ryan / Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:32:25 GMT
Tags 37signals, dhh, emo, jasonfried, programming | 11 comments
I had a nice time chatting with Andrew Park of Wired recently about some of the subjects on which I have so frequently opined in this and other venues: simplicity in software, programmer happiness, and the role 37signals has played in promulgating those values in the tech world.
Park cited me as a source in the resulting article (and graciously made a salutary reference to Lovetastic and my consulting firm.)
It’s an interesting article, and I’m glad to see more journalists paying attention to the fact that Rails and 37signals applications are important as much for having shifted the contemporary discourse about software as they are for the technologies in question themselves. But I think if the article had any weakness, it was that it didn’t very thoroughly discuss something to which it only alluded in its closing sentence: ”’I’m not designing software for other people,’ Hansson says. ‘I’m designing it for me.’”
Not enough attention has been paid to the growing movement in the software development community that suggests that programmer happiness is the most important factor in making quality software—the argument that code is meant to be read by humans first and computers only secondarily—that in order to write software that addresses real human needs we need to approach the problem of software development from a more human perspective. These “emo programmers” (if I may borrow Kathy Sierra’s coinage, which was originally intended as a joke) recognize that the most costly aspect of software today is the labor involved in making it. Performance is cheap. On the other hand, creating, customizing, and maintaining huge (and hugely complex) bases of inscrutable software code is very expensive.
There is increasing sentiment in the software world that we should be happy to take performance hits if it means the process of software development can me made more sustainable, pleasant, and simple. That’s what Rails does. And in this it embodies a sweeping philosophy about the manner in which software development should proceed, which stands firmly in opposition to the prevailing view in much of the Fortune 500 world.
I’d like to see us take up “emo programming” as a badge of pride to describe this nascent philosophy. Original terms of dismissiveness like “suffragette” and “tory” have subsequently been taken up as banners around which to rally movements, so there is no reason we shouldn’t do the same. Hopefully this article is an early sign that more people are paying attention to this movement and taking it seriously for what it is: an entirely new way of thinking about the how and whys of software development, and about the fundamental relationship between humans and their computers.
ryan / Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:39:51 GMT
Tags 37signals, dhh, fuckyeah, jasonfried, stockart | 20 comments
I’ve been bemused (and distracted) all day by a little tempest that the ineluctable DHH stirred up in the SVN comments teapot today.
The post was titled You’re not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter)! The question raised by the article was simple: should web applications really go out of their way to support off-line access, particularly given that most everyone doing real work these days (from cabinet-makers to “thought workers”) is hooked into a big fat bandwidth pipe at home, at work, and in between on a cell phone?
Saying “Fuck Yeah.”
The post encapsulates everything I love about 37signals. As I have written before, their delightful schtick is all about giving businesses the courage to calm down, to ignore the pressure to come off as a credible member of the “enterprise” community when doing so defies your every other intuition, and instead to use a bit of common sense.
In the world of online start-ups and small tech companies, they’re the ones who remind us when the emperor has no clothes, or when we’ve gotten so wrapped up in our own little narratives that we forgot we were naked too.
At the Getting Real workshop, Jason Fried & DHH shared with us their mantra of Done!, and intimated “done” tends to take the form of “fuck yeah” within 37signals. I’ve always loved this tidbit, and we’ve only half tongue-in-cheeckedly adopted it at SHN. Among the many flustered and sanctimonious commenters, my favorite was by one named “whoa,” who said “The title of this post: “you’re not on a fucking plane” is way off brand for you guys.” Notwithstanding how vapid a person you’d have to be to anonymously diss something by calling it “off brand,” I couldn’t imagine anything more to the core of what 37signals represents than what another commenter called the “f-bomb.” The 37signals folks have always argued that you shouldn’t check your humanity at the threshold of your cubicle. People don’t stop being people when they put on a tie. If they do, they stop knowing how to make products that will fit into real people’s lives. The same goes for your language.
Little Sammy Stockart is so Productive
But the broader issue at the heart of this whole acrimonious discussion about whether you need access to your software while on a plane (on the elliptical machine, scaling Everest, on the funicular to Montmartre, etc.) is that companies selling “business” products can’t resist the image of the stock-art “professional”. You know, those people on your online banking site who just look do damn thrilled to be sitting in front of a laptop in a suit reading about their latest finance charges. Or the painfully diverse group of young professionals you see in those de-saturated photos on “B2B” sites pretending to brainstorm up a heap of enterprise solutions.
One of the most salient and ubiquitous of these images is the one of that slick-haired asshole in a monkey suit, who’s often depicted kicking back in business class seat on a plane, one arm up behind his head, maybe chatting on the Sky Phone (which he has patched through his bluetooth headset or something), and all the while dicking around with Lotus notes his Think-pad (the IBM sticker covered with black tape) with his other hand.
You know this guy. The King of the World. The 24 year-old-pretty boy model who somehow manages to be a bit-shot Executive, controlling the universe with his little utility belt of gadgets. It makes you think of Audrey Hepburn’s great line in Sabrina about the tycoon
You press a button and factories go up. Or you pick up a telephone and tankers set out for Persia. Or through a Dictaphone you say, “Buy all of Cleveland and move it to Pittsburgh.” You must be clever.
