Loud Thinking

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.

They've done a lot of cool things, and are very talented. However, I think that they "jumped the shark" when they charged $20... twenty dollars... for a PDF version of their book (that isn't really a book... no ISBN), and had the gall to tell Tim O'Reilly that in addition to everything else, they were going to reinvent publishing:

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/2006_04.html

His links are all broken, though... and I can't find the back and forth with O'Reilly, but basically he come across as very presumptuous - something I'd be willing to accept because he's right about certain fields (web programming, for instance), but something I'd look at with a more critical eye when he's talking about something he really doesn't know 100%.

For some context, Mike Gunderloy (author of this article) is an extremely prolific rails activist and community member. This is not some random unknown making a fuss, it's a very well respected, very active, very productive member of the rails community making a pretty pointed statement and putting his money where his mouth is.

Some further background:

http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/39-im-an-r-rated-individual

http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/40-alpha-male-programmers-arent-keeping-women-out

And, the slides themslves (NSFW): http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr0n-star?type=presentation

They actually can. E.g. to start a WordPress site, one can do with a shared hosting with an ftp access. With FireFTP for Firefox, you don't have to leave the browser. You can install WordPress by just copying it over, as well all the plugins and themes you need.

This level of simplicity of deployment is a good thing to have for any project. Even David Heinemeier Hansson have commented positively on the immediacy of PHP: http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/23-the-immediacy-of-php I see that Arc is a research project that may have other priority at the time, but this landmark of usability is a good thing to keep in mind.

Disagree. It seems more like they've optimized one part of their infrastructure, so now a new bottleneck has popped up. Par for the course when you're optimizing anything...

Oh, and this interview was discussed by DHH on his blog:

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000608.html

The comments were interesting, especially one from Alex Payne (the Twitter dev himself). Here is an excerpt. Visit the link above to read the full comment (which is kind of long to post fully inline here).

"...We'd be running into scaling issues on Django or any other platform. We're happiest scaling on Rails."

again, I wasn't trying to bash DHH. Just adding some humor to my search for the very hard to find quote I'm still looking for.

But if you wonder why DHH seems to attract character assassins, look no further than how he signed off from his Christmas Eve post http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-and-share-the-rest

"So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!"

That's a great way to tick off a billion or so people.