In April 2008 John was interviewed by Amy S. Choi from BusinessWeek for an article titled Entrepreneurs Fight a Recession.  For the article BusinessWeek interviewed small business owners in Bisbee, AZ, Hanover, NH, Burlingame, CA, and Austin, TX to find out how we were preparing for the down turn in the economy.  A followup article will appear in the April 10 issue of  BusinessWeek.  So what's happened to 53 Technology since April 2008? 

Two dominant trends in web technology in recent years have been the emergence of open source application frameworks like CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, and Zend Framework and the maturation of open source CMS platforms such as Joomla! and Drupal.  In 2007 we standardized all of our web development on CakePHP.  CakePHP has allowed us to deliver more sophisticated applications with  shorter development cycles and lower total cost.  This in turn has allowed us to spend less time coding and focus more attention addressing customers' business needs,  ensuring that our applications have a positive impact on the bottom line.  

2008 and 2009 have been challenging in many ways.  It's been difficult to see some of our friends and family close businesses and lose jobs.  We've been pushed to do more for less on lower budgets.  There's a lot of uncertainty about the direction of the economy over the next several years.  We're  optimistic that helping our customers do more with less will be in demand.