Discover great authors from HEY World

Recharging trust batteries with meetups in a remote company

Nothing can substitute for spending time together in person as a way to build bonds, create connections, and foster trust with your colleagues. There's just a special kind of magic that comes from being together, which Zoom will never match or catch. But what's enabled the remote-work revolution to be effective is that these moments do...

Manage process before people

If you want to run a company that's light on full-time managers, you have to focus on managing processes before people. The traditional paradigm of a reporting manager that's constantly following up with their reports, conducting daily stand-up meetings, weekly 1-1s, and all other forms of intensive supervision, needs to be (mostly) re...

The luxury of working without metrics

There are a million metrics you can use to track the health of a subscription software business like ours. Customer life-time value, cost of acquisition, cohort retention, revenue churn, net promoter score, funnel conversion rates, to name but a few. All useful calculations, but I can't tell you what bliss it's been to steer 37signals ...

But what if you're wrong?

They seemed so sure. First, that the pandemic couldn't possibly have come from a lab rather than a market. Then, that masks – any masks! – would materially retard the spread. Later, that the vaccine would prevent you from getting the virus. Finally, that if you were vaccinated, you couldn't spread the virus. All of that, and plenty mor...

Sitting on the bench

There are many reasons to pick working for a bigger company in tech. The benefits, the pay, and, at least until recently, the job security. In many ways, it's hard to argue with the cold logic of taking a seat on a star destroyer, if you can land one. But odds are you'll be sitting on the bench if you do. That is, your talents won't ge...

That underdog DNA

Jason just penned a beautiful, succinct ode to the underdogs. Go read it. It's funny how finding just the right word unlocks the perfect mental image. We've often thought of ourselves as being in the corner of the small business, but that was never quite right. There are many kinds of small businesses, not all of them thinking of thems...

It's not just cloud costs that are out of control

We're letting our yearly commitment to Datadog, a performance and monitoring tool, expire at the end of this month. Not because we don't like the service. It's actually really nice! But because the $88,000/year it was going to cost us to continue is just ridiculous. And it's emblematic of a larger issue: Enterprise SaaS pricing is gett...

The misallocation of tech talent

Getting fired sucks. It doesn't matter how or when. It just sucks. And right now there are an awful lot of people in the tech industry feeling just how much. But what's bad for the individual isn't always bad for the group. Believe it or not, there's also collective upside to the massive tech layoffs happening at the moment. Like undoi...

In defense of the office

You're never getting me back into an office. I credit much of my career to escaping that place in the early 2000s. It wasn't until I found the prolonged solitude of working from home that I could consistently make big leaps in my creative process. The pandemic taught millions the same lesson. And yet – AND YET! – I'm going to come to t...

Programming types and mindsets

One of the longest running schisms in programming is that of static vs dynamic typing. I've heard a million arguments from both sides throughout my entire career, but seen very few of them ever convinced anyone of anything. As rationalizations masquerading as reason rarely do in matters of faith. The rider will always justify the way o...

Escaping creative downturns

If I'm stuck in a creative downturn, there's usually only one remedy: keep going. That is, accept the downturn, but continue to stare at the computer, waiting for it to pass. While staring at the computer, there's room for menial and managerial tasks put aside during more inspired times. Checking up on things, getting back to people, a...

How to recover from microservices

I won't deny there may well be cases where a microservices-first architecture makes sense, but I think they're few and far in between. The vast majority of systems are much better served by starting and staying with a majestic monolith. The Prime Video case study that blew up the internet yesterday is but the latest illustration. Maybe...

Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices

The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too. What a win! But beyond celebrating their good sense, I th...

Sovereign clouds

I've been talking about our departure from renting computers via AWS to owning them in a colocated datacenter as our "cloud exit". But I recognize this terminology can rub some people the wrong way. There's an entire generation of technologists who see themselves as "cloud native", and alienating them just because we want to own our ha...

Cloud exit pays off in performance too

Last week, we successfully pulled off our biggest cloud exit yet for Basecamp Classic. This is the original app that started it all for us from way back in 2004. And now, after a couple of years running on AWS, it's back on our own hardware, using MRSK, and holy smokes is it fast! Just look at these charts: The median request now runs ...

The responsibility is the reward

One of the straightest paths to purpose in life is to take responsibility for something (or someone). Becoming a person whose presence and competence benefits others. For both your sake and theirs. Jordan Peterson calls this the "meaningful burden" in 12 Rules for Life, and downright posits it as an antidote to depression. Echoing Vict...

Getting America's mojo back

There is no end to accounts of America's current ailments. From deaths of despair, soaring crime in some cities, ballooning debts, dysfunctional politics, and a raging culture war. It's easy to be down on those United States. Too easy, in fact. Take gun deaths, for example. Americans own more guns per capita than any other country in t...

How to continue making kerosene lamps on the eve of electricity

The recent and rapid advance of AI has rightfully giving many in software real doubts about the future of their profession. I'd probably still wager that the fears are overstated – that we also got prematurely euphoric about the imminent prospects of self-driving cars – and that AI generating code is different from it evolving existing...

We spent $300K on billboards in Boston and it was a bust

Our 2023 marketing campaign for Basecamp kicked off on a ton of different channels at once. Web ads, search ads, podcast ads, and TV ads all blasted the message of JUST LET ME DO MY JOB. Our flagship commercial was a hit with the audience and the critics. But our attempt at out-of-home advertising, with billboards all over Boston, was ...

Go Rails World

Amanda Perino had barely settled into the role as executive director of The Rails Foundation before she secured a venue, a date, and the full support of the board for Rails World. This 650-attendee conference will kick off the worldwide ambitions for The Rails Foundation to host a new series of ecosystem gatherings at incredibly afford...

The hardware we need for our cloud exit has arrived

It's been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excit...

Standing up to golems

Tim Urban's new book What's Our Problem? offers an excellent analysis of the current American political malaise. It breaks down the history of first how the Republican party got overrun by low-rung thinking from the mid-90s forward, then how equally low-rung thinking got the other side in the past decade or so. It's a light, humorous r...

How to have buckets of time

One of the most important techniques I've embraced for managing my time is to direct related tasks to a bucket, let that bucket accumulate until full, then empty it all in one go. This in contrast to trying to catch every task the moment it lands from the myriad of interruption pipes that'll drip-drip-drip your day away if you let them...

America is never "getting to Denmark"

It took moving back to Denmark to realize the folly of thinking America is ever going to "get there". Whether on guns or healthcare or taxes or any other major policy position that's so fiercely contested in the US. Despite growing up in this little Nordic country, I didn't fully appreciate the tremendous, underpinning power of a homog...

Why is paid social media a bad idea?

It'll soon cost $7/month to fully participate on Twitter. Musk has announced they'll start reserving presence in the For You tab solely for paying customers from April 15th, limit participation in polls to just those customers, and soon also give preferential showing in replies as well. Legacy blue-checks will not be spared, and will i...

Cut cloud before payroll

Every week seems to offer fresh staff cuts at the big tech companies right now. Several of the giants are already on their second rounds, and few would probably bet against a third after those. But as hard as it is on an individual level – and it's always hard! – there's a silver lining for the economy as a whole: Releasing captive tal...

Angry customers are a gift

The majority of customers will never tell you why they stop buying on their own. In fact, even if pressed, most will just smile, nod, and give you some face-saving reason for how “now is just not the right time” or “we are just going in a different direction”. Because that’s what avoids conflict. Thus, the only time you’re truly allowe...

Compressing a million-dollar commercial into $37,000

Last year, we hired a high-profile ad agency to work on our first-ever branding campaign for Basecamp. They were smart, funny... and entirely out of sync with our budget. So we ended up letting them go, hiring a new head of marketing, and doing it all ourselves. The problem was that our entire marketing budget for 2023 amounted to a "m...

Actions beat arguments

You can't convince someone invested in their convictions to the contrary by arguments alone. Only actions can pry open a locked mind, and most minds remain locked most of the time. So if you wish to be persuasive, you ought to spend less time arguing and more time doing. This is as it should be. Talk is cheap, and others are right to k...

SaaS startups will have to care about productivity again

When the money flows freely, and there's a strong cachet to having tons of open positions, you can be forgiven to think that the individual productivity on a product team just doesn't matter. So much time is spent coordinating the work anyway. Who cares if the stack you're using takes twice the number of people to ship meaningful updat...

The simplest thing that could possibly work

I'm a programming child of the agile software movement. Just as I was starting out, Kent Beck published Extreme Programming Explained in 2000. It was a revelation. I had just enough exposure to Big Upfront Design and waterfall methodologies to appreciate what a monumental shift this was. Beck's methodology x-rayed the ills of the tradi...

