My keynote from RubyConf about why I continue to choose Ruby as my programming language.
Viewer discretion is advised: Colorful language, metaphors, and topics.
Will Jessop joins 37signals as Sysop
We’re excited to announce another new addition to our team: Will Jessop, who pings from Manchester in the UK, is now the second EU engineer on our Operations team.
Will comes from Engine Yard where he provided scaling and support expertise for Rails sites such as Seeking Alpha, Groupon and KgbKgb. Recently Will worked on a senior team tasked with live migrating more than half of Engine Yard’s private cloud customers to a new cloud platform. It’s going to be great to have another member of the team with such deep understanding of application development and systems implementation practices.
With the addition of Will, we’ll have a lot more ability to conduct off-hours maintenance and scalability testing. He will also be helping us improve deployment practices, standardize our applications on the latest Ruby, and improve performance of our applications in Europe and the rest of the non-US world.
Welcome aboard, Will!
Anyone know of a source besides online mapping services (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mapquest, etc) where we can buy good looking vector maps of major cities around the world? Thanks.
Ann and Noah join the team
We’re excited to be adding two new people to our team. One joins our top-notch support team and the other pioneers a new position at 37signals.
On December 13th, Ann Goliak will be joining our customer support team. Ann comes to us from Rush University Medical Center here in Chicago where she’s been a reference librarian & coordinator of electronic services. Ann interviewed for a support position at 37signals once before. We’re glad she was persistent and submitted another application when a new spot opened up. Besides being smart, clever, and expert at helping people find what they’re looking for, Ann is a really sharp writer. Continuing the tradition of hiring people who go the extra mile with their job application, here’s the job application that helped her land the position.
On December 20th, Noah Lorang will be joining 37signals as our first business analyst (here’s the original job posting advertising the position). He’ll be helping us understand the data so we can better understand our customers and our business. We’re overflowing with intuition – now it’s time for a reality check. Noah comes to us from McKinsey & Company where he used his massive smarts to help their clients figure out what they didn’t know. Noah’s got an interesting background too – he has a B.S. in mechanical and biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon. Noah will be working remotely for us from his home in Pittsburgh.
Help us welcome Ann and Noah to 37signals!
We chose to roll the 37signals Suite out in stages. Right now you can actually only upgrade to the suite. You need to have one of the existing products and then you go to your account screen and you click upgrade. That was a way for us to cut down a little bit of the complexity in this. This was already a long running project, [so the question was]: How can we get it out now rather than just spend another three months on it?
Subliminal Negativity Theory
We take great care in pairing the right words with the right images here at 37signals. Jason Fried writes and rewrites headlines and body copy over and over again to ensure that we’re communicating the right message.
I have a theory about online advertising. I’m not sure if I’m on to something, but I wanted to share it with you to hear what you think. Here goes:
The Subliminal Negativity Theory
News is depressing. There are crises, wars, bailouts, failures. These news sources need advertising to keep reporting the news. It has been that way for ages. The revolution of advertising online (as demonstrated by Google) has been to serve relevant and contextual ads. These ads are related to the content we’re interested in.
However, many of the ads on news sites are displayed inline with negative and scary headlines. Do people viewing these ads pick-up on the negative mojo? Do the advertisers get some negativity rubbed off on them? Like I said, at 37signals we take great care in pairing words and images on the screen. We would never want to associate our products with negative words.
My theory is that the advertisers on these news sites do pick up on some of the negativity in the headlines. There’s got to be some subliminal association at work. Here are some screens from various news sites around the web.
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
CNN
BBC
Fox News
So what do you think? I’d love to hear thoughts or contrary theories in the comments.
The number one competitor we have in our business is not Microsoft, Google, or some other startup somewhere. The number one competitor we have is simple things, like email…
People are organizing through email. They’re keeping track of their notes through email. They’re doing all this stuff through email. And email is incredibly simple, basically just a text box that you can send to other people or receive.
We have to be just one step above that. Most software developers in our space think they need to be far, far beyond that. The more complex they can be, the more features they list on the back of the box, the better it’s going to be — without realizing that’s not how most people operate. Most people operate just with email. So if we can just be one step above that, then we’re doing pretty well.
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Audio of DHH speaking to A Better Way Of Work on the theme of simplicity
Audio of DHH speaking to A Better Way Of Work on the theme of simplicity
Product Blog features Extras: Backpocket, Mountain Desk, Spootnik, The Bee, Save Your Call, and Summit
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Extras
Access your Backpack account on your iPhone with Backpocket.
Mountain Desk is a desktop application for Basecamp.
You can now work just like you would normally using Basecamp while all your changes automatically stay in sync. Furthermore unlike regular Basecamp, you can continue to work even when there is no internet connectivity. So if you are on the road, travelling by air or on a client site, the application continues to function normally and allows you to make changes and additions to your project data. As soon as mountain desk detects internet connectivity all your changes are automatically synced.”
Macworld looks at how Spootnik bridges Basecamp and OmniFocus.
Spootnik can sync Basecamp with just, say, an iPhone or iPad (no Mac version is needed as an intermediary), or with every type of Apple-made device you can throw at it. It also provides a separate Web interface for editing your OmniFocus tasks in a browser.
The Bee, online invoicing app, imports time entries from Basecamp projects.
Sure, you can pull time entries from your instance of Basecamp to create invoices in the Bee. You can also pull time entries from projects found in your client’s Basecamp instance. This is really helpful, if you are collaborating on projects as a freelancer or subcontrator.
Continued…
[Podcast] Episode #23: The 37signals Suite
Time: 09:56 | 11/22/2010 | Download MP3
Summary
Jason and David discuss the new 37signals Suite, how its price was set, and how the project fit into our two-week iteration method of working.
More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.