We’re very excited to welcome Jeremy Kemper to the 37signals team. He starts next week.

Jeremy is the #2 contributor to Ruby on Rails and has been around since the dawn of the framework.

Jeremy comes to us from CD Baby where he was responsible for rebuilding much of their infrastructure and assembling their Rails team.

We’ve had our eye on Jeremy for some time. Since the early days of Rails, he’s always stood out as an obvious hire. So it’s fantastic that we’ve finally been able to make it happen.

We’ve got some great stuff planned. It’s going to be a blast to be able to work with Jeremy to get these things into your hands (well, on to your screens).

Welcome aboard Jeremy!

We get this a lot: “How do you guys get so much done with such a small team? 5 products, a book, Rails, and a popular blog. We have a lot more money, people, hardware, and technology than you do, but we can’t seem to get anything done. What’s the secret?”

There are two prisoners. Each have their own cell and no cellmates.

Both want to break out. One has a jackhammer and the other a spoon.

The jackhammer is clearly the better tool to break though concrete, block, brick. But it’s loud, big, requires a power source, it’s expensive and hard to hide. You can’t be subtle with a jackhammer. Small mistakes become huge mistakes with a jackhammer. It’s all or nothing with a jackhammer. It’s handy if you are breaking up a concrete sidewalk, but breaking out of a concrete prison is another story.

The spoon is for eating soup. But it’s subtle, quiet, utilitarian, maneuverable, human powered, easy to conceal, easier to repair or replace. It may take a lot longer, but you stand a much better chance.

Brute force (jackhammer) may get things done, but a whole lot more can go wrong—loudly. Subtlety (spoon) gives you more room to work. More opportunities to say no, to slow down, to make better decisions along the way, to change direction.

Pouring tons of money, tons of resources, and tons of people at a problem is like using a jackhammer to break out of jail. Putting a few smart people on the problem, embracing constraints, not trying to solve the wrong problems, focusing on precision, not using seven words when four will do, and taking the time to get it done right is like using the spoon.

We use the spoon.

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

The introduction to “Made To Stick” offers advice on how to get people’s attention:

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.

Why? The human brain is wired to perceive patterns and is drawn to aberrations. For example, the book discusses the success of Subway’s Jared ads and says the surprise factor — “I can lose weight by eating fast food!?” — was one reason for the campaign’s stickiness.

Check out Michael P. Maslanka’s review of Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big for another example of the power of counterintuitive statements.

[5 stars] It is all counterintuitive
The world does not work the way we think it does. In his latest, Godin takes zest in letting us know this: the internet is really bad for us (it increases anonymity which decreases civility; competence is bad (it breeds complacency and clinging to the status quo); success is unhealthy (it seduces companies to gravitate to the mean, and lose the edge that got them to success in the first place).

More excerpts from the Made To Stick intro
Business communication often goes awry when it gets too ambiguous…

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

From The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens by photographer Tamara Staples (Flash).

Notes from a talk by Alan Kay

“Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones.”...”Better is the enemy of best.”...”Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”...”People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

In defense of "purposeless acts of design whimsy"

“One of the functions of design is to delight and amuse the audience. There’s something to be gained from indulging ourselves, once in a while, in purposeless acts of design whimsy, even if we spend our days building minutely optimized interfaces that give no quarter to artistic idiosyncrasies.”

Infographic: ‘Hope’ ‘Iraq’ ‘Economy’ ‘Oil’

President Bush’s speeches have included over 34,000 words. This interactive graphic visually displays which ones pop up most frequently and when they appeared.

Curing Blackberry thumbs and tech necks

“Therapies to treat workplace woes such as a sore thumb from tapping on a hand-held computer, the aches of ‘tech neck’ from typing on a laptop or even skin irritation from chatting on a cell phone are the latest rage to hit high-end spas.”

iPhone tester: Keyboard is “a huge improvement” over thumbpads on Treo and other smart phones

“The buttons are significantly larger, you don’t have to hit them dead-center, you lightly tap them instead of punching them down, and the software is smart enough to know that you meant to type ‘Tuesday’ instead of ‘Tudsday.’ After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true e-mail demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.”

A few weeks ago our pal Andrew Huff from Chicago’s Gapers Block brought a few guys over to our office to give us a demo of some software they were working on. Andrew is handling their PR.

The guys were Atul Varma and Aza Raskin of Humanized — a small Chicago start-up focused on making desktop software simpler and less frustrating. They are sharp. Their philosophy is much like ours. We’re fans.

The demo we got was for a new product called Enso. It’s Windows only so they brought their laptops.

Enso is a launcher — much like Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac. Although Enso has some more tricks up its sleeve. Enso has a nice style about it too. It’s tastefully executed.

Hold down the caps lock key, type, and stuff happens. You can add up numbers, spell check a sentence, open a document, look something up with Google, get a word count of any block of text, define any word anytime, etc. They even demoed how it could work with Basecamp, although I don’t know if that feature made it into their final release.

Once you get the hang of it it’s probably something you can’t imagine being without. That’s how Launchbar is for me — when I use a Mac that doesn’t have Launchbar of Quicksilver I feel like I’m stuck in the past.

To start Enso comes in two parts: Launcher and Words. You can use them together or separately. Walt Mossberg wrote it up today in The Wall Street Journal. Not a bad way to launch.

If you have a PC, and you value your time and like to avoid frustrating common tasks, you should definitely check out Enso over at the Humanized site.

Macy’s

The example purchases and totals section of this Macy’s ad uses real items/numbers to make an abstract idea more concrete.

DrawerGeeks

The navigation at art site DrawerGeeks.

Senduit

Senduit’s straightforward layout.

low-hanging fruit n. The easiest task or the most readily achievable goal.

“Low hanging fruit” search results from our internal Campfire chat room: