Tonight Jason Fried from 37signals spoke at the Oriental Theater in east Denver. He discussed everything from client deliverables to the 37signals four-day workweek. In essence, Jason’s talk boiled down to three key points:

1. Don’t work on hard problems. Break them down and keep things simple.
2. Avoid distractions (open office environments, meetings, e-mail, etc.) get a site or product out of your head and into production ASAP.
3. Deliverables are bullshit, clients don’t care, the end product is what matters.

First off, I want to say I have great respect for 37signals and their impact on the industry. Having the chance to talk with Jason about issues such as: stopping IE6 support, disregarding Photoshop in the design process, and scaling with growth, was an absolute treat. Clearly the team at 37signals is one of the most innovative and talented in the industry.

However, I think 37signals dominance in the web products field has distorted their ability to critique the client-based approach. And while I don’t have knowledge to speculate specifically on day to day client interaction, I do have a few things to offer from a developer perspective.

Team chemistry is important.

First, people working from home all the time can be harmful to the group chemistry. Jason and team do a huge amount of work via telecommuting. Relying on campfire, screen sharing, and video chat interactions for the bulk of their communication. They feel this helps minimize distractions and keep people productive.

I’m not sold this is the way to go. I think it’s hard to truly feel connected and dedicated to your team if you don’t spend real time with them. When’s the last time you became really good friends with someone without spending some serious face-to-face time with them? For me it’s never happened, not once. And as great as chatting online is, it’s not the same as being in the same room and hashing things out. You miss the subtle face gestures, the inside jokes, the bantering, and the all around comradery that happens in the workplace. Part of the reason Imulus does great work is because we have dedication to one another. Even on days when I’m completely out of wack mentally I still find myself focused on helping the team. Why? Because I’m relied on to help create the great stuff we build. And I trust those I work with to do the same. As ridiculous as our office gets sometimes in the end we get shit done and we do it for each other and ourselves.

Deliverables have a purpose, it just needs to be refined sometimes.

Second, I don’t buy that all deliverables are bullshit. Just as some companies like to skip Photoshop (37signals) and go straight to coding, and others (Apple) like to make mockups pixel perfect it’s impossible to say that one solution is better than the other. Yet, we can agree that certain processes work better for certain people as well as certain projects.

Let’s talk about the way we work. Imulus’ basic approach is to offer the client a timeline, design brief, wire frame, and mockup of the final interface. Now, it’s important to realize that we haven’t always done it this way. In fact, for some time before I came to Imulus the wireframe process was basically nixed. What was the result? Instead of 5 hours spent reworking things in the wire frame process, 25 hours was spent reworking things in the development process. Look, we aren’t naïve, we recognize that clients change their mind and get new ideas all the time. However, we’ve found that most of this re-thinking takes place in the wire frame stage. And therefore we save hours of coding changes by altering the approach up front. In essence, if you’re building a car and the frame is faulty, why wait until the upholstery’s getting put on the seats to fix it?

Still, we know it’s a strong possibility that some of our deliverables are blown out of proportion. And as most firms do we will continue to collaborate and narrow down our inefficiencies. However, we have found that some deliverables are an extremely important step, and just because some projects or companies don’t require them doesn’t mean they aren’t important.

In conclusion

Clearly 37signals has clout and track record to support the way they work. And regardless of how that alters the Imulus process we love hearing about it. It’s phenomenal that they have so much passion behind what they do. I hope over time we can refine our own process to the point they have. Until then it’s great hearing a second opinion about things.

Last Thursday we had several hours of straight interviews, all but one of them were outstanding candidates. The first round of interviews for us is a “get to know” session. In 1 hour we have to get at the essence of the person. We actually put a good chunk into the person’s “blink factor.” If we aren’t feeling just a little bit of love in the first 2 minutes, then the candidate is going into an uphill battle.

