We’re hiring another iOS developer to help us build great native apps for Basecamp on all Apple platforms. You’ll join an existing iOS team at Basecamp that’s currently hard at work building a next-generation native app, but you’ll also help keep our legacy catalogue of apps humming.

It’s an offering for an experienced developer. You should have multiple shipped iOS apps under your belt (or one amazing one). You should be well-versed in iOS frameworks and APIs, but also be comfortable going off the golden path when necessary.

Our native development approach at Basecamp is hybrid. We combine great native navigation around WebViews and ground-up native features to get the best of both worlds: Productivity through shared codebases on the web, and great fidelity through native.

So while the bulk of the work is in ObjC/Swift, you should also be reasonably comfortable with both JavaScript and Ruby. Enhancing a Rails application to extend the API or tinkering with Turbolinks to make it work with a native-JavaScript bridge shouldn’t scare you.

It’s a great time to join Basecamp and our iOS team. We’ve recently gone all-in on Basecamp. Millions of people have used Basecamp, and our iOS apps are both well-liked and growing rapidly as the way people use the system. The latest work we’ve been doing, and that you’ll help us finish, will make that even more so the case.

We’re looking for someone who’s ready to do the best work of their career – without risking their health, sanity, or life outside of work. Basecamp is here for the long term. We’ve been in business for 16 years (5 before Basecamp, 11 since Basecamp), and we’ve been profitable the whole time. We’re not beholden to or on any venture capitalist timeline. Private and profitable allows us to set our own course given what’s best for our customers and employees.

We believe in taking great care of our incredible team, most of whom have been with us for a long time. This means lovely benefits to help you be the best you possible: fitness and massage allowances, fresh fruit/vegetable subsidies, helping out with continued education, matching charity donations, and of course great healthcare and retirement assistance (401k match in US). When you’ve been here for a year, you’re also in on Fridays off in the Summer. It’s a great package that’s part of creating a great scene.

Since we literally wrote the book on working remotely, we’re of course also open to applicants from both the Americas and Europe (any further away is tough to get enough timezone overlap). We do, however, expect your proficiency with English to be at or close to a native speaker. If you happen to be in Chicago, we have a great office for you to work from as you please. If not, we’ll pay for co-working space or help you outfit a great home office.

Does this sound like you?

Then please write [email protected] with [iOS Developer] as part of the subject line. We strongly encourage you to kill on the cover letter, but also to include links to some actual code you’ve written. If the code is on Github, you can share a private repo with dhh. (If it’s not possible to share code, that’s not a deal killer either, if you can blow us away otherwise).

Remember, it doesn’t matter where you went to school (or if you even graduated). We don’t care about how many years of irrelevance you have under your belt. The work is what matters as well as your willingness to improve yourself and everything you touch. We look forward to hearing from you!

(This opening has been cross-posted to WeWorkRemotely.com as well).

I’ve been messing around with Adobe’s new Character Animator software recently. It’s a pretty wild program that uses your webcam to track facial movements, your computer’s microphone to do lip sync, mouse inputs for extra animations, a fair amount of physics to make things dangle and sway, applies those to a puppet, and spits it all out into After Effects.

The software, which is still in public preview, comes with a bunch of ready-made puppets to play with, but I figured our own Happy Camper needed a proper treatment.

The puppet comes with all the mouth-shapes you would need to have a nice lip sync, it blinks when you blink, looks surprised when you open your mouth really wide and has mousetrack points on each hand and foot.

So, if you have Character Animator (shows up when you update Adobe After Effects) Download the Happy Camper puppet for yourself!

Because the software is still in public preview there are still a few bugs and workarounds you may need to overcome to get the puppet to work properly, so if you need any help feel free to get at me on Twitter and if you make any fun videos using Happy Camper, show us!

Special thanks to Nate Otto for the fantastic artwork.

Behind the Scenes posts take you inside Basecamp for a look at an aspect of how our products are built and run.

