If partially hydrogenated oils don’t kill us, this thing surely will.

Farecast
Farecast, an airline ticket price predictor, shows this infobox that explains whether you should buy now or wait for a fare drop. The clear “Wait” message is backed up nicely by the low fare history.

Another nice touch: The site offers time sliders that let you dial in the exact time range that works for you. You can also choose by take-off or landing time.

What they don’t tell you about being an entrepreneur

“The Shakespeare quote is so powerful it bears repeating: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ Entrepreneurship is very, very, very emotional. The emotional rollercoaster is such a substantial part of the entrepreneurship. I haven’t seen any entrepreneurship textbooks address this extremely important issue. If you’re doing anything you’re actually passionate about, this is a necessary requirement. You have really high highs, and really low lows.”

We overdose on information because we are programmed for scarcity

“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives. Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.” [via GE]

Zappos talks about focus on customer service at SxSW

”#1 thing they focus on is company culture. Managers jobs are to inspire the Zappos culture. Empower people to make the right decisions for the company and customer — the reps make their own decisions. Have 5-weeks of training on company culture, taking calls from customers, and working in the warehouse. Then they start the job they were hired for. Put out a culture book, written by every employee, about what the Zappos culture means to them. HR does interviews for culture fit (a second round). This keeps the company culture, even makes it better.” (Another recap)

ReadWriteWeb: “SxSW: Lessons Learned at 37signals”

“This afternoon I attended Jason Fried’s presentation on ‘Stuff We’ve Learned at 37signals’...As a company I’ve long respected, it was interested to hear him discuss some of the things he’s learned developing 37signals.” (Another recap)

“Agile / Lean or Common Sense and Permission To Change?” is an interesting article that examines agile ideas in comparison to Ricardo Semler’s principles.

I have most recently been reading a couple of books by Ricardo Semler, who runs his company in a completely democratic way – doing away with all top down authoritarian management principles and allowing the employees to make decisions on dress, salaries, where they work, when they work, and most importantly, how they work…

It struck me how most of the things that are characterized by “lean” are just common sense principles explained in such a way that they sound like a “process” that manager types can “buy into”. But really, they work because they make sense – and people have the permission to standardize and then change their work rather than having things written down and subsequently treating these processes like they are set in stone. You can’t change them unless you go through an agonizing approval process up the management chain…

Programmers often have difficulty going back to older code bases because they don’t reflect the latest, greatest idioms. It can be hard to work with constructs that you know could be better, written with less code, stripped of even more duplication, beautified. But it’s important to realize that all code will eventually feel like this.

Even if you take that project from three years ago and scrub it clean as can be today, it’s still going to drift from the best practices of two years from now. That’s normal, it’s natural. You continue to get better, to learn, and the technology you’re using is hopefully progressing as well. Yet it can still seem like a hard hill to climb to get back in to yesterday.

Suck It Up
Here’s something I don’t say often: Suck It Up. If you work on more than a few projects, they can’t all smell like today’s fresh linens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad programmer. It simply means that you’re prioritizing.

Yes, yes, you should clean up around you when you dive in to those older applications, but beware the lure of a full Spring cleaning. You’ll get pulled in and before you know it you’ve broken half the application and won’t know how to get back out with your ego or tests intact. Add your feature, fix your bug, and leave everything you touch in better condition than you found it, but that’s it. Move on from there.

This is not a license to be a slob. Whenever you’re starting something new, you should always try your best to infuse it with the top of your game. That way you can hopefully drown the feelings of disappointment with at least a dash of nostalgia: “Hey, when I worked on this I did the very best I could. How great to see the progress of my skills and sensibilities since then. Good job, me!”

When do we do our best work? When we’re excited about something. Excitement morphs into motivation. We do our best work when we’re motivated. A great way to stay motivated is to work on something new. No one likes being stuck on a project that never seems to end.

The typical project

The typical project starts out great but then our motivation and interest wanes as time goes on. It’s natural. Staying interested in a project over a long period of time is a challenge for anyone. The longer the project the thinner the tail. You’re not going to do your best work in the tail.