Introducing MRSK

It's finally time to talk about the technology we've been building at 37signals to leave the cloud with HEY and many of our legacy applications. We already run Basecamp on our own hardware, but we deploy it using an old tool known as Capistrano. This is the deployment tool we originally wrote at 37signals all the way back in 2005, when...

When prophesy fails

Remember back in November, when seemingly every pious public persona and their coteries announced final farewells on Twitter? All in the clear expectation that the service would sink any moment? Like they had seen the iceberg, and was sure – just sure! – that impact was imminent. Except, there was no iceberg, no impact, no sinking ship...

When prophecy fails

Remember back in November, when seemingly every pious public persona and their coteries announced final farewells on Twitter? All in the clear expectation that the service would sink any moment? Like they had seen the iceberg, and was sure – just sure! – that impact was imminent. Except, there was no iceberg, no impact, no sinking ship...

Don't be fooled by serverless

Cloud aficionados love pinning the true promise of the cloud on serverless functions and services. Not getting the savings you thought you would with the cloud? It's because you didn't go serverless. Frustrated with the complexity of the cloud? Serverless! Performance questions? SERVERLESS! Serverless has become a mantra to chant becau...

Get out of momentum's way

It can take a long time and be tricky business to get a gaggle of humans rolling in the same, right direction. When it finally happens, you feel it. The pace is effortless. The interactions are easy. This is the moment when momentum asks you to get out of the way. The easiest way to mess up a good thing is to mess with it at all. Just ...

Caring about costs is cool

Revenue gets all the glory in the land of tech. The unlimited upside! Growth cures all! The next digit unlocks the next round! Don't get me wrong, without revenue, without paying customers, there's nothing. But once there's something, costs count just as well to the bottom line as does revenue – if you care about profits, and you shoul...

Five values guiding our cloud exit

I've talked a lot about cost in our reasoning for leaving the cloud. But while cost is crucial, it is not the only motivating factor. Here are five values that have guided our decision, and that I recently articulated in an internal post at 37signals (so excuse the code names etc): 1. We value independence above all else. Being trapped...

We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit

Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we've been busy at work making it so. After a brief detour down a blind alley with an enterprise Kubernetes provider, we found our stride building our own tools, and successfully moved the first small application out of the cloud a few weeks ago. Now our sights are set on a t...

My all-time dream car

Whether you're a car lover or not, there's no denying the disarming enthusiasm of Doug DeMuro. He's an anti-influencer in a car world dominated by slick, status-conscious performers on YouTube. A reminder that being into cars doesn't have to be about showing off, and that you can enjoy the design, engineering, and driving experience of...

Hey, is that a CRM?

When we first started work on HEY, we didn't mean to build a general-purpose email service at all. We were looking to create Highrise 2. The successor to our beloved small-team CRM system from 2007. We had several skunkworks attempts at that in the past. One was nicknamed Glenn Gary. Another was Chestnut. But it was realizing that emai...

Inspiration is perishable

We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, ...

Invest in things that don't change

You know you're old when you can talk about stuff that happened twenty years ago with vivid recollection. I'm now that old. This week, it's been 19 years(!!) since we first launched Basecamp. Which means it's been well over twenty years that I've been working with Jason Fried at 37signals, and also more than twenty years since I first ...

How it started / how it's going

A picture of my home office in Malibu went viral last week. Some two million people gawked at that lovely Catalina Island-facing view that forms the background for work when I'm there. Here's another shot of that same office from the early morning: It really is my dream office. But at the same time, it's also just an office, and the mo...

Software has bugs. This is normal.

Disappointment occurs when expectations don’t match reality. And our expectations for software quality are profoundly unrealistic. Thus, lots of people are continuously disappointed — even enraged — by software bugs. They shouldn’t be. The only reliable, widely used way to ensure impeccable software quality is to write less software th...

Proof of the peak

Just a couple of months ago, I wrote an analysis of why I believed we were entering the waning days of DEI's dominance. I looked at four factors: 1) the likely judicial defeat of affirmative action in universities, 2) the disintegration and scandalization of BLM, 3) the loss of Twitter as an effective woke policing mechanism, and 4) fi...

Just let me do my job

This is to everyone who've ever been frustrated with the inability to find time at work to do their actual job. To those who've had to nod and smile at the VP of Wasting Everyone's Fucking Time. To whoever is sick of playing calendar tetris just to win the prize of zoom gloom. To people who actually like what they do, and would be ever...

Hardware is fun again

I lost interest in computer hardware during the 2010s. It seemed years would pass with only meager, marginal improvements. Intel was stuck in a rut, so CPUs were barely improving. The only bright spot for me was Apple's progress with their A-series chips for phones. But that felt like a segregated reality from that of regular computers...

Glorious days like these

This is my favorite kind of day. An entirely empty schedule combined with a juicy, challenging project to dedicate it to. The perfect antidote to the dread that occasionally sets in when a whole week is devoured by #ExecutiveLife. Nothing invigorates the soul like seeing something come together out of nothing, and to do that, you need ...

Another Android

It'd been a couple of years since I'd gotten a new Android phone. The last one was the One Plus 8 Pro. Nice phone, but I hated the screen water-falling over the edge. And I absolutely cannot stand the One Plus hijinks applied to scroll acceleration. So I've pretty much only used it as a spare Fortnite machine for the kids, except when ...

You can always go faster (if you know where to risk it)

The better you are, the faster you go. That's a basic truism of just about any field, and programming is no different. But competence isn't the only input to pace. Risk tolerance is just as important, if not more so. You can't go quickly if you treat every problem with the diligence required for rocket surgery. If your work can directl...

They're rebuilding the Death Star of complexity

I started my career in programming during heydays of Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This was late 90s/early 00s, and there was a rich ecosystem of enterprise vendors hawking application servers, monitoring tools, and boxes upon boxes of other fancy solutions. These tools were difficult to learn, expensive to license, and required an a...

The only thing worse than cloud pricing is the enterprisey alternat...

We spent the last couple of months thinking that bringing HEYhome from the cloud was going to involve SUSE Rancher and Harvester. A combination of enterprisey software products that would give us a cloud-like experience on our own hardware, and require minimal changes to how HEY is already packaged and deployed. But we should have smel...

We don't A/B test core values

Carlos Trujillo recently had to cancel a Basecamp account, but we managed to leave a warm, lasting impression by making it effortless. No last-minute offers, no pressure to get on a call to "explain", no dark patterns of any kind. Just gratitude that we could be of service while it lasted. It seems self-evident that it should always be...

A high bar is high respect

It's tempting to think you're doing someone new a favor by initially holding them to lower standards on work, effort, or decision making. They're new! They need to find their feet! Yes and yes, but neither fact is helped by going easy on what good decisions, reasonable effort, and solid work needs to look like at your company. Now keep...

Throw Twitter into the fire of Mount Doom

Whatever brief promise that Elon Musk might run New Twitter on principles not power seem dashed by the ElonJet affair. So I'm now biased to the tail outcome of this acquisition: That it liberates the world from Twitter's unique influence on our common discourse. Nobody should have this much power over the town square. No human is stron...

Apple's big monopoly loss comes curtesy of the EU

After being involved with the tech monopoly fightonseveralfronts in the last few years, I must admit I got a bit jaded after a while. In all the US state actions, for example, it seemed the basic political corruption available to any trillion-dollar company willing to buy all the lobbyists in the land, connecting that to campaign contr...

European Digital Sovereignty

All societies ought to strive for digital sovereignty. For the power and dignity of self-determination, according to the norms and laws of their culture. Independently of staying in the good grace of foreign powers. Without digital sovereignty, we cannot claim to be free in the 21st century. I stake the claim that we in the Nordics, as...

Meta goes no politics at work (and nobody cares)

It's not even been a full two years since we said no thanks to discussing societal politics internally at 37signals. The drama that decision created was immense, and all-consuming for a few weeks. We trended on Twitter for a while, there were countless, breathless articles covering the move, and ultimately, we said farewell to twenty-s...

Your estimates suck

Humans are terrible at estimating anything complicated that involves novel attempts at problem solving. So getting out of estimates and into appetites has been the single most important thing we have done for our software development process at 37signals. Instead of asking for a specific estimate to a specific solution, we start with r...

We can't have good faith on a flat social battery

After several covid years without, I've returned to speak at quite a few conferences and seminars this year. From OMR in Hamburg to Swiss Startup Nights near Zurich to Nordic Perspectives & Fingerprints in Copenhagen. But it was the session last night at the Copenhagen Townhall gathering of startup founders and investors that really ce...

