O'Reilly is carrying a great interview with Jason Fried, of Web consultancy company 37Signals, where he discusses the development of BaseCamp, an online project management system I use.

Jason does a great job of plugging the company, their 37express service, and BaseCamp itself, while providing some great development truisms:

We built Basecamp because we needed it. I'm a big believer in investing in what you know and what you need. We invested our time, energy, and focus into building a product that we knew we needed to run our own business. When you build what you know, and when you use what you build, you've got a head start on delivering a breakout product.

Exactly. That's why I developed RSS Digest! And:

The way I look at it is this: I want developers to be comfortable with their development environment. I'm a designer and a business guy, not a developer. I'm not going to push PHP or Java or whatever just because I've heard of it. I'm going to defer to David on this. And if David chooses Ruby, then Ruby it is. It's all a matter of trust. If you don't trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application? Trust is critical here. And, further, why would you dare impact your developer's morale by throwing him or her into a language where he can't be as productive or as satisfied? You only get good work from people who enjoy doing the work. I'll take a happy average programmer over a disgruntled, frustrated master programmer any day.

This is so very true. I know some amazing programmers who have barely any worthwhile projects to their name and I know some really mediocre programmers (though I would never name them, except for myself!) who at least have a number of useful profitable projects under their belt.

And when it comes to teamwork, I'd rather have a team of mediocre programmers who communicate effectively than a team of insanely talented programmers who are prima donnas who don't answer their e-mail. Actually, I'd go further than that. I'd say that talented programmers who don't communicate well aren't good programmers at all. There. I've said it!