It took me some twenty-plus years to really learn how to program. It wasn’t for a lack of trying either, it was just that I was trying the wrong way. I tried to learn to program by following tutorials that created programs I didn’t have the slightest interest in keeping. I was trying to learn for the sake of learning.

Now I’m sure that works for some people. Intellectually curious for the sake of it. I envy you. But that’s not how it worked for me and I know that’s not how it works for a lot of other people.

What made it click for me was programming in anger. Programming because I needed to. Programming because I gave a damn about what I was writing and I wanted it done sooner rather than later.

That’s how I learned to program Ruby. By making it my mission to write Basecamp in it. When you’re learning on a mission, the order of things come really naturally. So what exactly do I have to do to get this messages section working in Ruby? Oh, I’ll need to do a loop here. Oh, I’ll need to get something from the database there.

Before you know it, you’re half-way done with your idea and you’ve accidentally learned how to do it too.

In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.

Starting a new company is full of chaos and uncertainty. There are plenty of very reasonable things to worry about, like, will we make any money? Do we have the right product? How do we find any customers? But these are often not the things starters choose to worry about.

Instead, they worry about things they should be so lucky to encounter. Will my software platform scale if I get 10,000 customers per day? Do we have the right strategic plan for the next three years? What should our stock option plan look like so it’ll cope with 100+ people?

To make something of yourself, you can only worry about so much. There’s a certain set of worry slots available and if you fill them with all these possibly-maybe concerns, there won’t be any left for things that’ll matter tomorrow.

When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up a little and only a few will leave. You still have the entrenched rest to make the purchase pay.

Not so with ideas or talent. These are the purchases of aspiration: Imagine if we took that scrappy idea with those underpaid, hungry champions, and we gave them all the resources in the world. They could paint all the colors of the rainbow and still have pixie dust left to spare!

Turns out that good ideas and strong talent is as fickle as it is seducing. As soon as you start making big-company compromises, the good idea turns average, and the average turns into a write-off.

Same goes with strong talent. As soon as they have to deal with three layers of reporting, quarterly budget cycles, and swing-door managers, they turn off the creativity and head for the exit. The latter part might take from three months to two years, but it will happen.

That leaves the acquisition with nothing but a dusty footnote in the P&L, but don’t worry, nothing will have been learned, so the cycle can repeat next year. There’s always a fresh crop of shiny ideas and sassy talent available to try that-which-does-not-work once more.

Every time a young, promising start-up is bought out by a stodgy, old incumbent, the world is flush with congratulations. Congratulations to the team, island mojitos now await them. Congratulations to the venture capitalist, their past nine flops can fade in the background for a week. Congratulations to the acquisition team, who can celebrate the win on their lawyer’s expense account.

But all the hoopla and excitement quickly dies down and the fresh-for-a-moment old incumbent goes back to doing what old incumbents do best: thwart new ideas.

As soon as Monday rolls around, it’ll be time for another management rotation, and the new guy surely has no interest in playing with the old guy’s toys. That’s not how you make a name for yourself and move up the ladder. Oh no.

Take Dopplr, for example. Nokia picked them up in 2009 for the going price of Web 2.0 vanity purchases without a business model: $20,000,000. The Guardian is running a rare where-are-they-now story on how predictably that turned out: “We have decided to bring it into a maintenance mode… but will not develop it further at this stage”.

Or what about Bloglines. IAC picked them up in 2005, did little to advance the application, and then dragged out the inevitable. It’s being shut down on October 1st.

The acquisition graveyard is full of tombstones for the wasted efforts of bright minds. Minds that could have gone into building lasting companies with a shot at significance.

Next time a vanity purchase is announced, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick with the champagne.

Taylor Weibley has joined 37signals as our new operations manager. Taylor comes from a long stint at Engine Yard where he helped build up their support department. He’ll be adding Tampa, Florida to the now long list of cities that the 37signals team pings from.

We’re really looking forward to having Taylor take on a slightly more methodical approach to our growing infrastructure and make sure we keep adding 9’s to the uptime stats. He’ll also be heading up new projects like improving performance of our applications in Europe and the rest of the non-US world as well as multiple datacenter deployments.

Welcome onboard, Taylor!

Between Draft, Campfire, and Highrise, we’ve been building quite the iOS portfolio of applications. We want to take good care of them and continue building more iOS and mobile applications, so we’re hiring a dedicated programmer for the task.

Think you’re up for it? Check out the complete job posting on the 37signals Job Board.

We’re sad to say goodbye to our good friend and current operations manager Mark Imbriaco, but we know that he’ll continue to kick ass in his new position at Heroku. Mark has been with us for almost four years and seen our infrastructure grow from a handful of servers to I’ve-lost-count.

This means that we’re looking for a new operations manager to join our band. The operations team already consists of Joshua Sierles and John Williams and this new person will be working closely with the two of them, and the rest of us, to make sure all 37signals applications are always running like the German Swiss trains.

Please see the complete job posting on the 37signals Job Board.