This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: Jason talks Basecamp with O'Reilly
Feed Title: Loud Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking
Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp
My partner in excellence, Jason Fried, has been interviewed by O'Reilly's Marc Hedlund under the title The Builders of Basecamp. It shall be no secret that I was a huge fan of 37signals and Jason's work and ton long before I actually got involved with the company some three years ago. This interview does a fine job of highlighting a lot of the reasons why.
Jason has an incredible passion and drive for keeping it simple, telling it straight, and delivering. I'm frequently counting my lucky stars that he decided to attempt to learn PHP back in '01, that he couldn't make it work and asked for help, and that my help got the relationship going.
Asked about why we went with Ruby and subsequently extracted Rails, Jason speaks straight to my ideal on management and cooperation:
If you don't trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application? Trust is critical here. And, further, why would you dare impact your developer's morale by throwing him or her into a language where he can't be as productive or as satisfied? You only get good work from people who enjoy doing the work. I'll take a happy average programmer over a disgruntled, frustrated master programmer any day.
From that, it's not hard to see how we were drawn to the vision for Basecamp:
Our baseline approach is this: project management is communication. Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, tables, reports, stats, spreadsheets, and so on. Projects fail from a lack of simple two-way communication.
I wouldn't want to run a business with any other partner in the world. I wouldn't want to run any other business than 37signals in the world. And I wouldn't want to work on any other products than the family we're building with Basecamp, Ta-da List, Writeboard, and Honey. I'm having the time of my life in the best possible company.
So that's my round merry, happy back padding for today :)
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