Jason Fried On Focus and Avoiding Interruptions

BigTimOBrien writes "Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, talks about the day-to-day operations of 37signals. How does the company work, and what are the guiding principles behind the design of Basecamp and Campfire? He talks about the importance of avoiding interruptions and the relative unimportance of both physical space and mandatory meetings."

Comments

Re:If you've never heard of them

[mini me]

They are also the guys behind Ruby on Rails. Considering that topic is brought up quite often on Slashdot, I'm sure most people here have heard of it.

Re:If you've never heard of them

[nyargh]

We use Basecamp at our small consultancy, and it is just great. We get daily turnaround times for any bugs/issues with the product, and having client exposure and notification on our todo lists and other project planning saves us a mountain of "status check" emails from our more neurotic clients.

These guys have nailed the "do one thing, and do it well" philosophy of designing a product, and we have benefited greatly from decreased interruptions and happier, more informed clients.

Re:If you've never heard of them

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick a wiki up on a webserver. That's pretty much 90% of Basecamp anyway. Hell, that's pretty much 90% of all 37signals apps.

Not really. To truly emulate the 37 signals apps, you'd need to install mod_throttle or some other way of inducing latency to make each page of the wiki take 10-15 seconds to load.

I can't say if it's improved since we stopped using it, but my main memory of the experience of using Basecamp was how slow it was. Like 37 signals, my company sells a SaaS web application, though we have a completely different kind of application. For us, if a page is taking more than 2-3 seconds to render, we consider it too slow and try to improve the performance. Most of our pages will load in under a second when accessed over a LAN. Sometimes it isn't possible to make pages perform like that, though that is mostly just the reports using complex OLAP queries. Network latency and bandwidth can make pages take somewhat longer, but we still find it generally unacceptable for pages to take more than 5-10 seconds to load in a real-world environment, unless there's just a lot of data being sent to the client. Honestly...none of this is very hard to achieve.

The 37 signals apps routinely took 10-15 seconds to load simple pages. Until they fix that, it's hard to take anything they say seriously. Perhaps they should listen more to what others have to say instead of pretending to be an authority on this kind of thing.