After the “blink factor” we really want to know the person. How did they come into their career choice? What are they passionate about? Are they multi-dimensional? Are they a ridged or free-thinker? etc… Then we start analyzing the skill and experience level. Resumes don’t amount to much; just because a candidate lists every single program they’ve worked on doesn’t mean they are qualified for the job. Likewise a track-record of short job stints doesn’t mean they hop from company to company. In fact, one of the candidates in the last round of interviews didn’t list a job which lasted longer then 1 year. However, during the interview it became clear this candidate was very passionate about his line of work and the stints were not by choice but by circumstance.

The next part of the evaluation is the 4 staple questions which apply to everyone we hire at Imulus:
1. How do you rate your organization skills?
2. From 1 to 10, where are you with your writing skills and can we see samples?
3. Do you like formal meetings or ad-hoc gatherings?
4. How do you like to be managed?

Sure, they can lie their way through these questions but if they make it back to the second interview then the WHOLE OFFICE will have a shot at uncovering the real truth. At that point someone will smell bullshit. Anyone at Imulus has veto power, it needs to be a unanimous decision.

The last part of the evaluation is asking the question, is this person the best fit for the job? I would have hired several candidates if we were looking for an mid-level .NET person or Web developer, but we are looking for senior level experience. With just interviews and references to go off of it’s often tough to gauge how the candidate will respond to a real-working environment with our office dynamics, workload and management style. This is the part of the interview where I believe you have to trust your gut. I’m a big believer in quantifying data and looking at things scientifically but sometimes that feeling in the pit of your stomach is often the best judge of a situation.

I’ll guess you’ll see shortly who we’ve decided on.

Perhaps one of the most enlightening discussions we’ve had at Imulus was in regard to the following question.

Starting now if you had to read all type for the rest of your life in one typeface, what would it be?^*

My answer: Gotham. The font is profound, clean, inescapably strong, yet different enough in weight to convey emphasis and prowess. Gotham is the sort of typeface that a type-designer becomes famous for. It’s Helvetica with out the genericism^**.

So while Gotham is used frequently (pdf) it deserves credit for being a landmark typeface in the twenty first century^***.

In the end a typeface is much like wine, if it tastes good to you the complexities and price don’t mean much. However, you may just find that over time your tastes refine. And as far as Gotham is concerned, it’s about as refined as it gets.

^{* Note: This means an entire font family, not one particular weight.
** I’m a wannabe lexicographer.
*** Gotham was released from H&J in the year 2000.}

It seems that the notoriously tightwad ICANN is now relaxing domain naming conventions. Now any combination of letters, numbers and non-Latin text will be able to resolve to a Web site. Personally, I think this is a serious mistake.

There already are plenty of domain name suffixes to select from but time and time again .COM is the most selected suffix. It’s what people know and they are used to. I remember a few years ago there was a huge stink over whitehouse.com going to a porn site rather then to a government site. Those who understood domain names would have gone to .GOV. At the time there were only a handful of suffixes to choose from, this new direction by ICANN will change all that.

Personally, I think this adds more confusion to domain names. I already see plenty of challenges, even with technical folks understanding the differences in subdomains such as blog.imulus.com vs imulus.com vs www.imulus.com. Usually there is a 50 / 50 chance that if I give someone a domain name containing a subdomain they will usually add www to the URL; for instance bet.rmi.org then becomes www.bet.rmi.org.

This will surely benefit search engines more then the average user. I guess the lawyers benefit also because it sure will be interesting to watch the copyright and trademark lawsuits for all the domain name variations which will be gobbled up by the name registers.

Nice move ICANN!

Netflix recently announced that they are eliminating the Profiles feature from their online movie rental service. For a company that built it’s business on customer service, this is a seriously bonehead move. For families or small businesses this was the feature that made the service work for them. Without it, it isn’t a very good solution at all. I can only assume that some bean counters at Netflix think that all those profile users are now going to have to signup for a full account and they will increase their profits. On the contrary, this is going to make the service unusable for a lot of people and they will try something else. If Blockbuster can add profiles they will destroy Netflix. If you want to voice your opinion, I suggest you email Netflix and sign the petition here: http://www.savenetflixprofiles.com/

Update: Netflix has reversed their policy on this topic and will be keeping profiles for single accounts. This is wonderful, and a great example of users making their voice heard. Way to support and respect your users Netflix!