SEASON 2 - EPISODE 142 - FEBRUARY 5, 2025

Blogging Isn't Dead

Does blogging still matter in tech? In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, host Kimberly Rhodes chats with 37signals’ Principal Programmer Jorge Manrubia about why blogging is very much alive. They dig into the history of the 37signals developers blog, the company’s process for contributions, and the added benefits this communication tool provides.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:50 - Meet Jorge Manrubia, Principal Programmer
01:03 - The history of the 37signals’ developers blog
02:25 - The process — who contributes and how topics are decided
05:09 - Benefits of writing on the blog and sharing content with the public
07:40 - What to consider when starting a company blog
09:43 - Sharing code isn’t as revealing as you might think
11:28 - Secondary benefits of sharing your content
13:30 - What’s next for the blog?

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes. If you’ve listened to the REWORK podcast at all, you’ve heard our co-founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson talking about hiring great writers. We also say we should out teach the competition, and these two things come together in many ways, and one of them is our developer’s blog. To talk about it, I’ve brought our principal programmer, Jorge Manrubia, to talk all about it, how it got started, what we’re doing on it now, and how it has helped us as a company. Jorge, welcome to the podcast.

Jorge (00:39): Hey, Kimberly. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Kimberly (00:41): Hey, before we jump in, tell us a little bit about you, what you do here at 37signals, how long you’ve been here, and then we’ll dive into the developer’s blog.

Jorge (00:49): Sure. So I am a principal programmer in the product team, so I work on 37signals product and I’ve been working for 37signals for over five years now.

Kimberly (01:01): Very nice. Okay, so we’ve linked a couple times over the years in the podcast to the developer’s blog, to particular blog articles that have been written. Kind of tell me the history of it. How did it get started? How did it come to be?

Jorge (01:14): Sure. After I joined the company, I think there was already this desire in the team for technical folks to have a place to write about technical content. So there are three technical teams in the company. We can say we have programmers, we have designers, and we have ops, which are system administrators, and I think that it was a shared feeling that we all wanted to have a place to share our opinions because 37signals is a company of builders. We like building things and we tell the world about what we’ve built. So back in the day, 37signals had this very popular blog for the company called Signal vs. Noise.

Kimberly (01:52): Right.

Jorge (01:54): And I used to be a huge fan of it because it shared technical posts, but also business posts, how to work posts, so all sorts of content and well, I was among the many fans of that blog, so eventually the company stopped or closed Signal versus Noise, so we didn’t have a place to write our thoughts and well, a group of folks got together and decided to launch a new place, of course, with David and Jason being very keen about having that in place.

Kimberly (02:25): Right. On this blog, tell me who contributes to it. I know you mentioned there’s several different teams. Is everyone writing on it? I know I looked and you have several articles on it, but can contribute to that dev blog?

Jorge (02:37): Sure. Actually, believe it or not, the process we follow is very relaxed. Anyone in the company is able to write an article in the company blog. We don’t really have a very formal editorial process or any editorial process at all. It’s like you have something to share, you want to write about something, go for it. It’s always driven by the author, so it’s always about someone wanting to share something. It can be just describing how we are doing something, which patterns we are following, some piece of technology we have released, some problem or some crisis we went through. We touch on all sorts of subjects and really everyone is invited to write. I think it’s very important that at least the article matters to the author, right? Because you want to keep articles authentic and genuine. You don’t really want to write these kind of stock articles, for example, Seven Ways of Improving the Speed of Your Rails Applications, where you drop seven valid points, which are void of content and of substance and just to make search engines happy or whatever. I personally hate that.

Kimberly (03:49): Yeah

Jorge (03:50): And I know the company hates that. So I’d say that the only requirement we want to enforce is to write articles that are meaningful for the author that is writing them so that they tell something to the audience.

Kimberly (04:02): So it’s not like a topic is assigned or it’s an SEO driven purpose. It really is, someone has something that they feel like is valuable to share.

