ricardo

Quitting your job is by no means easy. You'd either have to be willing to take a huge risk if you don't have any savings or you have to plan way ahead to minimize the damaage. Having a spouse and/or kids to support only makes it harder. Sure, quitting your job doesn't mean you've made anything useful but it isn't as easy as the article suggests. For most people, building something on the side requires they give up some other aspect of their personal lives. If someone has found a way to chase their dreams by quitting a job they don't enjoy and keeping their personal lives straight, then I think they deserve some encouragement.

I'm a fan of 37signals and have been reading their blog for years but the tone of their recent posts have gotten strangely negative. Just by applauding someone for quitting their job doesn't mean they're ignoring those that moonlight. I hope this post, 'The Next Generation Bends Over,' and the 'Mojito Island is a Myth' aren't indicative of a new direction for them. Every new post seems to be a defense of their business model.

Basecamp is great tool for lightweight project management. It won't solve your motivation problem but it will make it easy to keep things organized. My suggestion: make a to do list about a particular function/feature and quickly jot down those tasks needed to make things happen. Any time the planning urge strikes you jot down some more. After a while you'll have a decent backlog of work to chew through. When you're feeling less motivated about work and planning start working your way through that list. This prevents you from trying to force yourself to plan when you run out of things to do.

The key to project management is the same programming. Keep breaking up the problem into smaller chunks that are easily tackled. Find the quickest system that allows you to document this without spending more time figuring out a new PM tool on top of your normal priorities.

A great technique is to modify the UI based on context and allowed actions. As I started using Basecamp (37signals) on a daily basis I realized that there are hardly any error messages in the application. If you aren't allowed to do something they hide any UI elements associated with the invalid action. This results in a simpler interface that is more intuitive.

Steve Yegge's essays are a great read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

While it's difficult to keep up with a steady stream of lengthy emails, I prefer that to phone calls. Especially when working with customers who tend to ask the same question multiple times. I'd rather send an email and attach the same file/text again and again than deal with the overhead of multiple phone calls.

I respect those that have found a job they truly enjoy doing.

When Microsoft started out it operated under a pretty flat organizational structure, similar to how Google is run. They've gotten fat in the middle (management) over the years and it's stifled any chance they've had of getting anything done.

See this blog post from a former MS employee about the year it took to design the shutdown menu in Vista: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

This comes across as a rant from someone who doesn't understand how 37Signals became successful.

They seem to practice what they preach. It may not be the right approach for everyone, but it definitely works for them.

How does having only 10 employees after 9 years not count as growing slowly?

There have been a lot of speculation and analysis about the challenges that this type of site will face but I think twitter's problems are much simpler. It was built by a group of people who had never scaled a site to that level before. They've been trying to cope with their success but it sounds like they don't have the right people to write scalable software and don't have enough operations people to keep their systems up.

I attended Railsconf 2007 and two of twitter's developers held an impromptu session to discuss the scaling challenges they faced. Twitter had just experienced several days of downtime and the room was filled with people interested in hearing all about it. It was pretty obvious from that one hour session that their issues are more than just technical.

At one point they showed some code that was used to balance some of their load among a group of servers. Unfortunately they wrote the function in such a way that it was limited to a maximum of 10 servers. Once they exceed the capacity of those 10 servers the whole site came crashing down. They seemed like nice guys and were excited about their work but it was obvious based on their comments and the crowd's reaction that they were out of their league. I got the impression that they are doing whatever it takes to keep the site up and running today, even if it brings the site down tomorrow.

Slides from the session I referenced: http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/scaling-twitter-railsconf-200...

There's a uWink coming soon to downtown Mountain View (corner of Castro and California where they old ranch house used to be). I just hope it isn't too gimmicky.

Another example: http://islostarepeat.com/

Google streetview may be illegal... in Canada.

It's perfectly legal in the US.

Verizon is just as bad. I can't wait to get off their wireless service. I recently moved to the SF Bay Area and found that my cell on a nationwide plan was roaming continuously. Somehow the phone I bought from them won't update its network listing so the options given to me from their reps were 1. Renew my 2 year plan and get $100 towards a new phone or 2. Buy a phone off of craigslist and pay them $20 to transfer it. I'll be glad to switch to a GSM network where I can buy phones online and swap the SIM cards if I need to.

Your original post doesn't mention any of this. I think it would help everyone understand your point a lot better if you posted a few specifics...

You can purchase a WiFi modem to boost the signal and have it work inside:

https://wifi.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=44022