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Tell that to:

Automattic
Mozilla
GitHub
Basecamp (formerly 37signals) (who even wrote a book about how great remote working can be)

along with a myriad of other companies who work either entirely remotely, or have very liberal policies around remote working.

Most, if not all of whom, can be considered to be quite successful within their field.

Tell that to:

Automattic
Mozilla
GitHub
Basecamp (formerly 37signals) (who even wrote a book about how great remote working can be)

along with a myriad of other companies who work either entirely remotely, or have very liberal policies around remote working.

Most, if not all of whom, can be considered to be quite successful within their field.

Easy:
https://weworkremotely.com/
http://37signals.com/remote/

Difficult:
Software is usually developed in a team.
Working remotely in a software team: simply does not work!

Just read Getting Real . I was thinking of recommending their second book, ReWork, but it's mostly a rework of the first. You either get Getting Real or you don't, and if you don't get it, you have problem about getting real.

GMail is a good example of an interface that you don't need to read a user guide first for --- although they do have short articles for those who get stuck. Google in general does user interfaces well. I credit it to: (1) using one-word, plain-English text labels instead of icons (or at least they used to), (2) clean and simple layout (which, by the way, is anything but simple to make) and (3) just a thousand little things to make the user's life easier. For example, while most email programs showed just the subject in the list, GMail showed as much as the message as possible. After all, people are bad at writing subjects. Little things like that, a hundred times over. There's no one big thing that turns it from a bad UI to a good one. It's just lots and lots and lots of polishing.

37Signals at least writes about what I think is the most efficient route to good software. See their book, Getting Real. I haven't used their software much, so I don't know how well they execute, but lots of people like it.

I think you should major in UI and minor in documentation. I think you will always need some documentation. And maybe your software needs a lot. Some software does. And a few of those projects have outstanding documentation. I don't know, see how PostgreSQL keeps theirs up to date.

Not necessarily. There is a school of thought that says if you want to stay in business you need to be "at home good".

Wishful thinking unfortunately. There are always ways to bring your competitor's product down instead of making your own product better. Regulation and ethics are the only things that stop this. Note that reputation does not do this because without regulation reputation can be fraudulent. In a world with billions of people mass marketing to millions/billions can and does trump one-on-one recommendations.

Regulation is all about stopping all the negative ways people can compete while still allowing the positive ways.

Not necessarily. There is a school of thought that says if you want to stay in business you need to be "at home good".

Almost every day.

But we are a team of two, working on a private company intranet.

I suggest you read Getting Real.

It sounds like they agree with Jason Fried, who cowrote the book Getting Real, which you can read free online. To wit, this chapter: Build Less.

Yahoo has always been relentless in destroying everything they buy.

No. The difference here is that Netflix has been held up almost as high as Apple by the "user experience design" community as being a web site that "does the right thing" in design for its customers:

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=%22user+experience%22+netflix&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gl=uk

specifically, the echo chamber:

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/netflix_nails_it.php

http://www.uie.com/articles/kane_interview/

Bill Scott, their former head of UX is a high-profile UX consultant and speaker who often uses Netflix as an example of good design for profit.

Compare this to /. where everyone knows they are crap, and therefore doesn't mind.

Designers, like everyone else in service industries, are competing against everyone in the market. There's no more hiding. You have to demonstrate value. It's not easy to show non-designers what the value of good design is, but good designers are effective communicators; if you can't communicate your value to clients, you shouldn't expect them to pay the rates many designers are used to charging. On the flip side, I'm reminded of this reminder of the value a truly skilled, experienced designer can deliver.

I've just tried with the extract.

The text extraction seams to have worked well. Unsurprisingly the formatting has been lost and it has got confused with the REwork type bits. PDFs are not designed with extraction to a editable format in mind, so getting any of the formatting is impressive in my book.

