dhh

13 ms·

91.
by dhh 15y ago
What additional screening do you put your system administrators through? Are we talking security clearances and background checks? Definitely curious to hear the specifics.
92.
by dhh 15y ago
I agree, Jason. While it's unavoidable that we at times will see things through log files in order to ensure the performance and uptime of the system, it certainly shouldn't be for these causes and it double certainly shouldn't be in order
93.
by dhh 15y ago
I don't think it has to be this way. We often run internal reports on usage of certain features, but it's always aggregated, and never looks at the individual data. I feel bad enough looking at a customer's account when they've specifically
94.
by dhh 15y ago
I'd be very happy if we come up with a good privacy policy that it could help others revisit theirs. Most policies, including ours, talk about shit people generally stopped caring about 5 years ago (what do you do with my COOKIES?!?!). Thes
95.
by dhh 15y ago
That's nice but feels more like a status page to me than a way to gauge long-term uptime (which is what we were going for here). For our application outages, it's been pretty well correlated that if pingdom can't get a 200 OK on the test pa
96.
by dhh 15y ago
We use pingdom to measure external uptime, so network issues will count as downtime as well. Do you have any other questions about methodology? I'd be happy to elaborate.
97.
by dhh 15y ago
Because I like living in the US better than living in Denmark. I've recently moved to Spain for part of the year because I like 65F and Sunny better than the Chicago Winter. Neither moves had anything to do with work per se. (Except that I'
98.
by dhh 15y ago
Yeah, we generally use RailsConf as a team-building exercise. Didn't get much out of SXSW, though. Liked meeting up somewhere just the team better.
99.
by dhh 15y ago
Dude, that was ironic. None of those places are tech hubs. That's the joke :).
100.
by dhh 15y ago
I think the balance really is important. What we've found is that just meeting up 3-5 times a year does the trick for us. We don't need every week.
101.
by dhh 15y ago
We generally never hire anyone we haven't seen before, unless there's overwhelming evidence that they'll kick ass. For example, we hired Pratik Naik from London and it took more than a year before he met anyone else in the office (couldn't
102.
by dhh 15y ago
Two things. We've definitely found that this setup works better with people who already have strong social ties present. Close by family, friends helps, but spouse + optionally kids really does it. Also, at 37signals the career path is not
103.
by dhh 15y ago
Dude, this whole software business thing at 37signals got started with me in Denmark. Also, we just hired someone from Russia. What makes it harder is that for this to work, you need timezone overlap. I now live in Spain half the year, but
104.
by dhh 15y ago
Plenty of BigCos have teams who work remotely. Often the teams that work on the most interesting, new stuff (because they tend to be smaller and more agile than the folks manning the sausage factory).
105.
by dhh 15y ago
We have Paychex handle everyone in the US and everyone outside the US work as contractors. You have to observe the local rules about who can be a contractor, but it works well for people with self-directed work, like programmers, designers,
106.
by dhh 15y ago
It's a great setup. We get remote workers to come into the Chicago every once in a while for a few days or a week. Good boost of energy, but doesn't need to happen more often than once every few months.
107.
by dhh 15y ago
When we developed Basecamp, I had only met Jason and Ryan once. We met zero times during the development phase. I agree that face-to-face is great, but I also believe that it's vastly overrated as a necessity for "magic" to appear. Tons of
108.
by dhh 15y ago
I've found this to be completely false for every one of our remote workers. Nobody at 37signals fits that description and as mentions in the article, the majority works remotely.
109.
by dhh 15y ago
You're forgetting to factor in the tire compound. See http://books.google.es/books?id=YY1fx4BOI5UC&pg=PA42&#38... for more information on optimal slip angles in race cars. Yes, sliding too much is bad. Sliding just enough is necessary
110.
by dhh 15y ago
I've heard great things about http://railsforzombies.com/ and of course a good book, like http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r... .
111.
by dhh 15y ago
On top of that, I actually talk to beginners all the time who are thrilled with the ease of learning Rails. They're building real apps they never thought they could complete on their own. Naturally, there's some selection bias there (most p
112.
by dhh 15y ago
If you optimize a framework for beginners, you're optimizing for learnability. That's great for the first few days or even weeks of learning. But once you're past that, it's not so great. What you care more about is the usability of the thi
113.
by dhh 15y ago
1.9.2 doesn't have any GC tuning options, so it proved slower than REE in production for us. Thus we needed to go to 1.9.3 to get the GC tuning.
114.
by dhh 15y ago
Our setup for new deployments is rbenv, 1.9.3dev, Unicorn, nginx, Capistrano.
115.
by dhh 15y ago
We had the plan vetted by lawyers and accountants. It's a taxable event should it trigger, but by then you have money to pay the taxes. It's not taxable at its implementation.
116.
by dhh 15y ago
"Sales tactics for Rails" :)? You do know that Rails is free, right? We want to get stories out there that we don't think are covered well elsewhere. We've been sharing our own story, technique, and tools for more than a decade. This is jus
117.
by dhh 15y ago
We want to tell stories that we don't feel like are being told. The conflicts of building businesses to last versus sitting with all the risk. This actually started as an email conversation with the Slicehost guys about some of these dilemm
118.
by dhh 15y ago
The proper permalink for this is actually http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost . Can someone update the title?
119.
by dhh 15y ago
I wrote a much more detailed takedown of Groupon's evaluation, in fact. You can find it here: http://shortlogic.com/post/6142108636/groupon-ipo-pass-on-th... If this stuff is your flavor, I also wrote one on Pandora: http://shortlogic.co
120.
by dhh 15y ago
The last transaction is a reasonable way to access market cap when a reasonable number of the shares are out in the open for free trading. 2/3s of Google shares are floating, so what the last trades happened at determine the worth to a reas

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