An ode to software products over software services

Back in the early 2000s, software customers and vendors were both excited to embrace an alternative to selling and buying applications on CDs in card-board boxes, dealing with complicated installations or upgrades, and being limited with multi-user collaboration beyond the physical office's internal network. Why bother with these hassl...

More creative than mere humans

ChatGPT is blowing mindsleftandrightincludingmine. It's placed a second dot on what appears as an exponential curve of AI competency, following the huge leaps in creative image generation already made this year. So it's our nature to imagine – or dread! – where the next dot will land, and what perhaps the not-so-distant future will hol...

Nobody Knows Anything

I can't remember a time in my life when so many got so much wrong in their predictions about the future. Not in politics, not in culture, not in technology, not in economics, not in medicine, not anywhere. It's been a profoundly humbling phase of human history for both the experts that predict for a living and the masses trying to sort...

May Shopify's immunity spread to the whole herd

I've lost count of how many times various groups have tried to cancel Shopify over some store they didn't like. But I do remember the first big one. The fight over the Breitbart merchandise store. It involved mass-mediaattentionforweeks, a Twitter hashtag, 200,000 signatures gathered, and ripples across the tech ecosystem. Yet Shopify'...

Hard times make strong companies

The past decade+ of decadent funding has produced a generation of flappy and fragile tech companies. Fed with excessive capital as early startups, stuffed with absurd rounds of funding as wobbling scale-ups, and finally lobbed onto exuberant public investors at grotesque multiples. Many of these companies have never known real distress...

Equating responsibility with busyness

A lot of people equate responsibility and busyness, especially when it comes to running a company. That responsibility means being involved with everything all the time, doing all the work that isn't getting done to your satisfaction of pace and urgency. Those are traps, both of them, that I fall in often. But I have learned to set bou...

We must say no to these people

John McWhorter's new book Woke Racism ends with with plea to all of those who haven't been taken in by what he calls "The New Religion". Especially if they find themselves accused of being a "racist" after daring to dissent on any racially-charged topics: “We must say no to these people, in quest of a result: An understanding will grad...

Don’t wish it was easier

One of the fascinating aspects of the TikTok algorithm is its ability to connect similarities from alien domains, and thus feed you more of what you’ve liked, but from an alternate angle. This brain hack is of course part of the addictive nature of TikTok, but it also occasionally unearths compelling connections you didn’t even know ex...

The waning days of DEI's dominance

The acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion entered the common corporate lexicon with overwhelming force in 2020. Executives everywhere quickly learned they needed a passable position on DEI to stay employed, and a cottage industry of consultants sprung up to provide it. There were endless proclamations of "doing the work", some e...

Heads we win, tails he loses

Regardless of what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk is without a doubt the most interesting man in the world right now. He's positioned himself at the intersection of so many trends and topics that it's hard to keep count, and through it all, he's tweetingmemes. It's the greatest show on earth, no work of fiction could ever hope to compet...

You can either buy attention or earn it

Most businesses are not fucking Coca-Cola. They don't have this secret recipe that's the foundation of their success. The vast majority of businesses succeed or fail on the basis of their execution and their timing. There just aren't that many profound secrets that completely alter the trajectory of wherever some company's going. But I...

The Current Villain

One of Lefsetz's recurring topics is how music no longer drives culture. There's no longer a shared center. The biggest star of today is someone most of the world have never heard of. With tens of thousands of new tracks hitting Spotify every day, there's just too much volume, too much niche, for anyone ever to break through like the o...

Why is Spotify still linking to the CDC?

Remember when all the noble people of the world stood up to denounce The Covid Misinformation perpetrated on Joe Rogan's podcast? It seems like ages ago, but in fact it was just this January! And okay, it also wasn't all the noble people. Mainly just a couple of old musicians, like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, who for a moment relived...

The bubble has popped for unprofitable software companies

We've often been accused of being unambitious with Basecamp. Why didn't you just raise a bunch of venture capital and go for The Big Time? Why were you taking profits when you could have invested in growth? Don't you want to own a unicorn? Don't you want to be a billionaire?! This is the Silicon Valley way. Ride the big money to the mo...

Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997

In 1997, Apple was in dire straits. The stock was trading at a 12-year low, they were losing gobs of money, and Michael Dell famously called for Apple to shut down and return its money to shareholders. Things were bad. It was at this bottom Steve Jobs returned. In February of that year, Apple bought NeXT Software, Jobs' company-in-exil...

Setting the pace

A productive company culture is one with a clearly set pace. One with basic expectations around how long projects should take, what level of risk is appropriate to meet that pace, and what happens when teams or individuals miss. When the pace is right, you ship high quality improvements at expected intervals, and customers are pleased....

The best teacher is a bad boss

It takes a lot longer to learn how to run a good business, if your lessons are derived solely from the confines of calm, comfortable companies operated by kind and caring bosses. Of course you can pickup on the subtleties of a well-run organization, but it's far more memorable to deal with the chaos and aggravation that comes from work...

Here's how to fix Twitter

With Twitter under new ownership, it's a great time for us to imagine how this hellscape might actually get fixed. And by fixed, I mean be a place where people enjoy hanging out, where the debate over content moderation is settled, and where Elon Musk might make his money back. Easy peasy then! To start, here's my fundamental premise: ...

American data spies will never care where the servers are

In the two years since the European Court of Justice invalidated the Privacy Shield concept, European companies have been scrambling to pretend to comply with the ruling, without changing anything consequential about how they use American internet services. The erroneous consensus seems to have been that if only they could get an Ameri...

The delusional demands of some Twitter employees

That crazy son of bitch finally did it. Twitter now belongs to Elon Musk. And I must admit that I'm softening on the prospect. I still think social media by and large operate to the detriment of society, but I don't see Twitter aggravating that under Musk's management. But we shall see! That's the excitement of our time. So many unknow...

Make politics private again

Before social media, I couldn't tell you what narrow political box to put most of my friends or coworkers. I might have had a hunch as to whether someone leaned left or right, but it was usually just that, a hunch, and more importantly, virtually never relevant to our relationship. That doesn't mean we couldn't occasionally have discus...

Why do they talk like that

Here's Snap explaining to investors why their third quarter results were such a disappointment: “We are finding that our advertising partners across many industries are decreasing their marketing budgets, especially in the face of operating environment headwinds, inflation-driven cost pressures, and rising costs of capital.” Why do the...

Move the needle or move on

Don’t continue to waste your attention on projects that can’t be deemed a success by the naked eye. The more sophisticated you have to be to tell whether there's a positive effect, the less likely it is to be worth the effort. Spend your energy where it’s plain as day when it works. This doesn’t mean instantly bailing if immediate effe...

Need it take 7,500 people to run Twitter?

When WhatsApp was sold to Facebook in 2014, it had almost half a billion monthly users, but a team of just 50 people running everything. Compare this to Twitter, which today has a staff of 7,500 to manage half the number of users. Yet Musk is the crazy one here for suggesting that maybe Twitter could operate with a mere TWO THOUSAND em...

Don’t tell someone how to feel

Emotions rarely flow neatly from logic. That’s why we so often place the two in contrast. And why it’s foolish to try to tell others how they ought to feel. Emotions roam on sovereign ground, and foreign prescriptions feel like invasions. Rightfully so. We’ve made this mistake for at least a decade at 37signals by trying to tell oursel...

Why we're leaving the cloud

Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We've run extensively in both Amazon's cloud and Google's cloud. We've run on bare virtual machines, we've run on Kubernetes. We've seen all the cloud has to offer, and tried most of it. It's fi...

LinkedIn?!

I must be the latest of the late-late adopters to LinkedIn. I somehow managed to go almost twenty years without an account on the assumption that this was just a nerdy, straight-laced edition of Facebook. And I stopped using that in 2011, so why would I bother with the lame business version? But it turns out I was wrong even though I w...

The scarcity scarecrows of Open Source

I love the ethos of open source: Free code creating a true commons in software. I'm less enthralled with some of the particulars of capitalized Open Source movement, which at times seem obsessed with the same scarcity mentality that runs the commercial branch of our industry. One of those times is right now with the fight over GitHub's...

Expectations are everything

It's well established that Olympians who finish 2nd are less satisfied than the ones who finish 3rd. It's "I was so close to winning" vs "I'm just happy to have made the podium". Expectations at work! I got reminder of just how true this is racing at Spa in the European Le Mans Series yesterday. We started the race with the absolute lo...

Misery starts when the struggle ends

In the essay "Can socialists be happy?", George Orwell makes the penetrating observation that while humans can imagine hell in minute detail, heaven escapes anything but the most fuzzy, vague descriptions. We can't conceive of happiness beyond a reprieve from what currently ails us. It's a profound conclusion that has far-reaching impl...