In our quest to make Basecamp as fast as possible for users all around the world, we recently decided to elevate awareness of page load performance for staff users. We wanted speed to be something we always think about, so for the last couple of months Basecamp staff have been seeing a little something extra when they’re logged in to Basecamp: “Oracle”, our performance widget.

Oracle uses the Navigation Timing and Resource Timing APIs that are implemented in most browsers to track how many requests are made in the course of loading a page, how long the page takes to load, how much time was spent waiting for the first byte of content to be received vs. parsing and loading scripts and styles, and how much time was actually spent processing the request within Rails itself. On browsers that don’t support those APIs, we degrade gracefully to present as much information as possible.

Mobile staff users don’t miss out on the fun—we include a stripped down version of the widget at the bottom of every page:

If you need Oracle out of the way you can drag it wherever you want, or just minimize it into a little logo in the bottom corner of the page:

This data for staff users is sent up to our internal dashboard, which enables us to diagnose slow page loads in more detail. When staff click on the toolbar after a slow page load, they load a page in our dashboard that looks like this:

This page shows the full request/response waterfall, including DNS resolution, TCP connection, SSL negotiation, request and server runtime, downloading, and DOM processing. It also shows timing for the additional assets or ancillary requests that were loaded.

One of the most useful features of Oracle is having instant access to all of the logs for a request. Clicking on the request ID under “Initial request” will load the Rails, load balancer, and any other logs for the first request of the page load.

In addition to presenting the raw Rails logs for the request, we also try to do a little bit of helpful work for you—we identify duplicated queries, possible N+1 queries, cache hit rates, etc. In most cases, timing details and logs are available in the dashboard within two seconds of the page load completing.

Oracle is just one of the tools we put to work to try to make Basecamp fast for all users. Read more about other things we do to keep Basecamp fast and available for you.

Entrepreneurial lore is rife with odes to hunger as a foundational necessity of success. Hungry founders are commended as the ones desperate enough to do whatever it takes. Hustle the gullible, bend the law, persevere through endless death marches. Whatever it takes.

But is desperation really the best foundation to build the kind of sustainable and long-term businesses the world benefits from the most? Or, is it rather a cheap trick to juice the odds of a short-term pop to the primary benefit of those who are only ever along for a quick ride?

I believe the latter. That it’s key to a narrative that serves those who extract their riches from the startup mining shafts — venture capitalists.

That’s what really gets to me. Champions of hunger-as-a-badge-of-honor are usually the fattest cats in the land. Extolling the virtue of an empty stomach is unsurprisingly easy when it’s something for others to endure.

And what a rotten virtue in any case. Poor decisions are the natural consequence of an empty stomach. Hunger has a Maslowian way of placing itself on the top of your hierarchy of needs. Whatever focus is gained through the tunnel vision of hunger is quickly overshadowed by the accompanying disregard for all else.

It’s the incarnation of short-term priorities. Primal neural pathways taking over. Fight or flight at every encounter. And not just for the time it takes to get to the first taste of success. Habits formed from hunger, like any other habits, gleefully outlive their founding context, and continue to govern behavior long after it is gone and forgotten.

It need not be this way. It’s not only entirely possible, but vastly preferable, to set off a new venture on a full stomach. Building the new not because of a perceived existential threat if you don’t succeed, but simply because building the new is intrinsically rewarding.

It’s also that much easier to keep your moral compass calibrated and pointed in a sustainable, healthy direction when you can focus on your own thoughts and not a growling stomach. It’s how you build businesses and organizations that aren’t just about fulfilling your own personal and immediate needs, but instead bring about respect – possibly even admiration – from customers, employees, founders, and perhaps even competitors.

Hunger is a stick for nobility to beat peasants into submission. Mistaking its abuse for inspiration is an entirely avoidable travesty. It’s time to pick another source of motivation for starting new businesses.