I had never heard of that. I googled it and here's one link.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1244-defining-the-problem-of-elevator-waiting-times

http://www3.sympatico.ca/karasik/GF_evolution_of_legend.html

http://www.shmula.com/384/on-queueing-and-elevator-mirrors

Getting the definitive source will be neigh on impossible, but those are rough pointers. Either way its illustrative of requirements engineering/user perceptions/problem analysis.

Redmine is a free open source project. It can be very difficult to get up an running. 37Signal has a awesome product line to check out. It's all hosted, so no setup is required. http://37signals.com/

Animation can add another level of context to the user interface. For instance, status messages with fading background colors (made popular by 37Signals with their Yellow-Fade Technique)--that's animation, but it's used subtly, sparingly and appropriately, so it gets a pass.

The places where it is simply unforgivable to use animation is in scroll effects, form fields or menu items. I always end up using nLite when I reinstall an operating system because it lets you create new installs that have all that CRAP turned off. It's astonishing how much snappier your computer feels.

An option would be to provide the customer with 3 figures at the pay point: Retail price ($20); Recommended price (say $10); Average price so far ($X)...

Sounds like something Jane Siberry did with her music - first link I found: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/419-jane-siberrys-you-decide-what-feels-right-pricing

It's a good thing the DNC is right now advertising an opening for a Ruby on Rails developer position: http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/5515, hopefully they get replace someone whoever is was inept enough to do this.

37signals on Avoiding Preferences

Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions... It may seem like you're doing [your customers] a favor but you're just making busy work for them (and it's likely they're busy enough).

I hate preferences. Just let me sign in and move on.

Good to know. What do you think the break point would be? >1000 users and it's worth the cost, time & effort?

Also curious if you think taking the money spent on CALs, licenses, etc and spending it on infrastructure & setup for a more unixy back end would result in something close. Like using the stuff from 37 signals.
http://www.37signals.com/

Insightful (and funny) talk by David Heinemeier Hansson entitled "The secret to making money online".

This is spectacular advice. I'll take issue with just one bit though:

Realize that coders consider their code as a mother does her children.

Realize instead that you have to break coders of the habit of considering their code precious. Being a coder/manager myself, I know where it comes from; coding is part art. But artists also know when to destroy their crud. (I actually posted this item on the 36:1 ratio of crap to good, just a few weeks ago.)

This is easy to do if you're still writing any code yourself: occasionally tear your own code down, or mercilessly delete it, in full view of the troops. You'll have plenty of opportunities. :-) (I call this refactoring with a chainsaw.) That doesn't mean you should be merciless about anyone else's code, but it will set the right attitude.

What people havn't understood yet is that Google is a product company and not a service company. Despite all the nice talk about consumerisation of IT, corporate cusomers want a service company. A company that picks up the phone, engages itself with an SLA and actually puts the Customer First. Google is miles away from such a corporate culture. This does not mean that the SAAS market does not have a very bright future, just that the winners will probably be focused companies considering this their core busines. Check out companies such as http://www.contactoffice.com/ http://www.37signals.com/

They do have a message about software development that you can read without purchasing any of their product. I have endorsed their book, Getting Real, and you can read my endorsement here without purchasing any of my product.

Seriously, where is the line between information and advertising? IMHO, if the link takes you to a page where there is no possible way to part with your cash without going someplace else, then it is information. Have you been so betrayed by capitalism that you can't tolerate any exchange of money at all? How can you afford to eat?

37signals has a number of apps that do these things. Campfire is web IM (with logging, file upload, etc.) and Basecamp is essentially a personal wiki with calendaring and other features.

I worked in a small company that used a software development project life cycle management application called SourceForge Enterprise Edition. You can download and use what they call the SFDE version of it if you have 50 users or less. This is a VmWare appliance where CentOS is the guest OS. We had no trouble with it whatsoever. We looked at what it would cost to upgrade to RHEL and, frankly, that was just out of the company's reach financially.