Unreasonable people

It takes unreasonable people to do unreasonable things. It's highly unreasonable to set off to change the way cars are powered across the world. To turn what started almost as a joke – a car driven by a floor full of laptop batteries?? – into that unreasonable reality that we stop pouring liquid flammables into a car that then propels ...

I love being wrong

Being wrong means learning more about the world, and how it really works. It means correcting misconceptions you've held to be true. It means infusing your future judgements with an extra pinch of humility. It's a treat to be wrong. When you've been wrong enough times in your life or career, it invites you to think in bets. If you hold...

The faith of Andrew Tate

“Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks Lick on these nuts and suck the dick Get's the fuck out after you're done — "Bitches Ain't Shit", Dr. Dre, 1992 [Lyrics | Video]” Dr Dre has 7M followers on Instagram. This 2011 derivative of the song by Tyga has 31M views on YouTube. “I don't love 'em, I fu...

The path to meaning is paved with responsibility

That the antidote to a flailing existence might be more responsibility can come off as counterintuitive. Why would you ask more of someone who's already struggling? But that objection flips the cause and effect. Lots of people are struggling exactly because not enough is asked of them. I remember a version of this diagnosis being expla...

God's will

I'm no scholar on Nietzsche, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the philosopher who declared God Is Dead was the very same trying to preserve the essence of God's will in the principle of Amor Fati (love your fate). The ability to accept reality as it unfolds is a gift Christians is offered in their communal theology, but one th...

Don't keep all your digital services with one company

The crazy case of the father from San Francisco who lost all his email, contacts, pictures, apps, and phone number – everything else connected to Google! – because of a false accusation of child pornography by AI is not just terrifying, but a warning siren for all. It connects directly to the case where Apple nuked the digital life of ...

Cultural intuition

We can't write down everything that factors into the conduct of the business. There simply isn't the time or the foresight available to carefully catalogue all possible scenarios, trade-offs, and decision trees one might encounter in the course of running a modern, creative business. And even if there were, such a tome would become a s...

Mission statements are worse than worthless

I'm sure it's theoretically possible to write a mission statement that actually says something and actually matters. Just like it's theoretically possible to find that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But chances are far better that the rainbow springs straight out of a dumpster than a pot of gold, and that the mission statement is...

Let it slide

No matter the size of the business, there'll always be an unlimited number of tasks left to do, processes left to improve, and contingencies left to plan. The work is truly never done, so regardless of how much effort is put in, you'll inevitably end the day unfinished. All you can control is what you're willing to let slide. Most days...

Try hard not to solve hard problems

You don't have to solve the majority of hard problems you encounter in either business, design, or programming. Almost all of them can be restated as an easy problem, if you dare question the assumptions, reweigh the trade-offs, and stop diving after sunk cost. Above all the other principles at 37signals, this is our key to keeping the...

Turning the phone into a tool again

I've been keen to use my phone less for a long time. So on a recent holiday, I banished it completely for a week, while reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. That felt great. But as Newport notes, it's easy to fall back into bad old habits, if all you do is a sabbatical from your phone. His book details a bunch of good remedies, b...

Stay with the pain, don't shut this out

"Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing", intones Tyler Durden in Fight Club, as his alter-ego is screaming from the chemical burn. It's a profound scene that taps into a well of philosophical thought that humans have been struggling with forever. And it's applicable to more mundane affairs too. I like to think of this ...

I can't save you, nobody can

In the two decades I've been managing people, there's never been a termination that didn't sting. Acting on the knowledge that someone isn't working out is probably the hardest task for any conscientious manager. It's only natural to meet that difficulty and that sting with regret: I could have done more. But the hard truth is often a ...

A way out of the danger zone

The new Top Gun has everything America needs right now: Confident, competent, and charismatic execution. It has premiered at a time when everyone here seems to have lost faith in the grander, uniting project of this country, and thus reflects an inspiring counter to the prevailing fatalism. It's as subversive as an unironic American fl...

There is no iceberg

It's human nature to assume there's a good reason for why things are the way they are. And that this reason is either benign, based on careful deliberation, or malignant, derived from malice or incompetence. But this is a false dichotomy that often steers us away from the simpler answer: Nobody thought about this at all. There was no p...

I ain't no angel but I have made some startup investments

I'm not saying the only reason I've categorically refused to invest in tech startups in the past was my instinctual aversion to the term "angel investor", but it surely did play a part! There's just something so ridiculously self-serving about this angelic charade that turned me off for the longest time. So too did the fact that every ...

Employee surveillance software is managerial bankruptcy

Moving to remote work has brought out the worst in some managers. It's revealed their insecurities and paranoia, and caused them to address these in a spectacle of incompetence. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the continued surge in interest for employee surveillance software, which risks turning a working arrangement that s...

Who's been swimming naked?

"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked", says Warren Buffett, and now we're indeed seeing just how many tech companies have been indecently exposed as the investment mood snaps from greed to fear. Bolt, for example, just announced a brutal 1/3 cut of all staff, after touching the sun with a $11 billion v...

Bullshit jobs hide more easily in big companies

The late, great David Graeber struck a nerve with his 2013 essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. It diagnosed the "moral and spiritual damage" caused to our "collective soul" when masses of white-collar employees work pointless jobs. The thesis was confirmed by a startling poll a few years later that showed 37% of British workers t...

This might not be the place for you

They failed to capture the hill at Netflix. That small but vocal gang of employees hellbent on canceling Chappelle last year over his comedy special. Now comes the counter offensive from the executive in the form of newly updated cultural guidelines at the company: “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity ...

The founder's gamble

As companies mature, grow departments, accumulate staff, and develop reliable streams of revenue, it gets structurally harder and harder to make the big decisions that might upset the applecart. This is the familiar scene of The Innovator's Dilemma. The more of everything there is, the higher the stakes appear, and the less likely prof...

Everybody loses when legitimate power isn't exercised

Just because you have a high-ranking title, doesn't mean you're automatically right about everything. More junior employees can surely hold better insights, field smarter ideas, or judo solutions toward simplicity in a given circumstance. But it does mean you should be mostly right, most of the time, or that title isn't vested in legit...

Everybody losses when legitimate power isn't exercised

Just because you have a high-ranking title, doesn't mean you're automatically right about everything. More junior employees can surely hold better insights, field smarter ideas, or judo solutions toward simplicity in a given circumstance. But it does mean you should be mostly right, most of the time, or that title isn't vested in legit...

Celebrating the end of The Good Times

It's deja vu all over again for founders looking for easy money on soft terms to chase dreams of unicorns and waterfalls. With interest rates shooting up, a recession in the forecast, and three whirlwinds of economic hurt spinning at the same time, the fair-weather funding conditions are over. Good. See, The Good Times™ all too often s...

Bring your work self to work

If employees are expected to spend the majority of their life at work — pulling those 60-80+ hour weeks — it's no wonder they in return demand work embraces their "whole self". But that's a terrible trade in both directions. What work and you really need is for everyone to show up with their "work self". Your work self needn't be a fac...

Growing apart and losing touch is human and healthy

I quit Facebook back in 2011 for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most crucial was to rebel against its core mission: Connecting the world. I was over-connected with the world, acquaintances and friends from the past, and I wanted out. Zuckerberg has repeatedly doubled down on the toxic idea that we should only have one self, one pers...

It's hard to escape being ordinary in a connected world

There's a scene at the beginning of The LEGO Movie where the main character Emmet is faced with the brutal assessment of his bland ordinariness by the people he works with. A few quotes: "Look at Randy here, he likes sausage. That's something. Gail is perky, that's something... I mean, all [Emmet] does is say yes to everything everybod...

Breaking from the news

I’m not sure exactly when I became addicted to the news. But I clearly remember the time before I was checking the latest developments in the world three times per day (or four or five!). I remember momentous events like 9/11 or the swine flu pandemic from an era before being hooked into an IV feed of BREAKING NEWS. World events that r...

Rogan popped the cancel balloon

I know it's a couple of episodes ago on The Current Thing show, but remember when much of the media together with Neil Young and a motley crew of "270 health professionals" (that included dentists, consultants, students, psychologists, and a licensed marriage and family therapist) had a collective freak-out over Joe Rogan? That episode...

Where are all the kids in America

There's a lot to notice about Copenhagen when you arrive fresh off the plane from America. Look at all those bikes! What a clean city! See all those pedestrians dutifully waiting at the crossover for the light to turn green without a car in sight! All these observations stick out, but none trigger the culture shock like seeing kids eve...

