What I learned about passion from OSCON

What did I get most out of OSCON? One word: Ruby.

Actually three words: Ruby On Rails.

Rails creator/evangelist David Heinemeier Hansson has the passion, and he's infected everybody. (He won the Best Hacker of '05 Award from O'Reilly and Google).

Don't stop reading if you're not a coder; there's a lesson in passionate users here we can all learn from David and his cohorts at 37 Signals--a group understands both software development (as a process) and user passion. They make (so far) three wonderful products, Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da. (They also have a very popular Signals vs. Noise blog.)

And if you're not already using one of their products, you'll probably want to (and it's easy to start with the free Ta-da List).

After all the passion I saw at OSCON around Rails, I looked a little deeper into what the 37 Signals folks are doing, and without interviewing them -- in other words, purely from what's readily available to an outsider with a browser -- I did a little passion analysis. Much of what they're doing could map well to virtually anything. And it all starts with what appears to be a core value:

The User Comes First.

I was so impressed that I decided to launch something new on this blog -- Passion Reviews. Beginning with my next post, which is a review of 37 signals, I'll be doing semi-regular reviews that take one company, service, or product and see how well it meets our passionate users checklist.

Before I finish this, here's one more picture from my OSCON talk, taken (along with the one at the top) by the inspiring Ted Leung (yes, very closely related to the equally inspiring Julie Leung : )

It makes me laugh (and cringe) to see how I look all serious in this one. Geez. Thanks to everyone who participated in the OSCON passionate users tutorial -- I learned a LOT.