Last Feburary I attended the Getting Real Workshop on making web applications, presented by 37signals.

I had just brought on a partner in my company, and we were setting out on a comprehensive redesign, reprogramming, and re-branding of our product, Scene404, in its new form as Lovetastic.

So I decided to plunk down the nearly $900 to see what they had to say. It was a sort of intentionally ironic decision, though, really. My joke at the time was that I was mainly going just to see if the guys at 37signals were kidding.

37s was starting to get a lot of press as an iconoclastic application design firm. They had developed and thoroughly promulgated what was ostensibly a sort of schtick, which they had repeated numerous times and articulated in various ways on their blog. Yet, just reading what these guys said, and hearing them occasionally on podcasts, I was a bit skeptical. I thought maybe they were either the most shameless sort of substanceless self-promoters or just deluding themselves. I couldn’t tell if they were being genuine about their aesthetic and philosophy, or if they were just cigar chomping.

But I was willing to give them a chance. I did like a lot of what they were saying. They were proclaiming all the things I already wanted to believe but didn’t think you could actually get way with. Jason Fried, for example, was asserting that you don’t need boatloads of venture capital and lots of enterprisey bullshit to earn a living making a product that your customers want. And David Heinemeier Hansson was assuring us that it’s possible to be happy as a programmer.

What happened that day, as it turned out, would completely change the trajectory of my business, and it would lend me external validation for a lot of my own long-standing ideas about work, productivity, design, business, and craftsmanship.

Far from being smug or opportunist, it was obvious from the first words out of their mouthes that these guys really cared about what they were doing. They believed what they were saying. And they could point to their own work (and success) as proof of the path they were advocating. When you look people in the eye and hear them talk about something they care about for eight hours, you can tell if they’re faking it. Jason and David definitely weren’t faking it.

Most of my postings here will be about those ideas. NotRocketSurgery is about what happened to me when, seeing the 37signals guys speak with great passion and authenticity on these subjects in person, I became an adherent of their philosophy. It’s about calming down, and starting to care more about your customers than about the universe of moronic conventional wisdom you’ll encounter as soon as you set into the world of “business.”

I’ll be posting regularly now, up to and past the launch of Lovetastic (the new “getting real” version of our old product, Scene404.) I want us to be a guinea pig and proving ground for the Getting Real methodology. I’ll outline, step by step, how we’ve applied specific principles laid out in both the workshop and book, in hopes of helping other business to learn from our experiences in the same way that 37signals has helped us.

Tomorrow, I’ll begin by talking about our decision to recraft the site using Rails, and about the tremendous increase in happiness and comfort I’ve felt both as a business owner and a developer in making that decision.

In the mean time, you can sign up for the latest workshop yourself, just announced today.