Either/or with Mr Spaceman

Sell Twitter to Musk, and you'll regret it. Don't sell Twitter to Musk, and you'll regret that too. Sell it or don't sell it, you'll regret it either way. Such goes Kierkegaard's immortal admonition that many of life's grand dilemmas have only regrettable choices. Yet we spend much of our time trying to argue and act as if otherwise. T...

A state of sunshine

The contrast couldn't have been starker. About a year ago, we were going through a really difficult time at Basecamp, after instituting a new etiquette around societal politics at work. Twenty-odd employees took our 3-6 months severance offer, and we became the main characters on Twitter for a moment. Today, we've just finished a wonde...

Always provide a way out

It's never been easier to dig yourself into an ideological hole. Get swept up in The Current Thing without really thinking it through or simply by following whatever herd you've been trotting along with so far. The internet today is nothing if not a credence reinforcement program. But some times people do change their mind, some times ...

I can't tell the difference

Despite my continued and fierce opposition to Apple'smonopolyabuses on the App Store, I continue to be thoroughly impressed with the technical advances they keep making. I don't have a problem in the slighest with admiring the engineers while skewering the business operators. And perhaps no engineering unit within Apple is currently mo...

Back to Le Mans

The 90th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans is back to it's pre-pandemic schedule, and will be held June 11-12, complete with the traditional scrutineering of the cars in the city center. I'll be participating in the #43 Inter Europe Competition LMP2 car running under the Polish flag alongside team mates Fabio Scherer from Switzerland ...

The silent majority's reply

When so much of the American political discourse and agenda is being set and performed on Twitter, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking this forum accurately represents the voice of the people. But not only do the majority of people in the US never tweet, they're also increasingly disconnecting from party affiliations. Here's a ...

You could be wrong

We recorded an episode for the REWORK podcast yesterday on the essay "Making the Call is Making Progress", which encourages training those decision-making muscles to be stronger so you can forward quicker. It included a discussion of lowering the price of making decisions by setting yourself up for cheap reversals. If making a bad call...

The antidote to social media is being more social

I'm usually not one for coffee appointments or long business lunches, but since the pandemic restrictions were once again nixed a few months ago in Denmark, I've had the calendar packed with exactly such engagements. It's been a revelation. Part of this came as a result of giving an interview to the Danish magazine Computerworld about ...

The long argument

It's rare that an argument is so strong that'll immediately pierce through all the cognitive defenses an opposing mind might muster. So if you only weigh an argument's worth on whether it served to convert someone to your perspective this instant, you'll usually be disappointed. "Right now, right here" is a bad timeframe to measure the...

Weak principles, strong tribes

One of the most compelling metaphors of the battle between emotion and reason is that of the elephant and the rider. I first encountered it in Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. It goes like this: “The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning...

No RailsConf

2021 was an incredible year for Ruby on Rails. We started it off still celebrating the third major version of Ruby, and left it with the accomplishment of the seventh major version of Rails. Together, these releases sparked a renewed enthusiasm for building modern web applications with Ruby on Rails, unlike anything I can recall since ...

Diversify your life

If your existence is all about work, and work goes to shit, then life goes to shit too. If you live for your hobby, and your hobby hits the wall, then your life crashes too. If everything else is waiting until you hang with your mates, and your mates fade away, then you fade too. Betting your drive to get up in the morning on a single ...

The other side of social media

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is at once reaffirming all the ills of social media and showing its utterly unique capacity to give a direct voice to anyone around the world. And while the more unfortunate expressions of this being due to "blue eyes and blond hair", it is fostering a strong sense of fraternity here in Europe. This just...

Dangerous conversations going private

I went on Jason Calacanis' podcast this week for the fourth time. We've had some explosive, illuminating, and contested conversations over the years, Jason and I. And I've loved everyone of them. Whether we were discussing venture capital, profitable businesses, and the definition of success or talking about big tech, education, health...

Russell Brand is grand

While Joe Rogan has served as a magnet for all the wagging fingers of the world, Russell Brand has somehow so far managed to build a five-million strong channel pushing equally or more heretic views without much consternation. It can't be long before the fingers start pointing in his direction. But I can see how he's been able to slide...

The advantages of large, long-running pull requests

My favorite part of doing code reviews is to see all the trade-offs, design decisions, and changes in context together. You can't easily do that if your feature has been chopped into itty bitty pieces as independent pull requests under pressure never to let them run longer than a week. So at Basecamp, we let pull requests run as long a...

Equating blasphemy with violence legitimizes the inquisition

By far the most furiously pushback I've received for writingabout the Canadian trucker protest has come from calling it "peaceful". Objections to this term has taken many forms. But they all seek to justify the opposite label of "violent", no matter the blind logical leaps required. Some claim that the background of certain organizers ...

Simulacra

I never did make it all the way through Jean Baudrillard's book Simulacra and Simulation before I lost my paperback copy on a trip. But it lodged several perspectives deep in my brain that I'm still trying to process. One of which was this: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” It's a...

I was wrong, we need crypto

To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the ridiculous transac...

Gritting your teeth, biding your time

What's the goodwill of developers worth to a platform operator? It's a hard question, because it can't be answered by the traditional economic models used by bean counters to populate the balance sheet. And it's far more ephemeral than the goodwill of consumers. The relationship is more intertwined. We're not just engaging in transacti...

This just wouldn't happen on Twitter

I'm slowly regaining my faith in debates again. You know, the ancient practice of listening, presenting arguments, accepting counterarguments, and progressing towards a deeper shared understanding. Even when the topics are hot. Even when the counterpart is a stranger. And it's giving me vintage internet vibes! Take this Canadian trucke...

Introducing Propshaft

It's an exciting time in web development. After a decade's worth of front-end progress kept demanding ever more complicated setups, we're finally moving in the opposite direction. With simpler tools that are still able to hit those high-fidelity user interface notes, but at a sliver of the cost in complexity. The long expansion of enab...

After two weeks with no covid restrictions in Denmark

It's been a couple of weeks now without any form of covid restrictions in Denmark. The daily infection numbers have remained as high as they were when the restrictions were dropped, and the positivity rate for tests is still a staggering 30%. And yet, Danish society has simply moved on. At our kids' school, it seems that virtually ever...

Go truck yourself

The Canadian truckers have now for almost two weeks faced insults, threats, and slander to protest the country's new vaccine mandates. With a persistence that is driving some progressives both inside and outside of Canada absolutely batty. How dare these truckers continue to exercise their basic political rights to freedom of assembly,...

How to mint a crypto fan

You couldn’t have planned a better advertising campaign for crypto than Gofundme’s ham-fisted cancelation of donations intended for the protesting Canadian truckers. Their first attempt would literally have re-routed donations for the truckers to “other charities”. That sounded so crazy when I first read it that I had to dig up multipl...

Apple reveals road map to tax any business with an app at 27%

In response to getting fined €5 million by the Dutch competition authorities, Apple has revealed an even more draconian, invasive, and frankly, terrifying scheme to collect their App Store tax from dating-app developers operating in The Netherlands. One that grants themselves the right to audit the books of any developer who dares refu...

The second-hand stress of social media

I'd been an active combatant in the arena of social media for so long that I thought the baseline stress it produced was mainly due to the direct involvement. Over the past ten-plus years, rarely did I go a week without getting into some sort of heated argument with strangers online. But since retiring from the back-and-forth, it's cle...

Work unites what politics divide

Is there a more powerful, communal force than making stuff together? It pulls the shared humanity right out of people when they collaborate on making something greater than what they could make themselves. It intersects all the major sources of meaning by combining human connections, pursuits of mastery, and a shared purpose. It's quit...

The infuriating ease of Rogan's popularity

For Rogan's own sake, and for all of our sakes, I hope we'll soon move on from picking apart every facet of his popular podcast. But before we do, just one more thing. Really 😂 In this whole saga, I must admit to a guilty pleasure of chuckling at all the folks infuriated by the fact that Rogan commands such popularity from his off-the-...

There are no all-knowing, all-seeing oracles

Moderating content on the basis of "truth" is an impossible task at all but the dullest edges of discourse. Because the vanguard of truth is always in dispute. Out there on the edge, truth is a process, and it emerges faster when opposing inquiries are pursued simultaneously. This is the bedrock of science. Rarely has this principle be...

Spotify's completely reasonable healthcare content policy

Here's what you can't say on a podcast hosted by Spotify about Covid, per the company's internal moderation policy: “Content that promotes dangerous false or deceptive content about healthcare that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health such as: Denying the existence of AIDS or COVID-19 Encouraging the deli...

We can't thrive without friction

Social media platforms have been on relentless quest since their inception to remove all friction from all acts of engagement. The distance from emotion to reaction has been whittled away one A/B test at the time, and there's barely any left. You don't even have to portray any original sentiment today, just like or retweet that of some...

