The biggest thing I pulled out of The Building of Basecamp workshop is that you don’t have to follow all “the rules” to make something great. When you think about companies delivering services over the Web, you think about…org charts, support staff, call centers, requirements documents, functional specifications, etc.
37 Signals will blow this perception apart pretty quickly. There are just three guys: Jason, Matt, and Ryan. That’s it. They don’t even have a full-time programmer. David works for them part-time. From Denmark.
Highrise: Shared contact manager: 37 Signals is starting up a CRM tool. This was a long time coming. Two-and-a-half years ago, when we went to their workshop, they were talking about this, and they had code-named it "Cream." After they mentioned the name (but didn't say what it…
Simplicity: This is a good essay that's a huge counterpoint to the "embrace limitations" philosophy that 37 Signals started pushing a few years ago when Basecamp came out. I think what Joel is saying is that you need features, but they need to appear simple to the end users. And…
Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft): Here's a great rant from Spolsky about what makes good design and how hard it is to get there. He has a great bit in the middle about the conflicts present when deciding whether or not to put a mute button on a phone.…
We talked about this film way back when Project Aardvark was announced. Fog Creek Software had an idea for a piece of software, and they recruited four college students over the course of one summer to build it. And they filmed them doing it. (They may claim to have…
Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we…
Open and honest communication: Interesting comments from the creators of Basecamp on their users' tendency to try to hide things from others. One of the things that has surprised me most when talking with customers who use Basecamp is how many people work in a culture of fear, deception, and distrust. [...]…
Extreme Machines: World's Fastest Elevator: I was watching a great History Channel series on skyscrapers which included a sidebar on the elevators at one of the world's tallest buildings: Taipei 101. The 1667-ft., 101-story building has 67 elevator units, including two that service the 89th-floor observation deck and qualify as the…
David Heinemeier Hansson has published the first release of Rails, his MVC implementation for Ruby. Rails is the system David developed to power BaseCamp, the 37 Signals project management app. David had previously released Active Record, his O-R mapping layer for Rails, which is the slickest method of database…
Here's a quick little graph showing how traffic has increased over the last eight months. Click the little image (or here) for a much larger version. The trendline tells the story — we've solidly doubled page hits. And this is just to the HTML pages — God (and Webalizer)…
Building on it's planned technologies for Longhorn, Microsoft is developing a new technology called 'Triage' to manage digital photos. It appears they're tagging photos with metadata ala Photoshop Album, but check out this ZDNet Video and take a look at how they're presenting the user interface. Very slick looking, but will…
When Deane and I were in Chicago this weekend, I bought a disposable camera, just so I wouldn't keep commenting that I should have brought a camera with me. Just before we left, I'd read about PTAssembler, which is one of several frontends for the open-source panotools suite of command-line…
I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability — for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that…
The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide: This is a short but interesting piece on the "damage" that PowerPoint has done to discourse and presentation skills in the last ten years. "Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, 'Let me show you the…
Wow, thanks so much for that kind review. We're glad you found the workshop valuable, and thanks for the feedback about the negatives. We'll work on those.
FYI, we'll be announcing a second date shortly. Stay tuned to http://www.basecampHQ.com for the announcement.
Jason spilled the beans on the name:
"Ever since the META and SETI project has been analyzing radio signals from space (and there have been billions/trillions), only 37 signals remain unexplained. At least that was how many in 1999 when we started the company."
Hang on -- we're going to have a geek core meltdown here in a minute....
37 Signals has just announced the next date: September 17, 2004.
"They built Basecamp the way they wanted to. All of you guys stuck in the corporate software trenches, can you imagine that — building software the way you think it should be built, without stupid restrictions?"
Of course, 37S has it good: they've got a successful enough business that they can afford the non-billable time to design and develop unproven things like Basecamp. Getting a regular paycheck in the corporate software trenches does have some appeal!
Thanks for the GREAT review! I have been following 37S for some time (I'm in Uganda, East Africa!), and I think they are doing some wonderful stuff.
This review just goes to show how wonderful it is. Keep up the good work guys!
One pretty severe warning: when you're using any of 37signals' products such as Basecamp, make sure you backup your data thoroughly and often, in case the site has a bug or goes away. As a user of one of 37signals' previous products, Singlefile, I had over 3000 book records in their database. At a certain point, their export function ceased working for me. I alerted Jason to the issue, but the problem wasn't fixed. Then they took down the site two months later -- so no data.
From an outside perspective (they have refused to address the issue, nor followed through on their promise to get me a copy of my data, over 6 months after the issue first occured), it looked like the product simply didn't scale to this number of records. Their customer service response has been pretty dire. This was the last message I received from Jason, back in early March:
"At this time exporting a single person's data for a service that is no longer available, was run for free over the past year, and isn't even on a machine that can facilitate the export is simply not at the top of our list."
Which you might imagine was rather annoying, since the export of the data had already been requested well before the site was shut down, and was only necessary because of a bug they didn't fix. It's also not a stellar example of responsive customer service and the transparency they mention on their Basecamp Manifesto.
There's a reason that you don't usually make your evangelist your tech support person... and having one part-time programmer is not exactly reassuring.
Note: the issue with my Singlefile data has been resolved satisfactorily and amicably.
Dear Singlefile User,
That's the kind of customer support I've received from 37signals as well. I totally agree with you about having the CEO running frontline tech support. Talk about cutting corners in a bad way.
Jason is curt to the point of being rude and for some reason is surprised to find that he generates ire from his customers for his disobliging support.
Sort of fits into the no tables or proper chairs in too small a room for the fifty people spending $500/each ($25,000) for eight hours of his time.
Their XML export option for Basecamp is inconvenient (no useable file immediately) and limited (messages only). It would be no trouble for them to make a static HTML version of your project downloadable.
So the promises about exportability ring a little hollow.
In any case, I'm glad that the Singlefile data issue has been properly resolved for the Singlefile User.
My issues were not and my experience with 37signals has made me very wary of hosted software (for which no version of source is available).
Very good write-up. Thanks.