Companies like Brookstone, Levenger, SkyMall, and PalmOne know that air travelers in particular like to think of themselves as the sort of intrepid, executive, multi-tasking folk we see in these pictures. That’s why you’ll find their productivity and “executive lifestyle” kitsch in Airport concourses and their literature in the seat pocket next to your vomit bag.
Sometimes I think we all secretly want to be that guy who’s so important that if he stops working for 30 minutes it’ll cause a thrombosis on the Hang Seng. But nobody is. I’ve never seen that guy in real life—and I doubt he really exists. Sure, people work on planes. I love to read, brainstorm, write, and even sometimes program on my laptop in flight. But to build an entire software infrastructure around these silly edge cases just so we can think of ourselves as slick road warriors is merely to bow to some marketer’s idea of how real people work. A notion some ad guy invented fifty years ago to sell a Dictaphone.
I’ve bought into this idea myself before. Ever since I was quite young, I’ve been known to lust after a fancy notebook or a swanky phone headset, with dreams of how stylishly productive it’ll make me. (If only I had a space pen in my pocket with me everywhere I went, I could do anything!) But more often than not I’ve learned that my desire for those things grew not out of need, but a misplaced longing to be the guy in the stock-art. (Which I’m happy to say I finally ditched all together.)
Quite simply: people don’t need offline access; they merely want to think of themselves as the sort of people who need offline access.
ryan / Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:06:23 GMT
Tags 37signals, gettingreal, launch, lovetastic | 6 comments
It’s been a long road since I attended the Getting Real workshop last winter and decided to completely tear down and redesign the site that would become Lovetastic.com.
I’m proud to announce that this week we launched Lovetastic with:
- Fewer features
- A simpler, cleaner interface
- Fewer requirements on sign up
- Requests for all information from users pushed to the last minute we need them
- A remarkably easy search page, which does the thinking for you
- An elegant, maintainable, and DRY Ruby on Rails back-end
- The judicious use of javascript and xhr to make data-entry more intuitive and less tedious
Many (if not all) of these ideas came directly from examples and ideas in the Getting Real workshop and book—and the great examples set by applications like Basecamp, Campfire, and Backpack.
I look forward to blogging in more specificity, now that the site is launched, on how we built the site.
In the mean time, to enjoy more of my 37signals fanboyism, listen to my interview on Leo Laporte’s Inside the Net podcast, in which I talk about the building of Lovetastic and all the ideas that I love to write about here at NotRocketSurgery.
ryan / Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:45:19 GMT
Tags 37signals, gettingreal, rails | 5 comments
Last Feburary I attended the Getting Real Workshop on making web applications, presented by 37signals.
I had just brought on a partner in my company, and we were setting out on a comprehensive redesign, reprogramming, and re-branding of our product, Scene404, in its new form as Lovetastic.
So I decided to plunk down the nearly $900 to see what they had to say. It was a sort of intentionally ironic decision, though, really. My joke at the time was that I was mainly going just to see if the guys at 37signals were kidding.
37s was starting to get a lot of press as an iconoclastic application design firm. They had developed and thoroughly promulgated what was ostensibly a sort of schtick, which they had repeated numerous times and articulated in various ways on their blog. Yet, just reading what these guys said, and hearing them occasionally on podcasts, I was a bit skeptical. I thought maybe they were either the most shameless sort of substanceless self-promoters or just deluding themselves. I couldn’t tell if they were being genuine about their aesthetic and philosophy, or if they were just cigar chomping.
But I was willing to give them a chance. I did like a lot of what they were saying. They were proclaiming all the things I already wanted to believe but didn’t think you could actually get way with. Jason Fried, for example, was asserting that you don’t need boatloads of venture capital and lots of enterprisey bullshit to earn a living making a product that your customers want. And David Heinemeier Hansson was assuring us that it’s possible to be happy as a programmer.
What happened that day, as it turned out, would completely change the trajectory of my business, and it would lend me external validation for a lot of my own long-standing ideas about work, productivity, design, business, and craftsmanship.
Far from being smug or opportunist, it was obvious from the first words out of their mouthes that these guys really cared about what they were doing. They believed what they were saying. And they could point to their own work (and success) as proof of the path they were advocating. When you look people in the eye and hear them talk about something they care about for eight hours, you can tell if they’re faking it. Jason and David definitely weren’t faking it.
Most of my postings here will be about those ideas. NotRocketSurgery is about what happened to me when, seeing the 37signals guys speak with great passion and authenticity on these subjects in person, I became an adherent of their philosophy. It’s about calming down, and starting to care more about your customers than about the universe of moronic conventional wisdom you’ll encounter as soon as you set into the world of “business.”
I’ll be posting regularly now, up to and past the launch of Lovetastic (the new “getting real” version of our old product, Scene404.) I want us to be a guinea pig and proving ground for the Getting Real methodology. I’ll outline, step by step, how we’ve applied specific principles laid out in both the workshop and book, in hopes of helping other business to learn from our experiences in the same way that 37signals has helped us.
Tomorrow, I’ll begin by talking about our decision to recraft the site using Rails, and about the tremendous increase in happiness and comfort I’ve felt both as a business owner and a developer in making that decision.
In the mean time, you can sign up for the latest workshop yourself, just announced today.
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