Spotify must be afraid of canceling Rogan, right? Right?!

What's stood out most to me about the latest Rogan round over Neil Young's ultimatum is the iron-clad assumption that Spotify surely must – MUST! – agree with the underlying premise. That Rogan is a menace to society because he host guests with divergent views on covid, and because he shares his unsanctioned opinion on the matter. Ther...

A pandemic dispatch from Denmark

Next week, virtually all pandemic restrictions will be gone from Danish society. No mask mandates, no vaccine passports, no distancing, no limitations on bars, restaurants, or night clubs. This follows a determination by the government's pandemic council that the virus is no longer threat to the functioning of society, and thus no long...

Just the cost of doing business [crimes]

The Dutch competition authorities just slapped Apple with a five million euro fine for refusing to comply with the country's new requirements on App Store policies. These new requirements are somewhat oddly contained to just dating apps, as they came as a consequence of a specific complaint from a specific provider, but even with that ...

The Mac proves Apple can safely open the iPhone

The Mac is such an inconvenient platform for Apple. It prevents the company from making any credible claim of an impending security catastrophe, if lawmakers force the iPhone to allow installation of apps without the App Store. With the Mac, we have almost forty years of proof that computers don't need an App Store to be safe. Made by ...

Free is never forever

Google gave away free email on custom domains for years. This unsurprisingly lured lots of people into switching to Gmail. But now the party is over, and what used to be free will now easily cost $500/year or more (if you have 10 users on a custom domain). Yikes. Unsurprisingly, I'm not actually against Google charging for email. The l...

Apple turns the legislative contempt up to 11

In North Dakota, Apple sent Erik Neuenschwander, a chief privacy engineer, to make its case that opening up the App Store to free and fair competition on payment processing would be bad for privacy. He focused in a relatively sober tone on the sanctity of Apple's integration and curation as arguments for why they deserved their monopol...

Case study in motivated reasoning

A few days ago, an anonymous Twitter user claiming to be an employee at a Big Tech company wrote a thread about work that went viral (since deleted, possibly partly by Twitter). Hazard Harrington's thread depicted a company drowning in woke excesses, so of course it sent the internet to the trenches. "This is EXACTLY what we suspected!...

This swapping of roles is making me dizzy

Matt Taibbi wrote a great piece called The Left is Now the Right last year. It detailed how many of the tactics and thought processes anyone who came of age in the 90s would recognize as "of the right" are now being used by the opposite side of the political spectrum. A clip: “Conservatives once tried to legislate what went on in your ...

HEY is running its JavaScript off import maps

The advent of import maps, and the bundler-less JavaScript reality it introduced, was undoubtedly my favorite advancement in web tech for 2021. Between Guy Bedford's excellent shim and native support in Chrome 89, we've finally been granted an escape from a decade's worth of frustrating complexity with excess tooling. Usually progress ...

The monopoly playbook is depressingly uniform across big tech

I finally had a chance to read ILSR's blockbuster report on Amazon's squeeze of independent retailers who sell through their marketplace. It's unusually well-written and researched, and the picture it paints is depressingly familiar to anyone who've been at the sharp end of a big tech monopoly spear. The overarching conclusion is that ...

The thrill of changing your mind

I've changed my mind on a lot of topics over the last few years, and it's frankly been exhilarating. Especially if the topic had been one left unquestioned for a long time. To me, it feels similar to the rush of solving a hard problem. When the pieces suddenly fit into place, and an elegant solution emerges, you can't help but smile. T...

Why is Denmark able to have these vaccine debates?

It continues to fascinate me to no end how different countries have ended up with such different approaches to this late-stage pandemic game. While the French president is talking about "pissing off the unvaccinated", the Australians are trying to a martyr of Djokovic, and the Americans continue to render everything virus through the b...

The merit of hiring by merit

I've spent years pushing back against hiring practices based on years of irrelevance, pedigree gates, and brainteasers. These indirect measures of talent have proven both unreliable and unfair. If you can, why not look directly at merit? When it comes to programmers, that merit is chiefly their ability to program! And program well. It'...

It's harder hiring managers

We just opened a position for a Director of Engineering to help us manage our rapidly expanding technical teams at Basecamp. We already have more programmers on staff than we've ever had, and we intend to double that crew within the next 12-18 months. We're going all-in on becoming a multi-product business again, and that means hiring ...

It's not a lottery

The opening for director of engineering at Basecamp has barely been up for a day, and there's already an inbox full of applicants. Virtually none of whom seem to have bothered reading the basic requirements for the opening or comply with the instructions on how to make a successful application. And I'm just left thinking: What's the po...

It could be worse

I grew up with persistent reminders of how any bad thing that happened could easily have been worse. Oh, you scraped your knee? It could be worse, you could have broken your leg! Oh, you broke your leg? It could be worse, you could have cracked your skull! Oh, you cracked your skull? It could be worse, you could have died! It wasn't ju...

Celebrating the silence of high uptimes

It was a very loud year, 2021. Which makes the satisfying silence of technical incidents at Basecamp all the more of a celebration. In the year that went, every single application we offer had at least 99.99% uptime! This is through repeated AWS outages, zero-day security alerts, and the drama of the world in those twelve months. But i...

Should you vaccinate your kids?

On the face of it, this seems like a basic medical question. One where reasonable people can weigh the same trade offs, yet arrive at different conclusions. And, as foreign as that might seem to Americans at the moment, that's largely how this question has been tackled in Denmark in the public forum so far. There are Danish pediatricia...

How we manage programming projects in Basecamp

That we manage all our programming projects in Basecamp is perhaps an obvious admission since its our own product. But it's less obvious to some how that's possible, given the apparent lack of affordances to tie todos, messages, or check-ins together with code commits automatically. Some teams who are Basecamp curious can't seem get ov...

Are we past peak "woke"?

Could John McWhorter have gone on MSNBC or The View or PBS or NPR a year ago to talk about a new book called Woke Racism? Would a book with a title like that even have been welcome at that moment in such chambers? I doubt it. But now it is. McWhorter has not only written an important book that's rightfully garnering broad attention, he...

Email is the antidote

It's easy to get down on the internet as a medium for reasoned debate. Every discussion on social media that touch controversial topics seems to descent into the depths of hell in less than sixty seconds. But social media is not the internet. It's merely one distorted expression of it. There are other ways to connect, to reason, to lea...

That shipping feeling

"Real artists ship" was one of Steve Jobs' mottos. You can clearly see that ethos still in present-day Apple. There are no far-future tech demos from things in the R&D lab at Apple keynotes. While their car project is the perhaps one of the worst kept secrets in company history, they aren't deliberately trying to flaunt it. Because a t...

The One Person Framework

Seven is the version of Rails I've been longing for. The one where all the cards are on the table. No more tricks up our sleeves. The culmination of years of progress on five different fronts at once. The backend gets some really nice upgrades, especially with the encryption work that we did for HEY, so your data can be encrypted while...

The art of not having a take

The most liberating aspect for me of writing emails rather than tweets is the natural limit on topics I might be tempted to have a take on. When I was primarily writing tweets, I could easily involve myself in a dozen topics in a day. HERE'S A TAKE, THERE'S A TAKE, TAKE THAT! With email, it's a sliver of that. But it goes even deeper t...

I won't let you pay me for my open source

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explores the fascinating history of debt and economies. It starts out by debunking the common myth that prior to coinage, everyone were trapped in this inefficient mode of barter. If you had a chicken to give and wanted sugar from Gandalf, but Gandalf was a vegetarian, you ha...

Heaven is hazy

In trying to understand the ideology of The Elect, as John McWorter calls them, I've found a historical dive into the late 60s and early 70s tremendously productive. The echoes of history provide a strange comfort: We are not the first people to be struggling with this. I don't just mean that in a general sense. That other peoples at o...

Everything popular is problematic

I can completely see why Joe Rogan's podcast has become so popular. I've listened to maybe a dozen shows, and the way he lets his guests talk, at length, feels like a throwback. It doesn't have the intellectualism of a Bryan Magee or the inquisitiveness of a William Buckley, but it does have the spirit of letting people – with whom he,...

The time is right for Hotwire

It's not exactly been a big secret that I've harbored a fair skepticism towards single-page applications over the years. Not because of some innate animosity with JavaScript, at least not the modern variety, which we first tasted in the form of CoffeeScript, then as transpiled ES Next. But because writing and updating HTML like that ne...

Worrying yourself into excess

When we were developing this HEY World system in the beginning of the year, we ended up spending a very considerable amount of time worrying about and discussing all the ways it might be abused. This is the internet after all! Full of savage trolls! Surely we must fortify lest we be overrun? But the trolls never came. Since we launched...