Jorge (04:11): Yeah, absolutely. Also, we don’t try to enforce any kind of cadence. We need to publish one article every week or every two weeks. It’s not like that at all. And you could say, oh, but what about if we don’t publish an article in, I don’t know, two months? It’s totally fine. I mean, publishing low quality stuff, I’d say is much worse. Again, my personal opinion. So we don’t set any kind of cadence or we don’t assign articles or anything like that. Actually, how we organize the work is that we have a card table in Basecamp, so if you want to write something, you can create a card there. You start working on the article and you can ask for all the folks for feedback if you feel like it, but it’s not required or anything like that. I mean, you can write an article and publish it on your own without asking anyone. That’s totally fine.

Kimberly (05:00): Okay. That’s kind of our managers of one concept as well. If you have an idea, run with it.

Jorge (05:07): Absolutely, 100%.

Kimberly (05:08): Okay. Jorge, tell me this, how has… I mean, we say internally 37signals, we’re sharing what we do, we are communicating, this is our process, this is how we work, this is how we do it. We’re very open about that I think compared to a lot of companies. I think the dev blog is no exception. How has the blog been beneficial not only to the company, but to you personally? I’ve seen you writing a lot of things. Have you gotten feedback from the audience? How has it been beneficial to you as a programmer?

Jorge (05:38): Oh wow. Writing for the 37signals blog has been a blessing in many ways. I just start by saying that writing in general helps you to think. So sometimes I’m writing about complex intricate problems or things that I have in my mind, and I start with a very gray cloud of thoughts and things, and writing them down helps me to structure it, and I clarify things a lot for myself first. So it’s not like, oh my god, I have this article, I’m going to just write it down. It’s like, yeah, as I’m writing it down, I’m learning, I’m clarifying my own thoughts and it’s incredibly valuable. I think writing in general is valuable for the author. There is this quote that writing is thinking, and it’s totally like that. Also, regarding engaging with an audience. I used to write, before joining 37signals, I had my personal blog and I released Open Source, but essentially I didn’t have any audience.

(06:39): So maybe I had some friends following me on Twitter, I dunno, my brother and things like that, but I didn’t really reach many people. But 37signals has a huge audience that Jason and David and other folks have built over the years. So by writing on their technical blog, suddenly you’re reaching a huge audience of, in my case, Rails programmers or other programmers. And for me, this has been incredibly fulfilling. I’ve written a bunch of posts about how we do Rails in the company and the community was eager to know about these subjects, so I got to engage with a lot of folks through email, social media, people ask me questions. Everyone was very, very grateful for this article. So for me it was very fulfilling. And also I got to learn a lot, you know interchanging thoughts with all the programmers. For me, it’s very fulfilling, I’d say.

Kimberly (07:37): That’s great.

Jorge (07:38): Yeah.

Kimberly (07:39): Okay, so Jorge, for someone who’s listening who might be a small business owner, might be in software, two questions. One, why should they start something like this? And two, what are things that they should keep in mind, either best practices or things to avoid?

Jorge (08:00): Sure. So I think, and this is not something particular to 37signals, but in general, people are curious about how other places, how they do what they do.

Kimberly (08:09): Right.

Jorge (08:10): When you’re using a product, you’re really curious about what’s behind the curtains of that product. I used to be like that before joining 37signals, so I have that feeling very present. So I’d say that the first reason is that by writing a technical blog, you can get to connect with your audience better because I’m sure there are technically minded people in your audience, or even if you don’t want to have a technical blog, you want to write a general corporate blog, I think the same principle applies. You can connect with your article better, and I think that when you are dealing with a company’s product for just like a black box where you don’t see what’s behind it, you just use the product, but suddenly you get an article about, oh, this is how we organize our customer support team. This is what we do, these are our practices.

(08:57): We are using this tool for organizing how we address customer feedback. All those things are incredibly interesting for the audience in my experience. Something I’ve seen, this is specific to programmers, but something that 37signals does, which is kind of unique, is that we share real chunks of code in our technical articles. So if we are going to write about some Rails concept, we get to share code from our commercial product. And this is an idea that I know David has been pushing on for years, that if you’re going to discuss technical subjects, you need to share it all. Because if you stay in a very, very abstract level, it’s very easy to make any point you want to make. But when you share the code, then everything lands into the realm of the concrete.

