Is Rails dead? Is it on death’s door, terminally ill or being slowly asphyxiated by Python? No. It’s just niche. Rails is not cool, it’s not the zeitgeist. Not at the moment. Maybe never again. Rails had its moment back in the noughts when it was fresh and an undeniable game-changer. It was the platform that someenormouscompanies were ...

The most common complaint I hear from founders/leaders in business is the number of people problems they have on their plate. It’s draining, distracting and demotivating. We invest so much time and energy trying to turn these situations around, yet they’re often only resolved when somebody leaves either by choice or by, er, strong enco...

“You know where you came from You know where you're going And you know where you belong — The Smiths, These Things Take Time” Leaving FreeAgent was a natural progression. The company was stable, I’d done a good job and I didn’t feel there was much left for me to achieve. Great people with youth and energy were eager to move on up. Time...

If I think back all those years (decades 😳) when we were building the first beta of FreeAgent, foggy memory-bank notwithstanding, there was a lot to get excited about in the day-to-day. Writing code and building the product was great fun for the most part, setting up infrastructure a bit less so (weak *nix skillz) but super-rewarding w...

It's been over three months since I left 37signals on a bit of a whim. When I left I had an emerging plan with someone to build something new, but as it turned out I had nagging doubts and couldn't get excited enough about the opportunity so it quickly fizzled. A bit of a shame, but them's the breaks. I decided to take the summer off i...

““Gasping but somehow still alive” — The Smiths, Well I Wonder” Occasionally someone gets in touch with me asking for work advice. I had one recently where the questioner was rather taken with Rails but asked, “Do you think Ruby on Rails lacks enough jobs? I’m concerned about the future.” It’s a good question, and while my gut reaction...

The gloves are off. The work experts are at war. Officista VCs are proclaiming that remote doesn’t work and the media seem to be buying it. AI-generated CEOs are calling it a mistake or, worse, morally wrong. On the flipside, remoterinos continue to disagree. As for a hybrid arrangement, that’s a total clusterfuck. The funny thing is t...

I did a talk out in Portugal to a group of company founders this time last year and I bait-named it “Lose the body fat. Why keeping your company lean makes it more attractive.” I pulled in a reasonable crowd and the talk went down okay, but not as well as I’d hoped, so I buried it in my Keynote graveyard and hoped never to speak of it ...

It only seems like yesterday when I started a new role at 37signals but time hurtles by when you're having a wild adventure (even more so when you're pushing 50 😳). And just as all the best adventures must come to an end, so it is that after an intense 14-month journey I've decided it's time for something new. Things are afoot and it's...

2022 almost felt normal, at least in terms of going to the cinema, theatre, gigs. Here’s a quick look back on the things I watched/read/listened to across the year. Music I don’t feel I listened to that much great new music in 2022, or found an album that I just couldn’t stop listening to. There were some good ones, of course, and the ...

2020 forced the majority of people in tech to work from home. It happened in days, and for the most part companies managed this upheaval without major issues because they were already using tools to make remote work possible. SaaS has become ubiquitous. Whiteboards were left untouched and there was an early fall of sticky notes on meet...

To friends and family I’m thought of as a proper techie, but to the real techies I know my tech-fu would be considered rather weak. This is fair. I like using tech to get stuff done and make my life easier, but I don’t really go for nerding out on tech for the sake of nerding out on tech. I manage my work and my increasingly-overflowin...

One of the realities of being a startup founder is having your fingers in all the pies. On the one hand you get to do a job you love, the way you want, day in day out. On the other hand you get the honour of taking on that heap of far less interesting things that need doing. This could be company finances, customer support, sales, mark...

In the world of software development, taking the convention over configuration approach has many advantages. It’s no coincidence that Ruby on Rails defined this approach and the Rails framework is still unsurpassed in terms of developer productivity. If you get too trigger happy with software configuration, those indulgent experiments ...

Some days feel productive. For programmers, it’s when you get deep into the zone and come out the other side having pieced together a challenging puzzle. It can be sheer delight. For managers, it’s when you approach the ‘zone horizon’ (you’ll never get deep into the zone like programmers, that’s the deal) and focus on a chunky project ...

Listen to your gut. Trust your intuition. Lean on your experience. I think there’s a reasonable amount of truth in this when it comes to making decisions, and I can think of many examples where my initial instinct turned out to be a pretty good choice. Impulsive decisions can often be the best ones. This isn’t the case for reactions. T...

Concern and despair about the perils of social media come in waves, and there have been some stormy waters in the circles I inhabit this week. Why do we do this to ourselves? I’ve had a love/hate relationship with social media since it’s incarnation. In fact, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the social aspect of the internet sinc...

It’s been six weeks since I officially left FreeAgent and rather longer since my mind started wandering off into the dense forest of 'what next'. After a modest break of trying to do very little (I am very bad at this!) I find myself rolling up my sleeves, ready for something new. But what? Over the years I’ve come to know a lot of fou...

I had a day "out of the office" yesterday (not to be confused with the previous 360 consecutive days out of the physical office since March 13, 2020). I just had a day off, which shouldn't be a particularly big deal. If anything urgent happened I would have received a phone call, otherwise I should easily be able to catch up with thing...

I built a minimal blogging app for fun last year, primarily as a way of applying WD-40 to my long-dormant Rails dev skills. I like it, but I still don’t blog enough. Unless you count unpublished drafts, of which I am a total ninja 🥷. HEY have now launched an even more minimal approach to blogging (with the same ethos, which is nice – v...