The ideal project

When you break a big project into smaller chunks — into tiny projects — you stand a better chance at maintaining motivation and rekindling interest. When you have a pile of tiny projects you get the chance to work on something new more often. We do our best work when we’re excited about starting something new.

Break problems down to their atomic level

The best way to optimize for new is to break features and projects down to their atomic level. Keep breaking them down until you all you have left are a lot of small project elements instead of a few big project molecules.

For example, we just introduced bulk delete in Highrise. The UI and underpinnings we built for this will eventually (probably) be used for bulk tagging and other bulk actions. But instead of trying to shove all the other potential bulk actions into this release — ultimately turning a one week project into a 4 week project — we decided to just tackle bulk delete first. It took a few days from inception to public launch. Now we can get excited about the next phase since it’s a new tiny project again.

Bottom line: Shatter big projects into little pieces. Finish and launch one piece at a time. Introduce value now. Over time you can recombine these pieces into the one big feature you had planned. Working on, finishing, and launching one little piece at a time will help you stay motivated because you’re always working on something new. Your best work is in the bursts, not in the tails.

[Credit for the waveform concept goes to Jim Coudal]

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Features
Basecamp: More storage space for the same price
We increased file storage space for Personal through Premium plans. Personal plans now get 1 GB (up from 250 MB). Basic plans now get 3GB (up from 500 MB). Plus plans now get 10 GB (up from 3 GB). Premium plans now get 20 GB (up from 10 GB)

New Highrise Feature: Bulk Delete
We pushed a new feature that makes it possible to delete multiple contacts at once.

Highrise: Improved import review and deletion
We pushed a new Highrise feature that makes managing previous imports easier…Now you’re able to review your last five imports and delete any one of those imports. This is especially helpful if you imported the wrong people or the data imported wasn’t what you intended.

Case Studies
Rails Envy team uses Backpack to organize its podcast
“For each podcast we set up a different page in Backpack with the title as the episode number. From there, we create a note for each story. We add these throughout the week or when we clear out our RSS readers. When it’s time to create the blog post about it, it’s really easy to go in and copy the headlines and URLs and paste them back in to Textmate (where we have snippets set up to make creating the blog post really easy).”

College senior uses Highrise to manage his job hunt
“Highrise has been the answer to my prayers. I took an hour or two and typed all those business cards into Highrise, and now everyone is searchable, and organized by company. I have all their contact information right there. In addition, the email dropbox feature lets me keep track of all my communications with them, so I can remember what I’ve said to whom. I also keep notes on people to help me remember them – ‘Steve looks like Ronald Regan’, ‘Rich loves the Saints’, etc.”

Buzz/Press
Apple profiles customer who saved $70k by using Macs and Basecamp
“The Mac and Basecamp have replaced $70,000 worth of Microsoft software and related equipment. ‘We pay a few hundred dollars a month for an unlimited version of Basecamp,’ says Carroll. ‘It takes care of Microsoft SharePoint server, Microsoft Project server and most of Microsoft CRM. We’ve replaced a solution that would have cost at least $70,000 to fully implement and would have required a full-time tech consultant.’”

Over the past 7 years I’ve probably been to almost every major web industry conference at least once. I can’t remember the last time I saw a good honest disagreeable debate on stage. There’s too much “yeah, totally” and “I definitely agree” and “Absolutely” going around.

Panels of friends

Part of why this happens is that the web design industry as a whole is pretty chummy when it gets together. That’s not a bad thing, but it amplifies the echo chamber.

Another reason why this happens is that when people put panels together they usually put their friends on them. Friends can disagree, but it doesn’t happen in public very often.

Finally, most of the panels I’ve seen aren’t assembled to present three different points of view — they are assembled to present the same point of view in three different ways.

Conferences are meek, Blogs are strong

There’s plenty of debates going on over the web. Take the recent Calcanis vs. Hansson round. And then the recent Norman vs. 37signals exchange. And then there are the savvy provocateurs such as Michael Arrington that suggested 37signals drove a company to the deadpool because we encourage people charge for their products. We didn’t respond on the web, but it would be fun in person.

