Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals — a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.

Source: Getting Real: The Book by 37signals

Just discovered this book from 37signals, a team I admire for their simplicity in product design that caters to the customer. There’s the FREE version that you can browse through online or PDF purchase. Some of the concepts mentioned in the book on developing Web apps are spot-on as I’ve come to realise after a few iterations of developing software. Sometimes, just getting the interface right first is really more important than a bunch of specs and documents. Building lightweight ready to run software would be something I shall strive for in current and upcoming projects.

Interesting article on management of Geeks.. I’m sure most people have had to deal with more technically inclined people at one time or another. I can identify and agree to most points made in the interview.

If you don’t want to lose your geeks, you have to find a way to give them promotions without turning them into managers. Most of them are not going to make very good executives — and, in fact, most of them would probably turn out to be terrible managers. But you need to give them a forward career path, you need to give them recognition, and you need to give them more money.

Source: How to Manage Geeks

I’ve been using Google Apps to power On9 Systems for sometime. The great thing about Google Apps? It gives me the flexibility to host email/calendar and documents there while having web hosting on On9 System’s server. This gives me the ability to create applications and host them locally.

Am also experimenting with ways to create a support forum for customers using Google Groups. At the moment, I’ve got a wordpress blog at support.on9systems.com but think its prob better to use a discussion forum.

Link to Google Apps

Discovered a nice service for DNS that not only provides a faster DNS lookup but also corrects spelling errors. It even offers anti-phishing at the DNS level!

What is OpenDNS? OpenDNS is a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.

Source: OpenDNS

Discovered a cool site for small business owners trying to find out information about common tasks. 

Link to How-to Guides to Running Your Small Business from Work.com

Finally managed to compile a list of past projects that I’ve worked on since 1998. Doing this made me realise that 2005 was a really busy year (39 projects/customers) and probably also why it felt like I was working 24 hours a day!

2006 with 20 projects and 2007 (7 projects as of Feb’07) seems like just the right amount. This year should be pretty interesting since I’m managing a small development team of 4 (German, Vietnamese, Singaporeans). Feels quite like a multinational company (super-micro level) at times.

There’s still a couple more things to do for the site, like adding in a few major projects that I’ve handled that would require a bit of write-up and getting screenshots of all the projects (30% complete). Hope to get this done before the end of March.

Got a heads up on a new blog for Entrepreneur. I did a quick browse and came across an interesting entry with some thoughts from various Internet entrepreneurs on lessons learnt from starting their business. Good read.

Lesson learned – once you decide what it is you are going to do, don’t pursue efforts that distract from the vision. One of the hardest lessons an entrepreneur has to learn is what revenue to turn down.

Source: Startupping – A Community for Entrepreneurs

On9 Systems is an IT solutions provider based in Singapore producing work in web and application development.