What is 37signals up to?
I love 37signals. I think they set a great example of what a company should be and how a company should treat their employees. Getting Real was a fantastic read and I wish more organizations would adopt it. That said, what the hell are they doing in Chicago? I mean besides ample amounts of blogging. Their last product release was Highrise in March 2007. Well over a year ago. I realize that maintaing existing products takes a lot of time and effort but over a year since their last release? Part of the Getting Real philosophy is to stay lean and cut down on the number of features. Thus leading to a quicker release because you don’t get bogged down with the things that are not necessary. So how is it that 37signals has gone 16 months since releasing Highrise? Here is a timeline of 37signals’ releases.
- Basecamp - 2004
- Ta-Da Lists - 2005
- Backpack - 2005
- Whiteboard - 2005
- Getting Real book - 2006
- Campfire - 2006
- Highrise - 2007
For any other small company I would not even care if it had been a year since their last product release. So what? The difference is 37signals has a seriously kick ass dev team. To give a quick overview:
- David Heinemeier Hansson - created Ruby on Rails
- Jamis Buck - Capistrano, Net::SSH, sqlite3-ruby, Rails contributor
- Jeremy Kemper - Rails core member
- Sam Stephenson - wrote Prototype, Rails contributor
- Mark Imbriaco - Rails contributor
That is a bona fide team of hackers. So much so that the significance of each individual’s open source contributions far outweigh their work at 37signals.
It’s likely that 37signals is pushing to mature their current offerings. This is supported by their release of Open Bar and an affiliate program as but both are building on their existing product line, not growing it.
That said, I still expect that we will be seeing something from 37signals before the end of the year. And if they follow their advice in Getting Real there will be a teaser with a lot of early buzz so we’ll know about it well before it actually hits.
People I’d like to see on Twitter
Randall Munroe - I’d wager that Mr. XKCD has dozens of ideas every day that he probably does not develop enough to turn into a full on comic. These dozens of little thoughts and ideas Randall has would make for excellent Twitter fodder.
Stephen Colbert - Comedic geniuses create the best Twitter streams. Who better than Colbert? There was a fake Stephen T Colbert who was doing a pretty good job of imitating Colbert until he was ousted.
John Hodgman - “Resident Expert” on The Daily Show and author of the book The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman would no doubt make a kick ass Twitter. Plus, I’m pretty sure he would beat Justin Long in a hypothetical fight.
Fake Steve Jobs - Yes, I want the fake Steve Jobs to be on Twitter more than the real one. I have nothing against the real Steve Jobs and I confess I would still follow him on Twitter but I can imagine that the majority of his status updates would be along the lines of “in a meeting”. Judging by his blog, and the fact that he is a professional journalist, Fake Steve Jobs would undoubtably write more entertaining updates.
Mark Cuban - Aside from the small fact that Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks, he writes one of the best weblogs on the Internet. He seems to thrive when it comes to writing long, well thought out entries, but I bet he has a decent short game too.
That is all I can think of for now. And, unlike the aforementioned 5 people, you can follow me on Twitter to see what I’m thinking about.
Computer Science Trivia Questions
Today we threw the first annual ICS day at UC Irvine. For the event I helped prepare a bunch of computer science trivia questions for a family feud style game. Since it is kind of an interesting list I am going to make it available to everyone here incase someone else is looking for a huge list of CS trivia questions.
Some of the questions were given to me by a classmate and I don’t know where she got them from. The rest I wrote myself. I dumbed down the questions as much as I could because I wanted to make sure people would get them right. Having a trivia game with questions that no one knew that answer to would not have been much fun.
Git Presentation
Last week I gave a presentation on the Git version control system at the OC Ruby Users Group. The presentation went very well and I felt it was the most lively presentation that I’ve ever given, even if questions did push the length over an hour.
The slides I used for the presentation are available for download below. The zip contains a pdf of the presentation and the keynote files. The original version of the slides was provided by Ryan Felton. I expanded and modified them for my presentation.
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Git Presentation Files - Released on April 27, 2008.