I have been writing business application software for over 20 years. SFEE is most probably the best life cycle application that I have run across but, ultimately, I was still unsatisfied with it. You have trackers and artifacts that you have to customize in order to get change requests and defects. It's kind of a round peg in a square hole deal. Trackers are too generic, too agnostic. I agree with 37signals that software should be opinionated. That is why I am "scratching an itch" by developing a real collaborative software development project life cycle management application.

I am calling this application Code Roller. This app has a lot of features.

• Users can collaborate on requirements, use-cases, test plans, designs, and diagrams.
• Documents can be attached to any of these kinds of items. Documents are managed with multiple taxonomies.
• All of these things can go through a software development friendly workflow process of review and approval/rejection.
• Time is managed through tasks and events.
• The user can also work his bug list.
• A dashboard style interface shows you at a glance what projects that you are working on and what teams that you are a member of.

For more information, please check out my white papers. I would absolutely be honored if members of the /. community would become beta testers.

I have a lot of respect for good ideas, but I tend to agree with Derek Sivers take on ideas vs. execution. (You'll have to scroll down to the part where it says "be an executioner").

So as specific advice I'd say: make the game yourself. If it's beyond your skills, get people to go in on it with you as a team. Hire them if you must. If the idea is really good, it should be worth executing, right? Take your idea as far as you can. Go beyond a "rough as nails" demo and into the space of a great indie game. Get it on Steam or some other distribution network.

Eventually, if you make a company that executes things well, or if you find your way to the top of such a company, then your ideas will be worth a lot more because you'll have the ability to execute them. For starters I think that the only way to see if your ideas are truly worth something is to execute them yourself. Be your own first believer.

Best of luck.

I much prefer to spend my time working deep in the algorithms of my software, because coding those is a pleasure for me. Anything else just doesn't hold my interest.

This guy got modded troll. Seems like the mods haven't read this book, published by one of the most respected web application developers in the world. Are they trolls too for saying exactly what this guy is saying (amongst other things)?

Like I said in a previous post. Here be dragons.

I'll always admire T.S. Elliot for saying, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."

This is the first time that I have seen this quote attributed to T. S. Elliot. Usually I see it attributed to Mark Twain, who did in fact use it. However, it comes from before him. It has been attributed to Samuel Johnson as well, but it is not his either. Instead, it comes from Blaise Pascal's "Lettres Provinciales", Letter XVI in 1657:

Mes Reverends Peres, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutume de se suivre de si pres, ni d'etre si etendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a ete cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Provinciales_-_Seizi%C3%A8me_lettre_aux_r%C3%A9v%C3%A9rends_p%C3%A8res_j%C3%A9suites

My Reverend Fathers, my letters are not accustomed to follow so closely, nor to be so extensive. The limited time that I had was because of one thing and another. I made it longer because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.

Please forgive my poor translation.

http://www.samueljohnson.com/apocryph.html

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/454-why-most-copywriting-on-the-web-sucks

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TimeToMakeItShort

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0444.html

Absolutely I "honestly think a business is going to allow its private correspondence to be handled over the Internet ...?"

Only it's not "one of these programs" but a whole cornucopia of online office 'sweets' that are otherwise known Software as a Service or SaaS for short.

And they're doing it in huge ways, just look at the dominance SalesForce has in the area of CRM applications, or the online offerings by 37 Signals."

Fact is, the cross-platform, concurrent collaboration qualities of these SaaS based office tools are also making huge gains in moving the corporate world away from the office space and into the web space.

Case in point, everyone who doesn't have a gmail account, please raise your hand? Yeah, I didn't think so.

I should also point out what 37signals is running on.

I'm also put to mind of Getting Real. You can read the HTML version for free or pay $19 for a PDF and they've still sold tens of thousands of copies of the PDF, not to mention the paper version.

http://www.basecamphq.com/

http://www.37signals.com/

You can add members to Basecamp, send messages / announcements to members, create overall tasks and assign tasks to individual members, etc. I think this system would work much better than the existing email based system

Campfire was released on 16 February 2006, while we had this on a website I'm an admin at since mid-2001. PHP and some JS. It works to this day and looks the same, although it was rewritten several times throughout the years to use AJAX instead of a reloaded frame.

