Author: Mark

We’re excited to welcome John Williams to the operations team at 37signals this week. John will be joining Joshua and me to make sure our servers and infrastructure are as reliable as possible. John impressed us with a job application similar to the one that Craig submitted and went the extra mile by driving 5 hours to Chicago to meet with us face to face for a couple of hours.

John has past experience doing Rails development and as a systems engineer at Contegix. He’s also a pretty good cyclist, and was part of the National Collegiate Cycling Association Track Championship Team in 2003 and 2006 while at Marian College.

He’s a great addition and we’re thrilled to have him join the team. Welcome, John!

While working on a new project, we came across some compatibility problems in a plugin that we want to use in that project. We have a known solution that works and doesn’t require the plugin, but if we can make the plugin work without too much additional work it’s worth using it. We have a limited amount of time to finish this project due to our new iteration system, so we’re feeling some time pressure, but we don’t really have enough information to make a good decision yet.

Rather than making an immediate decision, Jeff decided to spend another 30 minutes with the plugin to see if he could make it work. If we can solve the compatibility problems in those 30 minutes, it will be a nice win and we can make use of the plugin that we want to. On the flip side, we already have a known solution to the problem. Even if we’re not able to solve the problems we’ll only lose a half an hour, so it’s worth the time to do a very short spike to see if we can fix it.