How we achieve “simple design” for Basecamp and HEY

Yesterday I got an email asking how we achieve simple designs for Basecamp and HEY, so I hastily tweeted | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The evolution HEY: from humble beginnings to a multi-platform email service

Two weeks ago we released HEY into the world, the culmination of 2+ years of explorations and intensely focused work. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: inventing a new product from sc… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The evolution of HEY: from humble beginnings to a multi-platform email service

Two weeks ago we released HEY into the world, the culmination of 2+ years of explorations and intensely focused work. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: inventing a new product from sc… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Towards carbon negativity

Humans have been pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere at an unsustainable rate. It’s on us to reverse course as quickly as possible to stay below the tipping point of 1.5℃ global warmin… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Towards carbon negativity

Humans have been pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere at an unsustainable rate. It’s on us to reverse course as quickly as possible to stay below the tipping point of 1.5℃ global warmin… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS

Since we started working on HEY, one of the things that I’ve been a big proponent of was keeping as much of the app-side compute infrastructure on spot instances as possible (front-end and as… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS

Since we started working on HEY, one of the things that I’ve been a big proponent of was keeping as much of the app-side compute infrastructure on spot instances as possible (front-end and as… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Black Lives Matter

Today, on Juneteenth, it is important to us to take a pause and publicly recognize organizations, activists, campaigns, and journalists that have been doing the work, fighting everyday for a more j… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Black Lives Matter

Today, on Juneteenth, it is important to us to take a pause and publicly recognize organizations, activists, campaigns, and journalists that have been doing the work, fighting everyday for a more j… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Basecamp's Alternative to Employee Options

Employees can still benefit from a sale or liquidity event without offering equity or options. Here’s how we do it. A few years ago at one of our semi-annual Basecamp company meetups, the topic of … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Celebrating 3 million accounts (fewer)

We recently deleted over three million accounts across all our apps. This was the answer to a question we asked ourselves last year: what should we do about  accounts that weren’t cancelled, b… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Celebrating 3 million accounts (fewer)

We recently deleted over three million accounts across all our apps. This was the answer to a question we asked ourselves last year: what should we do about  accounts that weren’t cancelled, b… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

On current events

It’s easy to say what a year, what a week. But that’s a shortsighted, privileged point of view. I’m guilty of holding that occasional perspective. It’s moments like these th… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

On current events

It’s easy to say what a year, what a week. But that’s a shortsighted, privileged point of view. I’m guilty of holding that occasional perspective. It’s moments like these th… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years (2016)

When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp

We’ve been teaching people how to do remote work well for the better part of two decades. We wrote a whole book about the topic in 2013, called REMOTE: Office Not Required. Basecamp has been a remo… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp

We’ve been teaching people how to do remote work well for the better part of two decades. We wrote a whole book about the topic in 2013, called REMOTE: Office Not Required. Basecamp has been a remo… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Hiring programmers with a take-home test

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Hiring programmers with a take-home test

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes

Basecamp’s newest product HEY has lived on Kubernetes since development first began. While our applications are majestic monoliths, a product like HEY has numerous supporting services that ru… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes

Basecamp’s newest product HEY has lived on Kubernetes since development first began. While our applications are majestic monoliths, a product like HEY has numerous supporting services that ru… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

We’ve refreshed our policies

Spring is emerging in the US and as part of our company spring cleaning, we took a peek at our product policies, noticed some cobwebs, and got out the duster. Besides rewriting sections to be more … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

We’ve refreshed our policies

Spring is emerging in the US and as part of our company spring cleaning, we took a peek at our product policies, noticed some cobwebs, and got out the duster. Besides rewriting sections to be more … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of service… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of service… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Why HEY had to wait

We had originally planned to release HEY, our new email service, in April. There was the final cycle to finish the features, there was a company meetup planned for the end of the month to celebrate… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Why HEY had to wait

We had originally planned to release HEY, our new email service, in April. There was the final cycle to finish the features, there was a company meetup planned for the end of the month to celebrate… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Working remotely builds organizational resiliency

For many, moving from everyone’s-working-from-the-office to everyone’s-working-at-home isn’t so much a transition as it is a scramble. A very how the fuck? moment. That’s na… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Working remotely builds organizational resiliency

For many, moving from everyone’s-working-from-the-office to everyone’s-working-at-home isn’t so much a transition as it is a scramble. A very how the fuck? moment. That’s na… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Live Q&A on remote working, working from home, and running a business remotely

In this livesteam, David and I answer audience questions about how to work remotely. At Basecamp we’ve been working remotely for nearly 20 years, so we have a lot of experience to share. This… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

A live tour of how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run Basecamp

David and I spent nearly 2-hours giving a livestream tour of our very own Basecamp account. We wanted to show you how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run projects, communicate internally, share announcem… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp

People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here&… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp

People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here&… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

How we acquired HEY.com

Back on June 9, 2018, I cold emailed help@hey.com: Hey there-Curious… Would you entertain an offer to sell hey.com? I’d like to use it for something I’m working on, and willing to make … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

How we acquired HEY.com

Back on June 9, 2018, I cold emailed help@hey.com: Hey there-Curious… Would you entertain an offer to sell hey.com? I’d like to use it for something I’m working on, and willing to make … | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Keep digging

I’m reviewing transcripts from interviews we did with customers last year and came across a nice example of interview technique. The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where t… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Keep digging

I’m reviewing transcripts from interviews we did with customers last year and came across a nice example of interview technique. The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where t… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The books I read in 2019

Here are all my extracted answers from our monthly Basecamp check-in question of What are you reading? for 2019. (See also my answers from 2016, 2017, and 2018). The Sane SocietyAnother Fromm tome!… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

The books I read in 2019

Here are all my extracted answers from our monthly Basecamp check-in question of What are you reading? for 2019. (See also my answers from 2016, 2017, and 2018). The Sane SocietyAnother Fromm tome!… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Mailing list software should stop spying on subscribers

The internet is finally coming out of its long haze on privacy, but it’s with one hell of a hangover. So many practices that were once taken for granted are now getting a second, more critical look… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Mailing list software should stop spying on subscribers

The internet is finally coming out of its long haze on privacy, but it’s with one hell of a hangover. So many practices that were once taken for granted are now getting a second, more critical look… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp (2016)

Six weeks • One cycle An inside look at the specifics of how we decide what to do and then decide how to do it. “How do you guys actually work? How do you choose what to do? How big are y… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Integrated systems for integrated programmers

One of the great tragedies of modern web development over the last five years or so has been the irrational exuberance for microservices. The idea that making a single great web application had sim… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Integrated systems for integrated programmers

One of the great tragedies of modern web development over the last five years or so has been the irrational exuberance for microservices. The idea that making a single great web application had sim… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

DHH Testimony Before the House Antitrust Subcommittee

My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chicago that sells project-management and team-collaboration software. When we launche… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Testimony Before the House Antitrust Subcommittee

My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chicago that sells project-management and team-collaboration software. When we launche… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Testimony before the House Antitrust Subcommittee

My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chicago that sells project-management and team-collaboration software. When we launche… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago

Basecamp is hiring a Programmer

We’re hiring a programmer to join our Research & Fidelity team to help shape the front end of our Rails applications and expand our suite of open-source JavaScript frameworks. We’re accepting a… | Continue reading


@m.signalvnoise.com | 5 years ago