We introduced The Distance podcast in February as a companion to our longform written stories about businesses that have stood the test of time. In just a few months, we’ve learned an incredible amount about creating audio narratives and had a great time doing it—so much so, in fact, that we’ve decided to make the podcast the sole format for The Distance.

By focusing on just one medium, we’ll be able to bring you new stories every other week. Our last written story will run in early July. In the meantime, check out our bonus episode featuring Jason Fried talking to Shaun Hildner about his fascination with all things old and why he started The Distance. We’ll have another new episode next week, and it’s a good one—there are sandwiches involved! So please subscribe via iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. And if you like what you hear, we’d love it if you could rate and review us on iTunes.

The Distance podcast features compact, powerful stories about old-line businesses that you don’t often hear about, like an auto salvage yard with a famously dated TV ad or a floral shop that sells 25,000 roses every Valentine’s Day. The response from readers of The Distance over the last year has been really encouraging, and we’re looking forward to bringing you even more under-the-radar business stories in audio form. Please tune in and let us know what you think!

On March 20, 2007, Highrise, Basecamp's simple CRM tool, was launched to the public. Three years later, Highrise for the iPhone was released. Over the years, Highrise has received upgrades and improvements, but it needed a new home and dedicated team to give it the attention it deserved. So, on August 14, 2014, Highrise HQ LLC began – a new company dedicated to Highrise.

At the top of the list of things we wanted to update was the iPhone app. It had been over 4 years since it was released, and it hadn't kept up with changes to iOS. Bugs crept in. Some subtle; some significant. Our plan was to immediately go in and make fixes, but we realized the original iPhone app was built using an iOS framework that wasn't supported any longer, and hence, Apple was no longer approving apps built using that old technology.

We were in a bind. We decided to pull the Highrise iPhone app from the store because of the bugs people were facing (you could still get to the old app from your previous downloads in iTunes), but we couldn't fix anything or offer anything new. On top of that, we had to build a brand new team to support Highrise, get the lay of the land, make improvements to the web app that were sorely needed, and then one day we could get to the iPhone.

Well, I'm thrilled to announce that day is here. We started from scratch. We spent months making sure it satisfied the core needs of Highrise customers. It's been put through its paces with thousands of Beta testers to get it ready.

Highrise 2.0 for the iPhone is now available to everyone on the App Store

It has your Activity Feed, Contacts, Tasks, and Custom Fields. And all sorts of helpful extras. For example, adding a task from anywhere in the app assigns that context to the task (just like it does in the web app). On a contact, add a task, the task is now Re: your contact. On an email, add a task, the task is Re: that specific email.

Or the Current Location help when editing an address, making it a ton easier to add new Contacts when you are mobile.

Or the subtle navigation designs, like how tapping the Activity icon once will return you to where you left off in your Activity, but a second tap will scroll you back to the top:

Or the ability to switch amongst your multiple Highrise accounts:

We have plenty more coming for the app. We know folks want Cases, Deals, Tags, and offline support. And we know Android users want an app too ;) All things on our list. But this is a solid foundation for the future of Highrise on mobile, and so far, people have loved it:

@highrise – Loving the new iPhone app. Nice work!!

— Darren Sproats (@DarrenSproats) June 1, 2015

@natekontny Love the new app! Thank you for all the hard work.

— Chad Wright (@chadwright) May 29, 2015

@natekontny Hi. Just downloaded the new app. Loving it. I used the old one till a month ago. Feels good. Cheers!

— Abhishek Rai (@Abhishek_Rai) May 29, 2015

If you enjoy it, we'd greatly appreciate a review on the App Store, and if you have any issues or feedback, there's a handy Help & Feedback button in the app to quickly get someone at Highrise to help.

From all of us at Highrise, thank you very much for your patience as we got this ready, and for the tons of help and feedback we've gotten along the way. We hope you find it as handy as we have. It's the first thing I check in the morning :) Thank you for being part of the new Highrise. We're just getting warmed up.

