The 5 reasons why people tend to micromanage in the workplace – and how to manage up, and around them. I’ve heard the phrase, “I have a micromanaging boss,” more times than I can remember. I heard … | Continue reading
Yesterday at 12:45pm central time, our ops team detected a dramatic spike in login requests to Basecamp. More than 30,000 login attempts were made in the hour that followed from a wide array of IP … | Continue reading
Since our company is itself our most important product, we keep tweaking, experimenting, and – hopefully! – improving the organizational software that makes it run. Here’s an example of how w… | Continue reading
We received over 700 applications to the opening for a data analyst at Basecamp last Fall. There were a lot of qualified candidates, but in the end it was Jane Yang who bubbled to the top, and this… | Continue reading
The folks at Basecamp have been blogging since 1999, when Jason Fried would write by the light of a fire fueled by David Heinemeier Hansson’s savage indictments of the tech industry. A lot has chan… | Continue reading
The web isn’t just another software platform. It’s the greatest software platform the world has ever seen. And yet even in its obvious glory, we’re still learning how to be grateful for all its con… | Continue reading
I wish ad-supported services could look at my average usage (# of pages I’ve viewed, ads I’ve seen, etc), and give me an option to directly pay them the same amount they would have charged the adve… | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has become especially good at turning software, the highest margin product ever, into many of the worst performing businesses imaginable. With few exceptions, the amount of money bei… | Continue reading
During the dotcom boom back in the late 90s, I did a bunch of Photoshop-cut jobs. You know, where a designer throws a PSD file over the wall to an HTML monkey to slice and dice. It was miserable. T… | Continue reading
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of t… | Continue reading
David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried are fans of Marie Kondo’s 2014 bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which is back in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to her new Netflix show. I… | Continue reading
Last week I was in NY to record a podcast with Kara Swisher of Recode. I’ve been reading and watching Kara for years, so it was a distinct thrill to finally get to sit opposite her and talk t… | Continue reading
Playing to your strengths as a leader doesn’t make you a good manager. Here’s why. Of all the tips to be a good manager, “leaning into your strengths” has got to be one of the most frequently cited… | Continue reading
Now a tradition in its third year (see 2016 and 2017). Here are all my extracted answers to our monthly Basecamp check-in question of What are you reading? Notes from UndergroundFyodor Dostoyevsky … | Continue reading
Looks like I may be doing it right. This is exactly why we don’t have shared calendars at Basecamp. At Basecamp, everyone controls their own calendar, and no one can see anyone else’s schedul… | Continue reading
Maximilian Büsser is the MB in MB&F. They make wholly original mechanical creations – most of which tell time and fit on your wrist. MB&F’s machines are an acquired taste, and t… | Continue reading
I’m generally patient over the long term, but I can be impatient in the short term. But, really, what’s the rush? Why the hurry? I’ve been asking myself this question more and more lately. A new year is a good excuse to make a change, so in 2019 I’ve decided to put on some wait. … | Continue reading
Elephants wouldn’t be killed for their tusks if there wasn’t a demand for ivory. We can do all sorts of things to discourage poachers, but as long as the market is there, the killings will continue… | Continue reading
Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership t… | Continue reading
Web developers: here’s an alternative way to build UI features that rely on scroll position without actually observing scroll events. Using the Intersection Observer API we can know when an element… | Continue reading
I’ve been a designer for nearly twenty years now (😮), with the last seven years spent happily at Basecamp. I enjoy my work and I care about it a lot. Since I’ve been doing this for a long time, occ… | Continue reading
Signal v Noise post from the year 2000. The more things change, the more they stay the same 😂 | Continue reading
On Thursday, November 8, Basecamp 3 went down for almost five hours. It was the worst outage to hit the company in a decade and a stress test of Basecamp’s practices around internal communica… | Continue reading
Quitting Facebook. Renouncing Uber. Avoiding Amazon. There have never been more or greater reasons for turning your back entirely on much of Big Tech. The last few years have brought an endless str… | Continue reading
Doug gets it, most don’t. Look around YouTube at car reviews, and you’ll see a lot of people standing in front of cars. Below I’ve snapped captures of early frames in six car reviews. These re… | Continue reading
Fantastic branding It’s been said that your name is your favorite word. Likewise, a brand’s name is its favorite word. Pair their name with their logo, and it’s a self-love fest. You can see this p… | Continue reading
Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and… | Continue reading
If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t… | Continue reading
If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether… | Continue reading
Oh those superhuman CEOs who get up at 4am for that killer start to the day! Aren’t they just amazing? Such sacrifice, such grit, such tenacity. Such fucking bullshit. If you’re the CEO, and you ca… | Continue reading
We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans… | Continue reading
For the last decade or so, I’ve been on a number on boards, consulted with a number of entrepreneurs, and have been both formally and… | Continue reading
If you really set your mind to it, you can do it. Get to the very top. Beat out all the others. That’s how I did it. I just wanted it more… | Continue reading
If you really set your mind to it, you can do it. Get to the very top. Beat out all the others. That’s how I did it. I just wanted it more… | Continue reading
I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an… | Continue reading
I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an… | Continue reading
I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an… | Continue reading
I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an… | Continue reading
Last Thursday, November 9th, Basecamp 3 was in read-only mode for almost five hours starting 7:21am CST and ending 12:11pm CST. That meant… | Continue reading
Basecamp 3 is currently in read-only mode because of a database problem. This means that you can’t post new messages, rearrange todos… | Continue reading
I’m trying to remember when it was last this crazy at work. Before we spent a month fighting poor planning and terrible execution on our… | Continue reading
Is looking at how someone works “under pressure” a good thing? | Continue reading
(Adapted from a keynote I gave at Lean Digital Summit in Lisbon this month.) | Continue reading
Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen. | Continue reading
One of the things I love about our flexible work environment at Basecamp is the freedom to step away from something whenever I need to. | Continue reading
The problem with management in small teams and businesses is that it’s often not a full-time job. Smart, capable workers need some… | Continue reading
Brian Acton does not sound like the happy, fulfilled guy the stereotype of billionairedom would have you believe. He sounds like someone… | Continue reading