Today, February 5th, is Basecamp’s Birthday. She turns four today. Four years old. Wow. Time sure flies.

Here’s the original blog post from Feb 5, 2004 that started it all. Be sure to browse the comments — they’re especially interesting looking back. Time puts things in perspective.

From the vault, here’s the original marketing site

Here’s the original to-do section

Here’s the original milestones section

Here’s the original messages/comments section

(You’ll notice each message category had its own tab)

Here’s the original files section

Wait, there was no files section in the original Basecamp! Yup, when we launched you couldn’t upload files to Basecamp.

A great four years

Overall, we’re really happy four years later to have maintained the UI clarity, simplicity, and spirit of the original design and vision. Some sections have gotten even simpler. And yes, some sections have grown a bit too. But all in all, looking back, we’re very proud of where Basecamp started and how it’s grown.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible. Our incredible crew, our amazing customers, the press, the pundits, the lovers and the haters. Its been a wild ride. We’re looking forward to what’s next.

Thank you!

Programming platform experience is like knowing your way around the kitchen. Where are the knives, what size plates do we have, and what spices are available. It’s very useful for getting things done without having to search high and low for every little thing. But it’s also an asset with a cut-off point of diminished returns. Once you have a reasonably good idea where things are, it’s no longer the bottleneck in your culinary performance.

Like chefs, like programmers. Peopleware quotes a study that six months seemed to be the cut-off point for programmers. Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.

That sounds about right to me. That’s how I felt it going to Ruby. In the beginning, I would constantly be looking things up. Trying to internalize the idioms and not merely convert previous patterns to new syntax. But after about six months of exposure, I knew where things were. What tools to reach for. Yes, I kept on learning (and still do), but the difference between now and then is not all that dramatic.

Which leads me to my point: Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that’ll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.

In turn that means you as an applicant can use requirements like “3-5 years doing this technology” as a gauge of how clued-in the company hiring is. The higher their requirements for years of service in a given technology, the more likely that they’re looking for all the wrong things in their applicants, and thus likely that the rest of the team will be stooges picked for the wrong reasons.

Apple has an uncanny ability to infuse their products with that nebulous sense of futurism. When I first held the iPhone, the one word that immediately came to mind was just that: This is the future. It’s that unadorned look, the nobody-else-is-doing-just-this feeling.

When my MacBook Air arrived this morning, I felt exactly the same thing. Even the packaging feels future. It’s so tiny. It doesn’t look like any other packaging out there. The box opens as a board game and it’s really solid and sturdy.

The machine itself is without a doubt the prettiest laptop I’ve ever seen. The proportions feel so right. Impossibly thin, lighter than the ~3 pounds would lead you to believe. And yet it’s a full-blown computer with no sacrifices in the interaction. The keyboard is a slight bit more klackity-click than the new stand-alones, but still awesome. The screen is very bright and instantly at full strength (go LEDs).

People have been wondering how this is going to play out in the market. It doesn’t have enough features, the specs are too low, it’s too expensive, it’s not this, it’s not that. Bah. This is the RAZR of laptops. Lots of people won’t care about the compromises once they get a chance to taste the future up close and personal.

Anyway, enough pouring my heart out in love for Apple’s industrial design and ability to capture that feeling of future so perfectly. I’ll try to live with the machine over a week and report back with findings.

So far it’s very positive, though. The machine feels more than plenty fast. It runs the tests for Highrise about 25-30% slower than my MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz). Which is just about exactly what you would guess from a machine with 1.8Ghz. In normal operations (web/mail/textmate/iphoto), I can’t feel any difference at all yet.

Update: Ars Technica has an in-depth review of the Air. The reviewer only got 2.5 hours out of his machine, though. I’m currently on my 4 hour of service with the screen at half brightness, using the internet all the time, power savings set to “Better Battery Life”. Wonder how much of the difference is the SSD or if the reviewer just had something very CPU intensive running.

Update 2: MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick by Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster is funny and spot on.

Now you know.