Kimberly (09:45): Jorge, let me ask you a question about that because I feel like some people might be like, well, I’m not going to share my code, I don’t want people to see that they could then take it or steal it or recreate it. Tell me about that, about being so open about the code.

Jorge (10:01): Yeah, actually it’s pretty unique and I kind of understand the point of view of a company that is running a commercial product and you are, at first glance, you could be scared of sharing your code as if you were sharing your secret sauce.

Kimberly (10:14): Right.

Jorge (10:14): But do you really think about that? Sharing a few snippets of code is not revealing your secret sauce at all, at all. And rather it’s a way of making a difference because nobody is doing that. So when we are talking about commercial products, they’re like these very mysterious things that run somewhere in the cloud or whatever, and you can’t look into them at all. So that transparency can only play in your favor, in my experience, and this is not just my opinion, it’s like I’ve seen that talking to the audience. People love it, absolutely love it. And actually I keep getting notifications from people that quote my articles, oh, check this, check that, which is because there is a genuine interest in how we do that. And also you can link that with what I said before of being authentic. People love authenticity. It doesn’t have to be all about good things. I’ve written, I think one or two posts, I’m remembering one about a crisis in HEY with some email problem in HEY, I don’t remember the details, but I remember people loving it. It was like a Friday crisis with our email servers or something like that. So in general, people love authentic content.

Kimberly (11:31): I also really love that you get to see other people who work at the company. I mean obviously David and Jason are so prominent, but I love when it’s like, oh, here’s an article by Jorge or a writeup by Donal that you see the people behind the front lines.

Jorge (11:49): Yeah, absolutely. In our blog, you can get to see there are fantastic articles from, for example, Jason Zimdars, our principal designer in the company. So if you’re into product design, you can get access to how a world-class product designer does his thing. I think from the audience perspective, it’s incredibly valuable. Same with operations. We have an incredible ops team, which are, for example, responsible of moving our apps out of the cloud to on-prem servers, which was a big theme last year. So you can get to the blog and you see that this ops team is not like an abstract entity. You get to see like…

Kimberly (12:30): These are real people.

Jorge (12:32): These are real people, and you can get to see what Farah has to say. For example, Farah is a senior ops team member, you can get to see how she went through some problems and the lessons she learned. And I don’t know, it’s like, I think from the audience perspective, in pragmatic terms, if a customer is reading these articles, it’s going to feel a closer connection with the company. And if you don’t know about the company, it’s a way to discover the company if the article is really good. So I think it is really beneficial for everyone involved.

Kimberly (13:05): And honestly from a marketing perspective, it is living on forever. The blog is just always there, so it’s evergreen and then you guys personally are often tweeting it or posting it on LinkedIn, so it’s living multiple places, which is just great for reach.

Jorge (13:22): Right, of course. Of course. In terms of gaining audience and traction and spreading the brand, it’s not my field, but I can see how it’s obviously beneficial too.

Kimberly (13:32): Okay, Jorge, what is your next writeup on the blog going to be? No pressure.

Jorge (13:37): Right now we are working on couple of new products, so it’s a very exciting time for the company and we are developing some pieces of technology for this product, and I’m sure that next article is going to be along those lines like revealing something, sharing lessons, sharing technology we’ve built, probably something like that. You know, Kimberly, it’s like sometimes suddenly something happens and you say, oh, I want to write about this. And you can really schedule that and you can really anticipate that.

Kimberly (14:08): Right.

Jorge (14:08): So maybe it’s something like that. I dunno, maybe the next article is going to be about, I dunno, some problem we had on call, for example. So I don’t know. But in terms of big themes, there are new products in the oven, so I’m sure those are going to generate some good pieces for the dev blog.

Kimberly (14:24): Well, you can find the 37signals dev blog at dev.37signals.com. I will link to that in the show notes. Jorge, thank you for being here. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and if you have a question for Jason or David or Jorge about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.