He who will not economize will have to agonize.

I’ve always struggled with this. It’s all too easy to justify an expense with an idealistic mindset which imagines possibilities beyond every immediate opportunity. Starting a business though is a very, very good learning experience. There just isn’t enough money to spend on anything and everything that seems as though it might help get you to the next level.

I’ve found two devices which help keep me on the thrifty side of things.

#1. Stay Focused

Pick a few goals and spend what you need to make measurable progress toward achieving those goals. It might be purchasing a book, it might be taking a course, it might be a bottle of wine to help you unwind and relax. But every time you take out your wallet ask yourself whether you really need to make that purchase right then and there. If you can put it off, do so. You’ll either come back and spend the money later, or realize that you didn’t really need it.

#2. Look at the price tag and imagine that you just found that much money on the ground.

Which makes you feel better? The thought of finding the money on the ground or the thought of having whatever it is you’re about to spend money on? If the thought of having the money makes you feel better then put your wallet away. By making that simple choice you essentially did just find that money. Enjoy it.

This is a features which I think will make the Basecamp to-do list functionality appropriate for tracking software development tasks and work-items.

So why am I frustrated? Because I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to find a different package which would allow me the same functionality. Now I’ve got all of my tasks in another system and I hesitate to move everything over into Basecamp.

The compelling feature to Basecamp, and really all of the products from 37signals is the tight integration and flow from one product into the others.

I’m going to think about this one for a bit. But Basecamp’s new features might just make it too darn good to resist.

Nice work to all of those at 37signals.

The process is very effective. You purchase and download a training course. You’re then presented with a programming challenge. You click a button in the InnerWorkings interface to open up Visual Studio with the basic project code. You then write the code needed to complete the challenge.

During the coding process you’re aided by a VS add-in which allows you to easily refresh yourself on the challenge. When you’re done, you click another button to submit your solution to be verified. Your solution either passes, in which case you’re done, or doesn’t pass, in which case you’re given the opportunity to correct your solution.

A couple of things are particularly nice about this.

1. You’re given a very clear task. Anything that helps you stay focused while learning a new environment is tremendously helpful. When everything is new I find it tremendously hard to stay on track. I constantly discover new and interesting things elsewhere while going through documentation that pulls my attention off the task at hand. “Guard rails” so to speak I find very helpful.
2. You’re given starter code to work with. This helps you in two ways. First, it shows you how to get started, teaching you some best-practices along the way. Second, it alleviates a lot of the tedious startup work involved in starting from scratch.

I’m looking forward to working through a few of the challenges.

Here’s a link to the Cornell Entrepreneurship group on MySpace.

37signals reported some excellent results after a round of performance tuning based on their findings from RPM.

Your mileage may vary. But RPM looks to be one of a very small number (perhaps the number 1) of tools that can help in this way with performance analysis, which is the first step to performance improvement.

Definitely worth a look if you’re doing any Rails development.

Their value proposition is compelling. Definitely far more valuable than plain old Google Analytics or Mint.

I think this collection of screencasts will be particularly helpful to anyone coming to .NET from Ruby on Rails or other strongly MVC paradigms. .NET can be a bit overwhelming at first, without a solid entry point/introduction to the framework. These tutorials should help you get started on the right foot.