Books that bust bubbles

It's a disorientating time in America. So many societal seams are unraveling simultaneously. So few ideas for how to stitch those seams back together find common cause. No wonder despair and anger comes so easy to so many right now. These dark emotions are then propelled by the particle accelerator that is Twitter into super-charged ta...

Programmers should stop celebrating incompetence

In the valiant effort to combat imposter syndrome and gatekeeping, the programming world has taken a bad turn down a blind alley by celebrating incompetence. You don't have to reduce an entire profession to a clueless gang of copy-pasta pirates to make new recruits feel welcome. It undermines the aspiration to improve. It reduces the w...

Authoritarian hippie parents

There was a time when liberal ideals of self-determination, self-regulation, and free-range independence naturally extended to parenting as well. Such ideals were seen in stark opposition to conservative parenting based on obedience, discipline, and reverence. Today it seems like these roles are often reversed. The strictest parents I ...

It must be worth it even if it doesn't work

The way to work without regrets is to pursue projects that'll have been worth your time even if they don't pan out. Projects that'll tickle your curiosity, flex your competency, and teach you something new regardless of where they ultimately end up. Projects that leave you better off, as a person, despite not being a commercial or crit...

How do you know what people have been working on?

Losing the sense of being in the know about what's going on at the company is one of the most common concerns I hear regarding working remotely. Both at the managerial level and between coworkers. There's a real fear that staying remote for too long will eventually lead to nobody really knowing what's going on, and thus the organizatio...

Stimulus 3 + Turbo 7 = Hotwire 1.0

For so long, it felt like I could only tell half the story of how we make software for the web at Basecamp. Too many of the chapters about our front-end approach were missing key pages. Sure, we had some of it out there. Turbolinks, for example, hark back to 2012, when I was inspired by Chris Wanstrath's ideas in pjax, and took them fu...

Conceptual compression is lossy (and loss hurts)

To make things simpler, you have to take something away. That means giving up something of real value to get something else of greater value still. You can't counter complexity without being willing to sacrifice. That is the nature of conceptual compression. It's why it's so hard to do. People become attached to the choices and advanta...

Your likes, hearts, and flattering comments are bad for my brain

I’ve been publishing controversial thoughts, essays, books and software for half my life. It has endowed me with a thick skin to repel the haters, and kept me going whatever they said. But after close to two decades of having my work often judged favorably, I’m still no better at dealing with gestures of adoration. In fact, I think it’...

Apple's forced IAP is either dead, a joke, or illegal

I can understand Epic's disappointment with the verdict in their trial against Apple. They sought to have the iPhone recognized as the pocket computer it is. One where consumers should have the right to install the applications of their choice, like with any other general-purpose computer, and where developers should be free from extor...

Rails 7 will have three great answers to JavaScript in 2021+

Rails has been unapologetically full stack since the beginning. We've continuously sought to include ever-more default answers to all the major infrastructure questions posed by modern web development. From talking to a database, to sending and receiving emails, to connecting web sockets, to rendering HTML, to integrating with JavaScri...

No one wants to be a code monkey

So many software companies these days are stuck on a ticket treadmill, working a never-ending backlog. When those companies look at Basecamp, they think "this can't work for software development?!", because it's not a ticket feeder. Heads explode when I tell them we do everything in Basecamp. That's the challenge of selling software ou...

Japan bends Apple another inch on the App Store

Is there a country anywhere in the world without an open investigation into Apple's monopoly abuses with the App Store? It seems like we can barely go a month, let alone a week, between announcements of new inquiries, new laws, new settlements, new scrutiny. Change comes slowly, then all at once, eh? Now it's Japan's turn. The Japanese...

South Korea just killed the 30% app-store cut

Apple and Google knew from the start of this fight that they couldn't afford to lose even once. That's why they pulled out all the stops stops to intimidate the Senate in North Dakota. That's why they spared no expense on the backroom deal to kill the Arizona bill. But now they've finally met a legislature they couldn't bully or buy: T...

Apple's new settlement is a corrupt joke

There's this iconic scene in the movie Fight Club where Edward Norton's character is sitting together with his boss, and they're negotiating some enterprise software sales deal on a dreary Monday morning. The boss is being dazzled with the usual, trite spiel that enterprise sales people lay on middle managers, like "waste is a thief". ...

Modern web apps without JavaScript bundling or transpiling

I didn't much care for vanilla JavaScript prior to ES6. Through all of the 2000s, I chased different approaches to avoid writing too much of it. First there was RJS (Ruby-to-JavaScript). Then there was CoffeeScript. Both transpiling approaches that turned more enjoyable-to-write source code into the kind of JavaScript that browsers wou...

Too many fights on too many fronts

Compared to its big tech compatriots, Apple has only recently reached Grand Scrutiny Station. The place where everything you do is met first with skepticism and scrutiny – by an influential segment of the masses and the media – more so than courtesy or curiosity. That's undoubtedly a foreign place for Apple, after so many years of unad...

Broken software invites collaboration

After two decades of open source participation, I’ve found it easier to cultivate community collaboration around software that’s obviously a little broken. Waiting until the project is pristine before sharing it with the world creates an aura of perfection that intimidates and alienates. So releasing before every bug has been squashed,...

Here comes the law

It always seems impossible until it’s done. And few fights have demonstrated this more than that against the monopoly abuses of big tech. For over a decade, the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have been able to get away with murder in digital markets without fear of consequences. Wrapping their tentacles ever more forceful...

Bringing Hotwire to Basecamp

Hotwire is now powering Basecamp 3 on the alpha version we're running internally, and I thought it'd be helpful to document the upgrade process. Although upgrading is perhaps a big word. It's not like we rewrote all the JavaScript we have to make this happen. Coexisting is probably a better term. While existing JavaScript code stays as...

Email spy pixels are dead now that Apple will follow HEY

There's no advocacy as effective as competition. I could have yelled and screamed about email spy pixels till I was blue in the face, but it was building a serious set of defenses into HEY that turned the argument into action. And now the entire email tracking industry is about to be turned upside down, as Apple has announced they'll f...

We're hiring!

In the past few weeks, we've filled a bunch of vacancies at Basecamp with wonderful new coworkers. People we mainly found through our personal networks and other informal channels. But now it's time for the first big open call. We always do these with a bit of trepidation, because it's a lot of work. We usually get hundreds of applicat...

Building Basecamp 4

Since launching Basecamp in 2004, we've rewritten the entire system not once but twice. First with Basecamp 2 in 2012, then with Basecamp 3 in 2015. Yet unlike other infamous rewrites, we didn't do it due to technical debt. We did it because we wanted Basecamp to be a radically different product every time. The big ideas that animated ...

You'll pay for it either way

“If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it – Henry Ford” I was thinking of this quote all week, as I worked on a new internal operating tool for supporting Basecamp. We must have wasted thousands of hours over the years on routine support questions for Basecamp tha...

Targeted ads are staggeringly unpopular so we should ban them

People really don't like getting tracked around the internet by targeted ads. I mean really, really don't like it. A staggering 96% of users in the US are declining the privilege of being followed around their apps and websites for the grand prize of "more relevant ads" when given the choice in iOS 14.5. The American public can barely ...

Who owns your iPhone?

You can spend up to $1,399 on an iPhone 12 Pro Max in the US, but even though the button to commit to this extravagant purchase says "buy", the transaction isn't really a sale in the traditional sense. Because even if you pay lavishly for this magnificent pocket computer, it's never truly yours. The Right To Repair You'd think that aft...

Not just what you read but how

The concept of a media diet has gotten a lot of attention, and it's surely an important one. If you fill your mind with drivel, it'll soak your thoughts in kind. But how you choose to fill your mind matters too. Even if the sources are ace. For many years, I consumed media in a continuous, never-ending stream from morning till night. I...

Speeding up HEY's The Feed

Modern emails are essentially HTML pages. Particularly newsletters, which are full of images, styles, and tables. Showing these HTML emails inside a web-based email client is not a trivial problem. Unlike a normal HTML page that has the whole browser to itself, these HTML emails have to be shown inside the navigational chrome of the em...

After the storm

It's been three weeks since Jason and I announced the set of workplace policychanges that led to a public firestorm and a really difficult, stressful time for everyone at Basecamp. Since then, we've been regrouping, hiring new colleagues, and continued operating our services without a hitch. We have a great team in place, and everyone ...

Let it all out

Casey's reporting for The Verge brought some of the dirty laundry that helped motivate our change of directionregarding societal politics at Basecamp onto the public record. It erased part of that fine line we try to toe between sharing as much of the inner workings at the company as possible while respecting the confidentiality of emp...

