A brief write up on their blog, Signal vs. Noise on the development of their new web app, Backpack.
Daniel got a chance to sit in a session by one of the 37 Signals developers at Web Design World in San Francisco earlier this year, and told me about their un-orthodox philosophy of jumping right into the development phase of web design. Forget the laborious weeks and months of planning and strategy–rather, start building the site right away and strategize from what you learn from the revisions.
Interesting. And effective considering the quality of their end products, Backpack, Basecamp, and Tada List.
We use Basecamp here at CityTeam, and it’s helped us get organized with our projects.
Using Mozilla 1.7.6 on Ubuntu Linux
This works for them because they do everything in Ruby and Rails. If
you were to use the same methods for (say) PHP or Java projects it
would be sure disaster.
That’s awesome that Daniel got to hear from them in person.
Using Mozilla 1.7.6 on Ubuntu Linux
Nice text-entry widgets, btw.
A few suggestions:
Make it so it remembers the name & email you put in on previous comments
Make it so pressing tab from the email field highlights the text entry, not the bold button.
Myself, I am still waiting for a way to use emacs to edit textareas, but I think I am in the minority.
Also consider using Textile for markup–it’s easier on the user than using toolbar buttons.
Using Safari 412 on Mac OS
good point about ruby on rails. I can’t imagine having scrap and re-write PHP code the way they revise their sites over and over again.
About the text editor widget, I got it from the Man in Blue, and chose it because it’s easy to implement, easy to customize, and relatively simple compared with others.
I’m not sure I’ll keep it though, because there was a back button issue in firefox on my pc, and it doesn’t seem to work on Safari when switching between HTML and plain text. More testing…
Using NetNewsWire 2.0b3 on Mac OS X
Actually, we built Ruby on Rails the same way. No plan, just do it.
Language doesn’t matter. It’s how you approach a problem that does.
Using Mozilla Firefox 1.0 on Windows 2000
Wow, Jason, I feel like a celebrity has just visited my website!
Your approach to developing websites is very intriguing, and makes me seriously re-think how to go about developing my upcoming projects.
I’m curious, how did you find this post? I am still in the process of converting to WordPress from a coded blog located at http://webdesign.timches.com (as opposed to the WordPress version, http://webdesign.timches.com/wp/)