Voters don’t choose the 842 unpledged “super-delegates” who comprise nearly 40 percent of the number of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Even though it’s likely that the Super-delegates will ultimately support the nominee the public chose during the primary and caucus process, the whole Super-delegate thing seems a bit undemocratic, doesn’t it?

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election. It was originally a joint effort of AIGA and Design Observer, but now it lives at The New York Times.

In search of the distraction-free computer desktop

“WriteRoom has me composing more quickly, and it’s brought back the elemental thrill of assembling thoughts by tossing words onto the screen. As outrageous and premature as it sounds, programs like WriteRoom could have the kind of impact for this generation that The Elements of Style had for another, by distilling down the writing process and laying bare its constituent parts.”

How kids respond to the XO laptop

“If Negroponte wants to convert kids to the global information economy, he might consider the chief virtue of the XO laptop: its lights and sounds. Even Western kids, whose toys flash and squeal, are drawn with primitive wonderment to the peculiar phenomena of this computer — the distinctive hums and blinks that seem like evidence of its soul.”

Invest in an athlete

“The 25 year-old pitcher is offering 4% of all his future major league earnings for $50,000. If you don’t have that kind of money, you can buy a share of that 4% for $20…Don’t be surprised if in five or ten years you can bet on any professional athlete’s career the way you can bet on Newsom’s.”

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs on Microsoft/Yahoo deal

“The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.”

Outside.in switches to Rails

“By switching to Rails we were able to shrink our maintained codebase to just 20% of its former size while expanding the overall feature-set of the system. There have been some learning curve-related hiccups over the past few months as we acclimated to a new system, but on the whole we now have a leaner, better codebase, more control over our system, and are developing in a language and framework that are joys to code in. We’re very happy with the switch so far.”

Sometimes people use important-sounding words to seem more impressive. Sometimes they use complex sentence structures too. Check out this opening line from an email we received:

[Redacted] creates the conditions for experimentation and quantitative understanding of the impact of novel management practices in large companies.

The sentence is structured like this: “We create _____ for _____ and _____ of _____ of _____ in _____.” It’s tough to have anything make sense within that structure.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the email goes on to mention terms like strategic planning, competitive intelligence, thought partners, management behavior, orthodoxies, and change management.

Then it ends with, “Let me know your thoughts.” Er, I think I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

The Wonderful Audi R8 Superbowl Ad (bigger version). Click though to Truth in Engineering, click on “Truth in the Godfather” and then click “Behind the Scenes” to get a look at the how and why of the ad.

We’re happy to have added web-designer and author Dan Cederholm’s freshly redesigned and popular SimpleBits to the list of places carrying ads from The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals.

Dan is a perfect addition to the group. His territory is the area between practical, technical design issues and those defined more often by talent and taste. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a pretty sweet place to be.

Welcome aboard, Dan!

Garmin shows off their new Nuviphone — a surprise product clearly targeted at the iPhone set. The product is due to ship this summer.

Seems like a shrewd move by Garmin. Garmin owns the small GPS market, and their Nuvi line is wonderfully executed and designed. But with GPS coming to more and more cell phones Garmin had to do something. Instead of running away or ignoring an encroaching reality, they ran head on into the smartphone space. To me this signals great management and leadership at Garmin.

Technically it has a few things the iPhone doesn’t have (yet). True GPS, 3G, and geotagging of photos taken with the camera. It also has Garmin’s million points of interest database built in which is great for finding local businesses, phone numbers, and addresses.

No details on size, weight, battery life, or price. And who knows how well the web browser works or how well the different pieces are integrated into the overall flow and experience. There are so many intangibles that it’s impossible to know if it’s good or bad before trying it, but from what little I see I like what I see.

Aside from Apple, Garmin is the only company I’ve seen that understands UI design for small devices. The Nuvi is dead simple to use. If they can translate their GPS UI chops into a phone UI, they may be on to something big. Someone is going to make a product that is considered the official alternative to the iPhone, and Garmin is well positioned to claim that title.

Good competition is a good thing.

RELATED: My review of the Nuvi 350 (the most commented on SvN post ever with 812 comments).