Mosaics of positions

If you learn enough about someone, you'll eventually be disappointed or dismayed. This is nature, this is normal. While some conservatives love to throw the word snowflake around as an insult, I take it as a compliment. The most interesting people I know really are unique, quirky, and even contradictory. To illustrate, I'm going to lis...

Don't promise, just ship

Despite telling ourselves and the world that software roadmaps are a bad idea for well over a decade, we still made the mistake with HEY and custom domains. I'm sympathetic to why we did that – given just the endless avalanche of requests! – but a mistake it was. The first problem with roadmaps, and other kinds of explicit or implicit ...

Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work

Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees at Basecamp. As c...

Legacy without nostalgia

It was Signal v Noise that connected Jason and I, back in 2001. A quick call for programming help, answered from four thousand miles away, lead to a twenty-years-and-counting partnership. It was on Signal v Noise where Jason and I first wrote most of the essays that became REWORK, which has since sold over half a million copies around ...

HEY will soon let you recycle your emails

Gmail taught us to save every email forever so they'd have an endless data trove to mine for purchases, behaviors, and connections. Endless fields for machine learning to roam wild, sowed by the anxiety of WHAT IF I NEED IT ONE DAY. But saving every email you've ever gotten does not make any sense. Neither ecologically, practically, or...

Apple is an accomplice to fraud

Today's blockbuster story in The Verge about Apple's gross negligence in managing the App Store is wild. Wilder than wild, it's bananas. Absolutely bonkers. Go read it right now, then come back. Didn't I tell you? B-a-n-a-n-a-s. How on earth does a two-trillion-dollar company like Apple allow themselves to be exposed like this? That's ...

What is a computer?

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it was a milestone for the tech industry. They called it a phone, but the revolution was shrinking a general-purpose computer to fit in your pocket. That was the progress. But when Apple introduced the App Store the next year, it cemented the fundamental regression that had been present with the ...

The App Store is broken because it wasn't designed to work

When Kosta Eleftheriou first started revealing scam upon scam in the App Store, I have to admit I didn't quite get it. How were all these multi-million dollar scams being allowed into the App Store in the first place? And why weren't they being expediently removed when scores of customers complained in their 1-star reviews? The answer ...

Stop talking about product

Business people just can't stop referring to whatever their company makes as "the product". It's the great tell of whether someone's in it for the business or the beat. You hear it all the time. Car executives who talk about "producing compelling products" rather than "making good cars". Game executives who talk about "best-selling pro...

It's hard to draw lessons from your own failures

Andrew Wilkinson's tale of how he blew $10,000,000 building a to-do list app perfectly illustrates the danger of trying to analyze your own failures. It's so easy to fall in love with one of those infinite alternate universes where you just did that one thing differently and everything worked out. Like "if only we had raised venture ca...

No more platforms please

We have enough social media platforms, and they are all broken. Content moderation is bust at even moderate scale, and algorithmic amplification is broken at any scale. We need a reboot. We need to double down on the ideas of Web 1.0, and the tools that make carving out your own place on the internet possible. Not more platforms luring...

A world without trust is not better

One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression. (There are a millio...

Google affirms the duopoly grip by following Apple's 15%-on-the-fir...

I can imagine Machiavelli advising Apple on attempting to appease App Store scrutiny by throwing some inconsequential concessions into the ring: What if y'all just lowered the totally obscene 30% cut of revenues to a merely utterly obscene 15%, but then only for the first million in revenue? It would cost you bupkis, but the plebs migh...

Apple in China: Privacy, principles, purses, and pickles

It's easy to commit to principles when they don't cost you anything. That's why most mission statements ring so hollow. They're filled with free platitudes, and thus provide no guidance on how to actually drive "the mission" when trade-offs must be made. That's by design. The flowery mission statement is usually meant as a fig leaf ove...

What you read is none of their business

There's this scene in the 90s movie Se7en where the detectives played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are able to hone in on the serial killer via a secret FBI program that monitors people's library habits. The killer, played by Kevin Spacey, has been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and other books about the seve...

The totalitarians of the attention economy

It's become increasingly common for executives of dominant internet services to see their competition as all of human activity. Not just activity spent on competing or adjacent services, no, all activity of any kind. Any time spent outside their service equating to minutes on the clock to conquer. The latest example of this totalitaria...

Memento mori illuminator

I really like watches. Not so much because I need to precisely tell time all that often – most of my days, the calendar is pretty empty – but because they remind me that I'm going to die. That reminder of death is a reminder to make time count. Forget about productivity, though. The notion that TIME = MONEY – squandered unless invested...

It all began with an email

I must have told the story a hundred times. How I'd been a fan of 37signals since the company was founded in 1999, how I saw a post on Signal v Noise where Jason asked about a programming problem in 2001, and how the answer I sent in an email led to us working together for the next twenty years. But some of the details were always a li...

Keep HEY weird

We're planning the next cycle for HEY right now. As always, there's an almost unlimited number of things we could do. We've never been short on our own ideas, we've never been short on feature requests. That's software development! But with HEY, the process of picking what to do next has a new important directive: Keep HEY weird. Keep ...

The enclosure of internet commons

In Less Is More, Jason Hickel provides a brief history of capitalism from the year circa 1500 onward, which includes an account of the European enclosure movement. Where formerly public commons, like forest, streams, meadows, and land of all types, were turned into private property with titles and deeds for the lords to exploit. Ending...

Google suffers from a digital petro curse

The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the international market on top of...

The Arizona House stands up to Apple and Google

It passed! It fricken passed. I could barely contain my excitement when I saw the tweet from Matt Stoller that the Arizona House passed HB2005. This is the anti-monopoly bill that will prevent Apple and Google from using their gatekeeper role in mobile to force developers to use their exorbitantly-priced payment processing, and stop th...

You gotta read Less Is More

This gushing review was first posted to our automatic check-in question in Basecamp: What are you reading? Normally I do a big batch of everything I've been reading for several months, but right now I'm so enamored with Jason Hickel's new book Less Is More that I didn't want to wait! I've been a fan of Hickel since I heard him on the C...

Thinking about HEY World's potential for abuse

The internet can be a pretty grim place, and if you're building software here, you better think about how it can be abused, because odds are that it will. We thought a lot about that with HEY itself. It was one of the key motivating factors behind the screener. Which, immediately after launch, both Jason and I learned is a life-saver i...

Apple can brick your computer if you miss a payment to Goldman Sach...

I talk a lot about the problem with big tech not just being monopoly power, but also conglomerate power. Fingers in a million pies. Here's a sample from my testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives: “Apple is now involved in offering credit cards, producing TV shows, curating news, offering fitness classes, commissioning vi...

Remote-work surveillance software is vile

You could have hoped that as the pandemic wore on, the initial rush of companies to adopt employee-surveillance software would peter out. They'd realize that the biggest problem with working remotely is usually not that employees work too little, but that they work too much. No such luck. Employee-surveillance software seems to be as p...

Antitrust comes slowly then all at once

If you would have asked me a couple of years ago whether I thought big tech faced any material threat to their dominance from governments, I would have said no. Because it's been twenty years since the last time any of them did. For basically my entire career, big tech has gotten away with whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Th...

Why Apple, Google, and the rest of email's big players let spy pixe...

After the BBC ran their big story on spy pixels being endemic, there's been a surge of interest in the phenomenon. And for a very good reason: Most people still don't know they're being spied upon when opening emails, and they're shocked when they learn that they are! I went on CNBC Europe this morning to talk about spy pixels, and one...

Organic food used to be niche like privacy is today

I don't remember when I first heard about organic food, but I do remember only knowing one family growing up where the term was even mentioned. This was in the 90s, and my awareness of pesticides, factory farming, cage chickens, antibiotics-pumped pigs, and the other ingredients of industrial food production simply didn't occupy space ...

We will monetize by charging money

People are rightfully skeptical about new apps and services on the internet. The industry has a terrible record of conning folks into using something new "for free", then either selling their data to advertisers, selling them in bulk to an acquirer, or just shutting down entirely when the hockey stick can't hit the moonshot into orbit ...

Less software

As a software maker, it's rare you'll hear customers ask for fewer features, fewer options, or really any degree of less software. The customers you'll hear from are the people who want more. And if you juuuust add that one extra thing (or ten!) they'll stay or they'll signup or they'll upgrade or they'll tell their friends (and if you...

Testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives

I delivered this testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives today in support of HB2005, which will give all app developers the right to choose their own payment processor, as well as protection from retaliation if they do so. It was a closely contested bill, but in the end passed the committee in a 7 to 6 vote. You can read ...