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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 wor … | Continue reading
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 tha … | Continue reading
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 busin … | Continue reading
“What product impressed you the most last week?” is a question I’ve asked myself for some time. In January 2022 the answer was obvious, “Wordle – A Daily Word Game". At the time I answered: “Wordle has taken the world by storm and is incredibly elegant. It's so successful that wh … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Before you dive in: • JTBD interviews are designed to discover the underlying motivations or the real reasons behind a buying decision • These are typically wildly different from what customers will say in surveys or traditional interviews • The theory of JTBD is that customers d … | Continue reading
Before joining 37signals I hadn't encountered Puma-dev. This post is a message to past-me who would have benefited from using it to develop a constellation of Ruby on Rails applications. A pretty typical setup for an organisation with a Ruby on Rails monolith is to at some point … | Continue reading
Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. To celebrate that this turned out to be completely false, here are some assorted reflections as a 40-year-old programme … | Continue reading
From the start of my career, I've known the products I've worked on inside and out. Not only how they work, but why they work that way—from how one feature intertwines with another to the reasons others were never built. Joining two startups while the employee count was still in … | Continue reading
I've been using Twitter for almost a decade now. At no point I have really felt at home on the site though. The short form writing style always felt inadequate for any subject more complicated than sports. All the while, Twitter is designed to be addictive, so I always felt it wa … | Continue reading
"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 applica … | Continue reading
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 regre … | Continue reading
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 hoo … | Continue reading
We all know it’s important to work with people. That’s collaboration. But it’s perhaps even more important to learn how to work around people. To uncollaborate. Not by ignoring them or dismissing them. But moving without them because they simply aren’t available to move with you. … | Continue reading
This weekend I took a long walk with a fellow founder/CEO. We talked on the phone before, but never met in person. We found ourselves in the same city, so it felt like it was time to shake hands and catch up IRL. He runs a company that's an order or magnitude larger than 37signal … | Continue reading
Do you know how some apps (Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, Nova) have a shortcut you can type to bring up a command palette to do more quickly get to menu items? Paletro is an app that adds that functionality to every app on macOS. I've been using it for a few days now, and it' … | Continue reading
One of the first things I did when I started working at 37signals almost three years ago was cloning the git repo for Basecamp. I poked around and ended up at this method: module Person::Tombstonable ... def decease case when deceasable? erect_tombstone remove_administratorships … | Continue reading
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 s … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Ever find yourself about to ship something that isn't good enough? You know it, you feel it, but you still want to get it out there because regardless of outcome, lots of work went into it. You want something to show for it. You can often make yourself feel a lot better by wrappi … | Continue reading
"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 … | Continue reading
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 po … | Continue reading
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 condit … | Continue reading
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 u … | Continue reading
When we launched our company in 1999, we were called 37signals. We started out as a web design firm that ultimately transitioned into a software company. As 37signals, we made a bunch of products over the years including Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, Highrise, and others. We wrot … | Continue reading
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 t … | Continue reading
Last week, I exceeded my goal of raising $200k for Senseg. It was quite the leap to go from tinkering in the metaphorical basement to having other people deposit their life savings into my company's very real bank account. At the beginning of March, I didn't have a company, let a … | Continue reading
We've worked remotely for nearly 20 years, but we've sustained the distance by lining up intense, one-week-together-in-person bursts twice a year. Over the last 10 years, we've mainly held these bi-annual all-company meetups at our Chicago office. But the combination of the pande … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 incr … | Continue reading
There is something about progress that hides past decisions into new solutions. Throughout history, problems are solved with tools that generate other problems that are solved with other tools. This keeps looping until we forget the whys. "Why does almost every User-Agent starts … | Continue reading
A friend of mine is pissed off. He hired someone to replace a bunch of windows at his house. The guy did the work. Poorly. And now it turns out he needs to have everything redone. Given how badly the job went, he's going to work with someone else to get it done right the second t … | Continue reading
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 fosteri … | Continue reading
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 application … | Continue reading
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. … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
As someone who's been hiring people for 23 years, I've seen, read, and reviewed tens of thousands of job applications. The ones that typically rise to the top are the ones that demonstrate effort to get this job, and not just any job. We recently hired our first Email Marketing M … | Continue reading
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: Bitco … | Continue reading
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 gi … | Continue reading
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 sli … | Continue reading
Over the past few months I've been taking guitar lessons from a friend of mine who happens to be an exceptional teacher. I got lucky. I used to play years ago, but probably only retained 10% of what I knew, so I was as close to starting from scratch as any barely-experienced play … | Continue reading
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 exer … | Continue reading
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 s … | Continue reading
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 onl … | Continue reading