These back and forths are wonderful. They are passionate, interesting, and heated. People are forced to sharpen their position and everyone learns a thing or two. They expose important discussions and spawn new ones. They also generate a lot of traffic for those involved.

So why does the web have all the good debates? Where are the web conferences pitting two opposing viewpoints on stage? Hearing two passionate points is a great way to reevaluate what you believe. Where’s the web conference called Web Fight Night? I see a big market opportunity.

Any takers?

If anyone wants to set up a conference or special event let us know. We’ll take the side of the “self-funded small business that encourages people to stay away from the VCs, says you don’t need to live in San Francisco to be successful, suggests that charging for your products is a good thing, espouses the advantages of small teams, applauds shorter work weeks with more reasonable hours, rejects the notion of traditional ‘seriousness business stuff,’ and believes keeping it simple is the way to success.”

Jamis loves digging through numbers and stats and generating interesting reports. One of the most fun is when he writes a script to summarize the Campfire activity in our main “All Talk” room.

Here’s a summary of stuff people have said and done in the room over the past 30 days:

away (said "bb15" or "bbl" or "brb")
   Ryan Singer               ::    32
   Jamis Buck                ::    26
   Mark Imbriaco             ::    23
   Jason Fried               ::    20
   Sam Stephenson            ::    16
   Jeff Hardy                ::    16
   David Heinemeier Hansson  ::    13
   Jeremy Kemper             ::    13
   Sarah Hatter              ::     3
   Josh Peek                 ::     2
   Matt Linderman            ::     1

back (started a message with "back")
   Jason Fried               ::    36
   Mark Imbriaco             ::     9
   Jamis Buck                ::     8
   Sarah Hatter              ::     5
   Jeff Hardy                ::     4
   Jeremy Kemper             ::     3
   Ryan Singer               ::     3
   David Heinemeier Hansson  ::     2
   Josh Peek                 ::     2
   Sam Stephenson            ::     2

backpack (mentioned "backpack" or "BP")
   Jason Fried               ::   284
   Sarah Hatter              ::   144
   Jamis Buck                ::   126
   Mark Imbriaco             ::   101
   Ryan Singer               ::    89
   Jeremy Kemper             ::    87
   Sam Stephenson            ::    62
   David Heinemeier Hansson  ::    60
   Matt Linderman            ::    40
   Jeff Hardy                ::    35
   Josh Peek                 ::     3

basecamp (mentioned "basecamp" or "BC")
   Jason Fried               ::   108
   Jamis Buck                ::    95
   Sarah Hatter              ::    78
   Ryan Singer               ::    54
   Mark Imbriaco             ::    53
   David Heinemeier Hansson  ::    42
   Jeremy Kemper             ::    21
   Sam Stephenson            ::    18
   Matt Linderman            ::     8
   Jeff Hardy                ::     3
   Twitter                   ::     1
   Josh Peek                 ::     1

Steve Duenes, graphics director for The Times, recently answered reader questions at the site. In one answer, he talked about striving for “daily graphic excellence” that educates readers without forcing them to skip a beat:

Our criteria for what makes a great graphic varies a little. There are things we attempt, and we hope the result will be spectacular, but we also think there’s such a thing as daily graphic excellence.

It doesn’t do us much good to produce a few splashy graphics but stumble on the smaller, routine things. If a reader can glance at a map or simple chart and quickly orient themselves or understand a statistic, and then continue reading the story without skipping a beat, it means we’ve edited and designed those graphics well.

A nice sentiment all the way around but the part that sticks out to me is the idea that good design makes it easy for people keep the beat.

That seems an especially apt metaphor for web design. By setting expectations, by offering preemptive support (e.g. explanatory text next to a form field), by being consistent, you let your visitors pursue their goals while staying in rhythm.

Some examples…

Keeping type in phase
Rhythm can come from a subtle visual thing, like keeping type in phase so it creates a rhythm up and down the page.

Type that’s in phase.

Punchy copy
Or it can be done through smart, informational text that’s short and punchy so it’s easy to comprehend at a glance. That means users can stay on their path instead of having to bail to get more info.

Quick instructive text keeps customers in flow.