Download Highrise 2.0 for the iPhone

-Nathan Kontny, CEO Highrise
P.S. The Highrise team is growing. If you know anyone who is great at Software Engineering, and would love to be part of improving Highrise please send them our way!

I’ve been a vocal critic of Android for years. Compared to the glorious polish, consistency, and coherence of Apple’s iOS, Google’s sprawling, inconsistent, and incomplete operating system always felt less. Yes, occasional rays of brilliance, but a sum less of its parts. And to many – although now fewer – extents, I think that’s still true.

But. I’ve come to realize the appeal that lies in figuring out and taming all that sprawl. It invites spelunking in ways that remind me of an earlier age of computing. Hacking consoles, tailoring icon sets, and finding backdoors and alleyways.

It’s a tinkerer’s joy. It’s riddles and puzzles. It’s computing not for the sake of productivity, but as a hobby in its own purpose. It’s the pleasure of making something your own, something unique. A pleasure in part and exactly because it’s not for everyone.

What really got me lured down this path wasn’t just Android in general, though. It was the Moto X in particular. I love this phone. It doesn’t do any specific technical discipline particularly well: The screen is below par (white balance is way too warm), the camera is distinctly mediocre, the battery is so-so. Processor and speed is fine, but nothing wow.

Yet it just feels right in the hand. The last time I recall this feeling was another Motorola phone, the PEBL, back in 2005. It too was nothing special as a technical exercise, but it also just felt great, like the Moto X. Particularly with the wonderful wood back. The 5.2” is perfect. The screen-to-bezel ratio is excellent.

So I keep reaching for the Moto X. Phones have gotten so good that as long as you’re not dependent on things where big leaps are still being made (like the camera), yesteryear’s tech can play second-fiddle to the personal attachment and emotion of the device. That’s a wonderful sign of progress and invitation to diversity.

Anyway, the appeal of the Moto X has sucked me deeper into that sprawling Android land. No, I haven’t given up on iOS. I need to double-carry anyway to deal with two sim cards. But I really appreciate Android culture as distinctly different. Worse in so many obvious ways, and probably for most people, but also alluring and appealing in many other subtle ways.

Some times worse and flawed are just different angles of affection.

The progress of technology needs a full spectrum of adoption to work well. From early adopters who jump in before kinks and warts have been banished, to a late majority who bring scale to the now-safe choice.

If we didn’t have any early adopters ironing out the kinks, there’d never be a now-safe choice for the late majority. And if everyone always jumped on the latest thing on day one, society would waste needless cycles churning through the broken glass of beta software.

But usually people see things a little narrower. They’ve picked a group to belong to, and along with it the story that serves it just. I find that a constant and fascinating example of how we’ll all tell ourselves what we need to hear to feel good about our choices.

In most cases, for example, I like to be an early adopter. Take getting the first version of the Macbook Air, while many fretted about and scorned it for too few ports or not enough speed. I accepted the shortcomings by telling myself that this is ultimately The Future, and I want to be among the pioneers that drags us there, even if it’s a bumpy ride across the frontier.

Further, that if everyone wanted to wait until all the bugs were squashed, the bugs would never be found in the first place, and thus never squashed. See, isn’t that a lovely altruistic cover story for what could just as well be labeled as technological ADD, and just wanting the latest thing BECAUSE?

Same deal works on the other end. There are all these great stories available about how you’re being prudent by waiting to take the plunge on a new product, such that you don’t waste money or resources before the inevitable version 2 or 3. A story filled with the virtue of restraint: An ability to resist the draw of SHINY NEW THINGS.

What’s great is that all these stories can be true at the same time, even if they’re individually in conflict. I can even feel good about a chosen story for my current choice, and then swap to the opposite story for my next choice. Self-deception is grand.

