37signals

i think a lot of the advice the 37signals guys give would be good to hear. their basecamp wasn't the first or "best" of its kinda but the founding team makes great arguments as to why it was the best that could be offered. check out http://37signals.com/ and the samples from their book REWORK or maybe check out DHH's site http://www.loudthinking.com/. while i wouldn't agree with all of his thoughts (at all), he does speak to/about the importance of persistence and various manifestations of ingenuity that are possible to make a product/business succeed.

at the same time, let's be realistic here--if you think that they will be able to offer a better product across the board or that the product that you're developing is quite niche and that they will own the products community, you might even now start thinking of ways that the work you've put into this tool can be redirected without being significantly diluted/compromised.

just a couple thoughts. good luck.

I'm currently redesigning a backend interface, and it's the 1st time since I've started my Front-End career (7 years ago) that I'm not using Photoshop at all. I'm just using Bootstrap, Sublime Text, and Chrome.

For many projects of course, it won't be sufficient: clients want (and probably need) a stunning Photoshop mockup to provide feedback and boost their self-assurance.

But if you combine a simple CSS framework (even if it's just for a grid system), Chrome's inspector, a selection of Google Fonts, and some sense of "flat" aesthetics, you can come up with a more than decent, and sometimes amazing, design. Plus, it takes 70% less time, especially considering it's usable right now.

37signals mentioned this "skipping Photoshop" attitude in 2008 [1], but I never quite managed to put it into practice until recently.

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1061-why-we-skip-photoshop

This is why "work remote" jobs are so fantastic if you can get them. You don't have to worry as much about politics. In an office environment you have to worry about if you're getting along well enough with people on a personal level and this nebulous "I enjoy working with him or not" factor might make or break your career. At an office job you need to put in hard work to "become friends" with everyone otherwise some people will bear a grudge. Sometimes this is not easy depending on the situation. There are too many "social factors" in office jobs which can make or break you and that have nothing at all to do with your ability to "get shit done". Not so with remote working. All that matters is your ability to be productive.

https://37signals.com/remote/
weworkremote.com

Nice! I was thinking of adding a feature like this to my animated-guitar-tabs site Soundslice (http://www.soundslice.com/). I've got time-synced data for each note in a song, with string and fret values, so I'm planning to do stuff like "cliche lick" detection. Searching by riff would be a great addition.

I talk about this a little bit toward the end of this tech presentation I gave: http://37signals.com/talks/soundslice

I definitely echo what some other comments have said -- if you made it based on intervals instead of "hard-coded" notes, it'd be a lot more flexible! That seems to be how our own brains store music -- if somebody sings "Happy Birthday," for example, you can instantly join in, regardless of what key it's in. Unless you're tone deaf... :-)

Rails is a great framework. But posts like this and the one discussing how the team made product decisions around their caching strategy [0] and the horrible hacks that they did to make it work, for me are telltale signs that Rails is not the right tool for building web apps anymore.

Web development is evolving, as it ever has, and I believe that the next step is pushing the view layer to the client, and caching data, not html, on every step of the way. The major hurdle here is SEO, but I hope that when the right framework comes, it will offer an elegant solution to this problem.

[0] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to-be-so-damn-fast-without-using-much-client-side-ui

Something fundamentally missing from both versions - trust signals. Why does a user want to trust this software? You go to http://www.seomoz.org/, you see Zillow, Home Depot, Yelp and etc "love their software". Same with 37signals - WB and Kellogg's are using Basecamp? http://37signals.com/ Why isn't my company?

It is not explicity apparent that anyone loves this software, especially nobody they know or have heard of, so why should they use it? It doesn't have to be who uses it, but could also be "featured on" if you (Patio11) got coverage and co-linked to the service there as well, which I bet is more prominent. Of course, families don't care about Techcrunch - relevant news is needed.