No, I'm not giving you an URL - I wish I could, to prove my words, but the server load is high enough without the /. crowd trying the thing out...

• * Doing great UI design is important.
• * We spend lots of time and effort on the UI. ex. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/887-design-decisions-calendar-picker-for-backpack-reminders
• * They *exactly* copied our hard work.

Jason Fried from 37signals has discussed this issue regarding a previous ripoff.

heh my friend reading this thread pointed me a link at 37signals saying they 98% reliability is okay with them. http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php. lol. I think it's fair to say zed is correct.

Now look, I didn't come to bash rails and I hope your applications run great. But you rails guys like to pretend your shit doesn't stink when any half ass engineer can see some seriously problems. I swear one mention of threads to you rails guys are like bees thinking their hive is under attack. In any case, real world beckons. best of luck.

Which is why most VoIP providers (Comcast included) do not have to adhere to laws written for POTS, nor do they have to meet 5 9's of reliability. People want cheap phone service (Comcast VoIP, Vonage, etc, etc) but it's cheap because you're riding dumb, non-redundant last-mile infrastructure. If you want rock solid POTS service, get a POTS line. If you want cheap phone service, get VoIP and extended duration battery backup for the VoIP node in your home (and hope your last mile provider's hybrid fiber coax box has backup power for a long enough duration).

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php

He has just a slight vested interest in pimping his wares, here.

The flow goes like this:

• What does the website *do* for customers? Why?
• How do we make it easy for people to find stuff?
• Can we make the visuals simple, and navigation clean?
• Have we avoided clutter? Either visual or cognitive?
• Is it readable? Does it pass muster at a Flesch "plain english" level?

Otherwise known as "Information Architecture", and critical to effective web design. (Interesting, IAs tend to be the highest paid job title in the web dev field, see here.)

An analogy for the coders: what's worse than trying to code a major piece of software without having fully worked out scope and specs - exactly what problems it needs to solve for the business, and so on.

Ultimately, IA is why all those comments from the tediously omnipresent snide, sneering, critical, back-seat-driving, basement-dwelling slashdot minority saying graphic design is just clutter and flash and fluff and useless distraction, are sadly mistaken. The talented graphic designer uses every tool in the "visual language" toolbox (whitespace, typography, colour, shape, size, etc) to most clearly serve and support the priorities and relationships established by your IA.

Here's one common method:

• Brainstorm a range of persona representing archetypes of your main visitors. For example, you might include:
  • A (existing/potential) customer (b2c)
  • An (existing/potential) supplier
  • Someone from the media
  • A prospective employee

  Obviously it depends on the nature of your business.

• Brainstorm what content and/or functionality those people would want to find on your site. Eg. product info, pricing info, online purchasing, how to find your physical shop(s), staff contact information, manuals and documentation, supplementary content/expansions, etc.
• For each persona (whether or not that persona was one who desired it), assign numerical values of importance to each content or functionality item, including negative reactions. Eg, -1 = puts me off, 0 = neutral, 1 = pleased to see it, 2 = very pleased to see it / considers it essential. BE STRICT AND HARSH!
• Assign a numeric ranking to the importance / weighting of each your persona (if, for example, you are likely to be visited by 10,000 times as many customers as suppliers, it doesn't make sense for the stuff the suppliers want to overwhelm the stuff the customers want.)
• Spreadsheet magic (left as an exercise to the reader) can then produce an overall value score for each content or functionality item.
• Stuff at the top is obviously critical. Your main nav will obviously want to be influenced by this (remember to structure navigation in terms of how visitors will see things, not in terms of organisational heirachies!) but it may go further. For example you may well want to have the top 2 or 3 items to have a prominent "pull out" direct link from the homepage.
• Likewise, stuff at the bottom with very low scores, you should consider cutting altogether. Don't assume everything you add automatically adds value to the overall site - it's possible to have too much there, the more you have the more difficult it becomes to build navigation that remains supremely simple and usable.