A year ago, The Distance published its first story: a profile of 110-year-old Horween Leather Co., Chicago’s last remaining tannery. Since then, we’ve visited an 18,000-square-foot costume and wig store and a vintage tiki bar with its own gift shop. We’ve met a custom bra fitter who started her business as a single mom and the second-generation owner of an auto salvage yard that ran the same commercial on local television for 30 years. We launched The Distance because we believe the people behind long-running businesses have amassed a lot of wisdom from their decades of experience. At the heart of each story is the question: “How have you stayed in business for so long?” The answers we’ve collected so far are nuanced and varied, reflecting the complexities that each business owner has faced. Their lessons are difficult to reduce to a list of handy aphorisms. But one year seems as good a time as any to take stock in some way, so here are a few themes that have emerged from the last 12 months.
Take pride in your product: Van Dam Custom Boats makes just two to four of its handcrafted wooden boats each year. Each one takes eight months to two years to finish. As you might imagine, the market for a luxury item of this kind is relatively small, and business took a hit during the latest recession. But the Van Dams took the lull to recommit to their reputation as the maker of the world’s finest wooden boats, no hyperbole intended. They limited production to increase demand and raise their prices, and today they have a waiting list of about three years. Horween Leather has taken a similar approach, focusing on the high end of its market despite pressure in its industry to move toward lower-cost manufacturing. As Nick Horween says in our story, “It just has to be the best you can make it. You put all the best stuff into it so you can get the best of out of it, and get your price or don’t sell it.” Don’t become a commodity: Shrinking margins and slow growth are an ever-present threat in the corrugated box business. That’s why the Eisen brothers, who run Ideal Box Co., have shaped their family-owned manufacturer into a specialist in the corrugated retail displays you see at supermarkets and big-box stores. Scott Eisen says they never want to be a “me-too corrugated company.” Tom Benson of the World’s Largest Laundromat had the same thought about his business. Coin-operated, self-service laundromats can be found on virtually every block of his town, and they tend to look and run the same. The World’s Largest Laundromat does things differently, and the family-friendly amenities it provides has made its store into a destination and community center. Channel your artistic passion in practical ways: Jim Jozwiak of Band For Today was a professional trumpet player with a burgeoning freelance career who discovered a bigger, more lucrative opportunity: providing music education in schools that lacked their own programs. Bruce MacGilpin of The Icon Group was studying sculpture and helping his university manage on-campus art shows when he met a traveling puppeteer who didn’t have a proper storage system for his puppets. MacGilpin built some basic wooden crates lined with packing material for the man, a job that introduced him to the fine arts services industry. Today his business stores and transports priceless works of art for museums, galleries and private collectors. Find new markets and customers: The founder of Hollymatic invented a machine for molding hamburger patties that played a big role in the advent of the American fast food nation. McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s used to be customers. When those chains became mega corporations, they outgrew Hollymatic. Now the maker of meat-processing equipment sells its products to grocery stores, butcher shops and smaller restaurants—ones that, unlike fast food places, make fresh patties. Elsewhere in the world of beloved American foods, Ingrid Kosar was the first to patent the thermal pizza delivery bag in 1983 and signed up companies like Domino’s in the early days of her business. But she didn’t have the market to herself for very long and later lost Domino’s as a customer. Kosar took what she learned about insulating food and started making products for companies outside of the pizza industry, like Meals on Wheels and Panera Bread. Thanks for reading The Distance and listening to our podcast during our first year. Please keep sending feedback and suggestions for businesses to profile to [email protected]. Here’s to another year of stories!

Back in 2011 and 2013, we shared our phone homescreens with you. We get a kick out of how others personalize their mobile phones. A lot’s changed since then: we have a few more folks on Android, there are 3 varieties of iPhones (6 is the most popular), some of us like having monster phones, and there’s even a Watch among us.

Attention: there are a lot of homescreens in this post. The screens all start to blur together (apart from the Android ones), but they’re all interesting when you take the time to examine them. This is a great article for your lunchtime/afternoon break browsing…