I’m not one to set “resolutions” for the new year. I set my personal goals on my birthday, because for me this has more meaning than a calendar change. So instead, on this New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d offer up a toast to those out there striving to reach their own goals, whatever they may be.

Over the past year I have met in person or online, so many more like-minded people than in all my years previous. It’s encouraging, it really is. I attribute the increase in connecting with this new crowd to three things: 1) I set it as a personal goal on my birthday last year, 2) I became involved in the right online social networks (not all will do), and 3) I joined the Ruby on Rails community full time.

Many of you have provided encouragement, motivation, and wisdom as well as shared your experiences. And for that, I am very grateful. I’ve never felt clearer in the direction I’m taking, and I’ve never made as much progress. The fears are still there, as is the little voice that tries to object to the optimism I feel, but thanks to many of you, I’m able to tell that little voice to take a hike.

And so, first to my fellow entrepreneurs and web service startups, I toast you, and wish you the happiest of New Year’s and the best of success in reaching your personal and professional goals (which to me are one and the same).

And next, to those of you who are still unsure where your passions lie, and what direction you want to take, I wish you clarity and peace in the year ahead, and encourage you to seek out those who can motivate you as they have motivated me.

And to any and all who have hopes and dreams of achievements and success, I urge you to persevere through all the obstacles and road blocks that may come your way. Most of them are never as big as they appear, and there are plenty of others out there who have been right where you are and can lend a helping hand and offer some motivational words when needed.

Remember, if its not challenging, and there is little risk of failure, then its probably not worth doing and offers little reward.

Happy New Years!

I’ve been following the unique style of 37 signals for several years now and I believe they have come up with some very sound business practices, both in their direction as a company in developing web products and in how they promote a creative and motivational environment for their employees. In the interview I linked to below, Jason discusses many of these principles from trying to let each other work without distraction (avoiding meetings and working in the same room), to improving team collaboration using web tools (like Campfire), shortening work weeks, and streamlining development cycles.

Jason discusses his views of not needing Venture Capital, at least at the beginning. He discusses simple design, not watching your competition, not planning too far in advance, and not spending a lot of time up front designing and planning but instead doing and learning from the outcomes.

If you’ve listened to or read Jason or 37 signals in the past there isn’t much new here, but their thinking is so far outside the stuffy and constraining boxes of the Enterprise and corporate America, that you really can’t hear this enough. I hope it catches on, and I continue to try and preach the same principles and put them in practice in my own projects. I think many people instinctively recoil away from some of these ideas, but I urge you to resist the comfort of, “we’ve always done it this way…it must be working”, and instead consider the principles behind these ideas and the desired outcome of some of this new way of thinking and doing business. I’ve experienced first hand the flip side of these practices in the IT corporate world for the last 15 years. It never ceases to amaze me how every corporation does the same thing with the same results over and over again, including wasting employees time, working on large projects with huge complicated processes that burn time and money and burn out their employees, needless bloated meetings, emphasizing quantity of communication over quality, treating employees like worker bees or worse yet children by requiring them to be in a certain location at a certain time clearly showing them you have no trust in them, and by discouraging their individual thoughts and creative inputs.

I’ve worked with many employees with great potential who were figuratively bound and gagged, stripped of participation and thereby emotional involvement in the project, which demoralizes and prematurely burns out the employee. 37signals does exactly the opposite and you can see it by following the employees of the company, seeing the quality of their projects, and the passion the leaders of the team speak and write with.

Despite unemployment rates increasing across the country to the highest point in five years, IT unemployment is unchanged and is as low as it was in 2000/2001, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as referenced here (and shown on a nice graph.)

In the past IT was seen as a supplemental skill set. When income was high, business would invest in IT by hiring more IT employees, giving raises and bonuses, and spending money on more training, software and hardware. When low, the opposite occurs. However, many more companies today rely on IT for the entire business as compared with the past when IT was there to assist and create internal reports and other “nice-to-haves”. Now more corporations than ever actually make money from the work of their IT professionals and because of this they cannot cut them as easily as in the past.

As for Rails developers specifically, some feel the hurting economy will help Rails developers. As companies need more IT work, but have less operating income and less venture capital, they may look for shorter development cycles and outsourcing as opposed to funding large internal Enterprise applications often based on more time consuming and less agile coding frameworks.

Recently the FiveRuns blog shared their opinion:

Rails shops are built to do more with less. It’s part of our DNA to be more agile, more nimble, and more productive than developers using “legacy” tools.

They provide other reasons for Rails opportunities being on the rise, including the lower cost to deploy and host Rails applications.

eWeek.com reported David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails, as saying:

I think Rails developers are much better positioned to weather the storm as they generally stand for delivering more with less faster. It’s the traditional mainstream environments that are going to see much more pressure to deliver.

Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard, added:

A slowing economy will likely lead to constrained IT budgets. There’s a good chance this will have a positive impact on the uptake of open-source options, such as Linux, Ruby and Rails.

Read the linked to articles from above for more opinions on why Rails developers should continue to see lots of opportunities. At the recent Tampa Brigade Ruby meetup it certainly sounded as though there was more opportunity than there were developers, and I’ve heard the same thing from several Tampa Bay recruiters now. Let’s hope it stays that way.

What has your experience been so far?

I recently purchased the Teva sandals pictured here, via Zappos (which, as a side note are fantastic…I’m a bare foot guy but some times you need shoes and these are the perfect solution). The browsing and purchasing experience was pleasant and easy, but it was the post purchase that really shined. I ordered around 4pm EST. They told me the shoes would arrive in 4 to 5 business days, but at midnight I received an email saying I had been upgraded to priority shipping and they would ship much sooner; no specific time was given. The next day my shoes were on the front door., and all without any shipping fees at all. Incredible. But it gets better.

After trying them on I realized they did not fit. They felt fine most everywhere but the poor little pinky toe was taking some serious, blister inducing punishment. So I visited the Zappos site to find out what my options were. I clicked on my order and it gave a phone number to call to setup a return. It was about 11pm EST and when I called someone picked up immediately. I only had to press one number; no long series of phone menus. The woman on the other end spoke perfect English and was patient and friendly. She set me up with a new pair of shoes, the next size up, to ship the next day, with no restocking fee, no shipping fees, and no return shipping fees. And, they shipped them to me without waiting for me to ship the old ones. She walked me through printing out the return shipping label (which I didn’t need, but welcomed simply because she was so patient and helpful) and told me to ship back the other ones in the original box with the new label. My new shoes arrived 36 hrs later and fit perfectly this time. I had 14 days to return the originals.

In every aspect of customer service and product quality Zappos got it right. It’s a lesson to all of us. They just sell shoes. No great online features. No creative products or services. No amazing innovation. They have a huge line of quality shoes, at normal prices (no discounts that I could see), but with free immediate shipping and triple A customer service, they stand out of the crowd. I know where I’ll be buying my next pair of shoes from.