Author Archive: John McCaffrey

“Build half a product, not a half-assed product” - tips on clarity and focus from Jason Fried of 37Signals

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, September 24, 2008 @ 3:31 pm

Jason Fried from 37Signals spoke yesterday at the ITA "Speaking of Success" event, about the history of 37Signals, their philosophy and culture, and the critical business decisions they've made to get them where they are today.

The software biz is fundamentally broken. Too many products fail because of the obsession of adding more and more, and trying to do too much.

Jason went on to say that the approach of adding more and more only works for companies that have lots of money and lots of time, but that for the average company the main goal should be to build something that is "good enough," get it out to the users, and improve the design based on their feedback. The challenge of which features to include, and which to say "No" to, is covered well in the "The Innovator's Dilemma," which he said "everyone in this room should have read." The book resonates the core philosophy of 37Signals, which is evident from their blogs, their book "Getting Real," and the design of the Rails framework. As an example of the "Good Enough" philosophy, Jason used his laptop and its basic webcam to stream the Q&A session out over justin.tv and send out a text to the 37signals Twitter group. "The quality probably isn't that great, but its good enough," and with that quick setup he had now broadened the audience by 1,000 users or so. (I searched for the video archive at justin.tv, but didn't find it yet.)

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agile ajax

Upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff conference

John McCaffrey, Friday, November 2, 2007 @ 4:28 pm

The Great Lakes Software Symposium (aka No Fluff Just Stuff) is coming to Chicago November 16-18th, and if you are a java/ajax/agile developer or manager you should really check it out. I went for the first time last year and it was great. With the amount of relevant and interesting sessions they have, I could have gone to the Milwaukee one the next week and still not made it to every session I wanted to.

  Why is it good?

1. No Fluff, Duh! - This means there are no B.S. artists there trying to pitch their half-baked, proprietary, "silver-bullet", junk.
2. Best of the Best - the people that present are top-notch practitioners, and more importantly top-notch, well practiced presenters. (Its one thing to be a smart guy who knows how to write great code, but to present it and really "Teach" the audience is a different skill set)
3. Fair price- Compared to other conferences, the NFJS series is very reasonably priced (particularly because its close by). Also a $100 discount for alumni!! combine that with the early registration
   deal (which has passed already for this year), and you are down to a
   very good price.
4. Great networking - I've seen a fair amount of some of Chicago's finest developers at NFJS, and found it to be a great way to meet people from other companies (its good to find out which companies sponsor the cost, and which ones don't)
5. Relevant topics - The latest on Ajax, Agile, Spring/AOP, Groovy, Ruby/Rails, and overall development best practices.
6. Door prizes - last year a friend of mine won an Ipod. This year they have more iPods, iPhones, Sony PS3.

All in all its a good conference at a good price, and even in the cases where it covers a topic you know well, there are always good things that come out of the discussion. There is a cool energy in the air when you go to a conference like this. Amazing ideas are thrown around, groups of people huddle around a laptop trying out new ideas, and you leave the place really excited about development and eager to try out some new ideas.

Hope to see you there!
-John

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