shaunandrews

An Open Letter to 37signals

I just sent the following letter to 37signals:

This isn’t a problem, in fact I’m about to gush on the fact that Backpack has changed my life and made the work/family/life stuff so much easier to manage — and made it easier for my wife and I to maintain a semi-normal working schedule while taking care of our 6-month-old twin baby boys, Jackson and Tyler.

I’m a full-time freelance UI designer, and my wife is a full-time web developer telecommuting to her job with a great company in Syracuse, NY. When our boys were born (August 24, 2010) my wife took a few months off for maternity leave, and I took a month off for paternity leave. That first month was really hectic, in fact there’s large chunks of time that I simply don’t remember — having a baby can be crazy time in your life; having twins… well, I’m sure you can imagine.

Right before the boys were born, I had just finished converting a workshop in my backyard into a full-fledged office. After my month off, I was excited to get into my office and do some work. I started slow; just a few hours a day, and only one client. I quickly learned that finding even 2 hours a day to get work done was going to be tough. We made due, but once my wife, Amy, went back to work, those few hours a day become nearly impossible to find — for both of us.

About a month ago I realized that my work and personal life was become way to hectic to keep track of, and I was in danger of losing business due to being so unorganized. I used Backpack for a little while when it first launched, but at that time I was unmarried, and didn’t have two kids. I decided to give it another chance — with the first month free, and a coupon code for a discount on the second month, it was a no brainer.

The first day I created the Backpack account was one of the most productive-feeling days I had in months. I quickly set my wife up with an account. In the days following we’ve found so many uses for Backpack. My wife has the great idea of setting up a work schedule calendar, so now we know who’s working when, and who’s watching the boys. Amy also setup a babysitter calendar, so we both know when we have friends and family over for an afternoon, or an evening out. For work, I’ve setup a page for each client and keep track of todos, client emails, notes, etc.

Its great knowing that, at a glance, I’m working tomorrow morning, and have baby duty at 1pm, and that at 6pm a friend is watching the boys so Amy and I can enjoy a night out.

I guess what I really wanted to say is, Thank You! Backpack has changed our lives, and made dealing with the work/life balance so much easier. I’ve even found time to start writing more (using writeboards, of course) and have started keeping track of some of my passion projects (Spendly.com) and am making progress on my goals.

Thank you so much for creating such a useful and easy-to-use tool. Backpack is great, and I look forward to being a happy customer for years to come!

About the MetaLab/Mozilla thing…

Sometime last night MetaLab’s Andrew Wilkinson published a blog post stating that Mozilla copied their website design. Upon first read, I was under the impression that this accusation was based on a single image posted on the semi-public Mozilla Lab’s wiki. It turns out this initial assumption was incorrect; Mozilla posted a video in a blog post announcing the editor that displayed the design (perhaps simulated) which was  a direct copy of the MetaLab site.

My initial confusion was based on the limited details in MetaLab’s blog post; there was no mention of anything other than a single image on the Mozilla Lab’s wiki. I think Andrew should have included more details about the incident, as well as further proof.

That being said, I’m a little concerned about how MetaLab handled this whole situation. In a matter of an hour or so, they posted a blog post on the MetaLab site (basically trying to incite a riot by asking readers to tweet and comment), various twitter posts, and (in my opinion the worst part) published on post on Clients from Hell. The Clients from Hell tumblr is theirs, and they can do what they want with it—but as of this morning I’m no longer a reader. I don’t appreciate them using it as a platform for their business.

All of the above was done before they had spoken with anyone at Mozilla. Aza Raskin did contact MetaLab (based on Aza’s tweet, it seems like it was about two hours after the first post when live on MetaLab), and seems to have resolved the situation. MetaLab mentions in their post that they “expect better from a respectable company like Mozilla” — yet they never gave Mozilla a chance.

In the end, the whole thing felt like a attention-grabbing move, and not an authentic concern over plagiarism. Mozilla is a respectable company, and Aza Raskin is by far one of the smartest and most genuine people in the industry. I feel like MetaLab made a mad dash to publish (in many formats and venues) hoping to grab some attention and press. Thats not cool in my book. MetaLab could (and should) have had some class and waited until business hours to contact Mozilla; would it have killed them to wait until they received a response before lighting the fire and trying to shame Mozilla?

Dribbble, its like twitter for designers.

I was invited to Dribbble in mid-January by Bryan Veloso. If you haven’t used Dribbble yet (yet, meaning that its supposed to go public soon), its kind of like Twitter for designers. Where Twitter asks the question “What are you doing right now?” with a 140 character limit, Dribbble asks the question “What are you working on right now?” with a 400 x 300 pixel limit for screen shots.

To say the least, I’m in love with the site and find it as my first destination every morning. I’m a little sad to see it opening to the public, as I find its private nature allows people to share things they wouldn’t normally be comfortable posting otherwise.