Now, some people write off this approach. They've got a point, but I'm wary of falling into sycophantic "OMG! 37signals said it, it must be true!" mode. It works for them, but not everybody has not everybody has their team, their instinct and experience, etc; for many organisations this is unfamiliar territory and therefore the persona exercise is a useful piece of formalism to force them to think of these things. Of course you don't follow it blindly and let yourself temper it with common sense.

As for the technical side, as you're a techie, I ho

There are a lot of people who think that web, Ajax and Flash applications are a very bad thing. Not just users, but also noted developers and usability experts.

More thoughts on why Ajax is bad for web applications: this is about how Ajax apps are often very fragile and usually don't work as expected.

Ephemeral Web-Based Applications: usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes this great article that goes into depth about how most web apps are complete failures when it comes to usability. Even something as basic as navigation quickly becomes unintuitive and difficult.

Why the .NET framework makes for bad web applications: this explains why .NET apps using some of the latest technology around is often a bad idea.

You're not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn't matter)!: Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson talks about how we don't need web apps everywhere.

There are a lot of anti-web app articles here. Having done a lot of web apps for years now i think a lot of them are spot on although they are really against web apps when web apps probably are the best tool for the job:
Web apps: taking five years to get to where desktop apps were a decade earlier?

A JavaScript tip built on years of experience: try to avoid JavaScript.

Why is Web page layout still such a problem?

Web 2.0: A serious case of diarRIA.

AJAX: the "ricer" of the software development world?

Keep the Web in the browser, please.

The wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects.

An example of the sorry state of JavaScript today.

The Web is inherently an inadequate application development platform.

Where is the developer productivity increase with JavaScript-based Web applications?

A great Web developer is a waste of a really great application developer.

Rails is fine if you want to do another Basecamp or similar 37signals-type project. It's even better if you want to whip out an amazing number of structurally identical, common-organization Hype 2.0 apps. But just ask the folks at Twitter how well its database access scales to meet demand - it almost put them out of business. Several times. Rails is a poster child for the perils of an application-specific language being used as a general-purpose one.

A lot of things that I read obout it remind me of Python in the early days - but I don't recall Guido van Rossum being so Great Leader-ish, and there's also the difference that Python actually can be used for an amazing range of applications. Ruby can too; it's a beautiful language - until you cut its balls off with Rails.

Are iPhone users really that interested in Java? Given that it's an interpreted environment, I question its efficiency.

Too many buttons, indeed.

It'll be a cold day in hell before they sell that company to MS.

4) Set up an automatied process: Fetch the captcha and present it to visitors of some porn site. "Enter this text to access". Feed what they entered into the the ticketmaster website.

Judging from the image of the ticketmaster captcha at http://www.37signals.com/svn/images/optik.jpg, I am surprised they can sell any tickets at all.

If I was to buy tickets from them, I could really use any good OCR application the scalpers might have.

You make far too many assumptions.

That that url doesn't work only shows that either expose_php is off, or that the page isn't powered by PHP. Allegedly it did work at the time of that blog posting, and given that every single other 37 Signals website is powered by PHP, it seems pretty plausible that rubyonrails.com also uses PHP. Regardless, I don't particularly care either way about that point.

You attacked the original poster's method, saying that it would give false positives, which it clearly does not. I pointed out the flaw in your argument, and you assumed that that somehow meant that I agreed with the original poster, which I do not (I don't disagree either, however).

I'm not defending anything, I'm merely pointing out the blatantly wrong.

You might want to look a little closer. The Signal vs Noise blog is powered by Ruby on Rails: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/37-the-newish-signal-vs-noise