Movin’ on up!

By the end of 2010, thoughtbot’s growth led to a seriously crowded office. In January 2011, we took over the 30-year headquarters of Hair Club for Men and began to envision what thoughtbot’s new headquarters would become! We started tearing down walls, picking up leftover toupées and planning for a cutting-edge expansion on the top two floors of 41 Winter Street, in Downtown Crossing. This past July, we said goodbye to our first downtown Boston location and moved on up to our brand new office.

Not only were we able to expand the number of desks and conferences rooms from what we had previously, we also were able to build a training room that can hold over 30 people for trainings, hackfests, and events. 

Heres are some photos of the remodeling process.

We built walls!

We cut through floors!

Coolest construction job - being able to use stilts! 

Over the next five months, our new space transformed: from a 1970’s hair salon to a demolition site; from a demolition site to two gutted floors that were quickly filled with steel beams, new pipes, paint, and sheetrock. As winter turned to spring, our new office was pristine - a team effort on every level. 

With all our new space, why wouldn’t we brand it with a 15 foot logo of our chief evangelist, Ralph!

Hi Ralph! 

Clearly, we’ve been productive and busier than ever as we’ve settled into our new home.

We hope you’ll stop by for one of our meet-ups, hackfests, attend a workshop, or even become an apprentice.  

Last four photographs, Conor Macdonald. 

Design by Leonardi Aray Architects.

Design for Developers

I’ll be teaching the next session of our Design for Developers workshop on December 7th & 8th at our Boston offices.

The workshop is aimed at developers (as well as non-developers) who know HTML and CSS, but feel like they don’t have the graphic design skills to make something that looks good enough to show customers and clients. I want to ease the pain of developers who feel like this:

I’m a developer who is a HORRIBLE at design so I don’t even know where to start.

I have the technical skills but my designed sites and interfaces are always awful, I know how to build a site technically and I know when a site  looks bad, but I’m rarely able to do anything about it.

The workshop is heavily focused on hands-on instruction, so that you can start to see immediate improvements in your ability to layout pages, pick and use typefaces, and work with color.

Visit the workshops site to learn more and register.

On the Monday and Tuesday before this workshop, we’ll also be running our Advanced HTML & CSS workshop. This workshop provides a solid foundation in HTML and CSS fundamentals. We’re running these workshops back to back to give folks the opportunity to get a crash course in the full stack of skills you’ll need to design and build great pages.

If you’d like to find out more about either workshop and figure out which one might be right for you, drop us a line.

Backbone.js on Rails live audio Q&A chat

Last Friday, October 14th, we hosted a two hour live Q&A chat for purchasers of our Backbone.js on Rails eBook with co-author Jason Morrison. We invited people who have downloaded the book to submit questions ahead of time, and then join us in chat for a discussion.

We’re pleased to offer the recording and notes as a free resources. You can download the Backbone.js on Rails live Q&A chat audio and notes over on our Workshops site.

The money back guarantee

We offer a money back guarantee on our workshops:

• Everybody Codes
• Advanced HTML & CSS
• Intro to Ruby on Rails
• Test-Driven Rails
• Scaling Rails
• Intro to Rails with PostgreSQL

For a one-time, expensive (hundreds or thousands of dollars) purchase of a service like training, a money back guarantee makes a lot of sense.

It’s simple and has a positive effect on our motivations:

• we have to deliver a great service
• we have to talk to people to make sure they’re a good fit for the content

We have to be willing to say “you shouldn’t take this workshop” when we sense a potential student is too advanced or too beginner for the content. The money back guarantee makes that decision easier because it’s not really rejecting revenue if they won’t be happy with the workshop.

It also helps us understand if we’ve priced the workshop correctly.

For the few individuals who have asked for their money back, they don’t say “this workshop was worth $0”, they say things like “for me, it was more like a $900, not a $1,100 course.” So, we refund a portion of the registration and note that we either need to improve the workshop or drop the price a little.

Could it work with SaaS apps?

We don’t offer a money back guarantee on our SaaS apps for these reasons:

• They all have 30-day free trials. There’s time for evaluation before paying.
• They start at about $10/month. The financial risk of having a bad experience is very low.
• The nature of subscriptions is such that if people are unhappy, they stop paying. Our motivation to satisfy them is ongoing.

Backbone.js on Rails: a new dynamic ebook

We recently tweeted that this was the “summer of backbone.js”. 75% of our client projects are now using Backbone.js and Trajectory is using it heavily now as well.

We’re loving Backbone.js, but as we got started with Backbone.js we realized that there was definitely a learning curve. As we got more familiar with it, we realized that the standardization we were familiar with from Rails was lacking and there were quite a few tricks and tips to make Backbone.js work well, especially with a Rails backend.

So we’re pleased to announce that we’re now writing a new book, Backbone.js on Rails.

But this more than just an ebook. We’re using git-scribe and github to manage the writing of the book. When you purchase access to the book, you’re going to get pull access to the repo. As we write, you’ll be able to follow along, view diffs, comment on individual lines of the work, and use Github issues to provide feedback and issues.

Because we’re using git-scribe, the book will able to be generated in different formats: HTML, PDF, ePub (iBooks, Nook), and Mobi (Kindle). We’re supporting HTML out of the gate, and other formats as soon as they’re ready to go down smooth.

Along with the book, the git repo will contain working Backbone.js and Ruby on Rails examples to help your understanding and be really useful.

You can get access now for $39. This early access price is for a limited time, and will go up to $49 on August 1st. We also have a special group price of $199 for up to 10 readers.

You can see our working table of contents and purchase access on the Backbone.js on Rails web page.