at 3! We’ll see you there!

Big business learning that smaller teams can rekindle the creative spark

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 5 comments

Even the Giants Can Learn to Think Small [NY Times] talks about how smaller teams are more agile and creative. The message: Keep teams small, give employees freedom and a sense of ownership, don’t focus too much on the competition, create a culture of experimentation, and use technology to enable remote teams.

By breaking huge business units into smaller, nimbler teams, companies stand a chance of rekindling the creative spark that got them rolling in the first place. After all, “small is the new big,” as Seth Godin, a prolific blogger and author, puts it in his 2006 book of that name.

It is a point of view shared by a diverse group of business leaders, management consultants and information technology experts. According to Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the company that created and operates the virtual world of Second Life, companies seeking to foster creativity must find ways to break apart the bureaucratic hierarchies now smothering it. Optimizing a company for creativity involves helping individual employees of every rank develop an entrepreneurial spirit. In Mr. Rosedale’s view, the most creative work environment is one where every employee, regardless of job title, has enough freedom to develop that sense of personal initiative.

“Most companies erroneously focus on competition and on differentiation from their competitors,” he contends. “The business opportunity lies in turning creativity into productivity.”

Decentralizing the hierarchy opens the door to creativity, giving workers the leeway they need to make significant decisions without first jumping through executive management hoops. “The idea,” he says, “is to enable a creative environment where there’s a good degree of experimentation.”

Optimizing a company for creativity also optimizes it for small-group collaboration. And that opens the door to new information technology that lets team members work cooperatively from anywhere on the planet. “That’s the revolution that’s making all of this possible,” Mr. Rosedale says.

It’s great to see these ideas picking up steam and getting out there in the mainstream press.

Are you finding the root cause?

David
David wrote this on 43 comments

We circle the on-call responsibility between all the programmers at 37signals. Every day is someone’s day to take care of the technical issues that bubble up from support but can’t be resolved there. And that seemed to work pretty well in the beginning, but we’re starting to think that we need a more systematic approach.

The problem with passing the support monkey around is that everyone just wants to get rid of him as soon as possible. There’s not a whole lot of vested interested in dealing with the root cause of the issues, so you solve one-off problems for individual customers and get on with your day.

For the individual programmer, that approach will appear to work reasonably well because the feedback cycle is so long. You forget next week that you’ve actually already dealt with this problem before. And you certainly don’t get the feedback of knowing that the issue caused three other incidents for other people during the week. So your personal incentive to fix the true cause isn’t building naturally.

I’ve found that to ever get anything done, you really need to align personal incentives with the task at hand. That’s why we’ve been thinking about doing support weeks.

A single programmer gets assigned to work the support monkey all week and have to solve the root cause for every issue he encounters. No I’ll-just-deal-with-this-guy one-offs. But not just because of the directive that it’s what you’re supposed to do, but because it’ll come ever so natural when you’ve solved the same problem three days in a row.

Are you finding the root causes for your daily grind or do the wheels just keep spinning on the same issues?

What you expect from clients is what you will get

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 36 comments

“We get it. But our clients would never understand.” It’s a frequent rebuttal to our Getting Real philosophy.

Read between the lines and there’s a disturbing undercurrent to that message. It’s really saying, “I get it but these other people could never understand. They don’t have the wisdom and the understanding that I do.” It’s like the way some LA or NYC people sound when they talk down about the masses in the flyover states. It’s insulting.

The truth is folks can usually handle a lot more than these wizards think. Are their clients really imbeciles who couldn’t possibly understand why they’re foregoing a spec to build something real ASAP? I doubt it.

A lot of times people are just stuck in patterns. Process gets done a certain way because that’s the way it’s been done in the past. Sometimes the arteries of work get clogged up simply because no one stops it from happening. Inertia happens.

Set a new course
Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of your job.

Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible. Agreeing on a common goal is an old Dale Carnegie technique that works well because it gets everyone to realize they’re on the same team and fighting for the same thing. You start getting “yes” immediately.

Then steer them in what you think is the best direction. Take the initiative. Set expectations. Explain why you want to do it a new way. Tell them how you think the project should go.

Will this approach lose you the job? If it does, maybe it’s a bad fit in the first place.

But you may be surprised by the results. This kind of effort shows you’re someone who genuinely cares about the final outcome. And a lot of clients would love to work with someone like that. They’d love for you to tell them there’s a better way. They’d love to know that you want to do more than just phone it in.

Don’t assume ignorance. People live up to the expectations placed upon them. If you assume intelligence and flexibility from your clients, you just might get it.

37signals is looking to hire a second system administrator

Jason Fried
Jason Fried wrote this on 11 comments

37signals is looking to hire a second system administrator to help manage our growing infrastructure. We are looking for someone who has solid experience running production web applications and good all around system administration skills. In particular, you should have strong experience with Apache, MySQL and the HTTP protocol. Some of the other software we rely on includes HAproxy, Mongrel, memcached, and Xen primarily running on RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 5, with a handful of FreeBSD machines.

Experience with Cisco hardware and Ruby programming are a big plus, but attitude and enthusiasm are an even bigger one.

Details on how to apply at the Job Board.

[Quotable] NetNewsWire, JotSpot, Git, Google, old Texas sayings, etc.

Basecamp
Basecamp wrote this on 9 comments

Avoid the middle of the road
“As a company, you have to be the most of something—the most exclusive, the most affordable, the most responsive, the most friendly. Companies used to want to be in the middle of the road — that’s where all the customers were. But now, in an age of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What do they say in Texas? ‘The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.’”
-Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work

Put your business model in beta
“So my advice to startups in this particular category is if you’re going to put your product in beta — put your business model in beta with it. Far too often we are too product focused and not business-model focused. That’s one thing I definitely would have done differently with JotSpot.”
-Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot

Work in small bits
“When dealing with git, it’s best to work in small bits. Rule of thumb: if you can’t summarise it in a sentence, you’ve gone too long without committing.”
-Git for the lazy

The schizo thing about software development
“Here’s the schizo thing about software development (at least on Macs): 1. Everybody praises apps that don’t have a ton of preferences and features. 2. Everybody asks for some new preferences and features. (Okay, not everybody. Not you, I know. I mean everybody else.) To make it worse: 1. Everybody thinks they’re representative of the typical user, so what they want ought to be a no-brainer. 2. And they act like you put skunks in their fridge if you don’t do whatever-it-is. (Okay, again — not you. You’re cool. I’m talking about the others.) The problem is 100 times worse when it comes to deleting features.”
-Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire

Major in learning
“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.” Google’s advice to students

Learn from mistakes
“If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
-An old saying in Texas