There’s been some speculation that we significantly increased the amount of posts here on SvN in the build up to the launch of the new Basecamp, and in particular that we targeted the front page of Hacker News for those articles. Some people aren’t happy about this.

I’d like to bring a little context and fact to bear on this to put these speculations to rest.

In the month before the launch of the new Basecamp, we published 25 posts here on Signal vs. Noise. For comparison, during the same period in prior years, we published (before 2007 we used a different blogging engine, so I don’t have those numbers handy):

• 29 posts in 2011
• 50 posts in 2010
• 36 posts in 2009
• 49 posts in 2008
• 42 posts in 2007

Relatively speaking, this was actually a pretty low level of posting activity for us. During all the years prior to this one in that period, we were also maintaining a separate product blog, whose posts aren’t included in these totals.

During that period, there were 24,826 first time visitors to any of our sites who we could identify as having first gotten to us via Hacker News (in all, we received more like 105,000 unique visitors from Hacker News, but many of those were repeat visitors). 97 of those visitors signed up, with more than 85% of them electing the free plan. This conversion rate pales compared to our average conversion rate, particularly for non-search-engine traffic.

When all is said and done, what’s our likely financial outcome from Hacker News visitors for those 25 posts? About $300 total per month.

We typically write on SvN because we have an announcement to make, or because we have something we’re thinking about that we’d like to share.

Do we benefit from other people noticing our blog posts and linking them up from their blogs or other outlets? Absolutely – we’ve been talking about the power of word-of-mouth marketing for almost a decade.

As a writer, do I like it when more people read what I’ve written? Sure.

Is there any business value for us in getting on the front page of Hacker News? Not really.

Upvote us, downvote us, ignore us – I don’t care, but I hope you’ll make that decision based on the merits of the content of a given post, not because you think we’re trying to manipulate the front page of Hacker News for our gain.

After a ton of very hard work, and lots of debates and decisions, we’re thrilled to be able to share the all new Basecamp with you.

This has been a company-wide effort. Every designer, every programmer, every sys admin, and every support team member were involved in building this product.

It’s completely new. Reimagined, rethought, and redesigned from the ground up. Everything was reconsidered. Every idea, every flow, every concept. Nothing was sacred – every idea and every feature had to fight for its place in this first version.

The new Basecamp features an entirely new innovative interface. All new code. Brand new tech. And some serious hardware backing it all up.

This is our best work. And it’s just the beginning. We have a lot of great ideas in store. But first we wanted to focus on the basics. Nailing the foundation so it’s strong and steady, easy and fast.

In many ways, this is our second chance to make a first impression. For many of our customers, Basecamp was the first time they’d ever used a project management and collaboration tool. Most used email. Or the phone. Or lots of in-person meetings. Basecamp was a whole new idea, something brand new, an opportunity to get organized and keep everything together.

This new Basecamp is a return to our roots. It’s focused on the basics. It’s even simpler and clearer than before. It’s super fast. And it’s useful for a whole new group of projects – short projects. Most project are small and short. The original Basecamp was overkill for most kinds of projects. The new Basecamp is perfect for projects of every size.

We think a whole new generation of customers will be introduced to a new way to manage their projects when they use the all new Basecamp.

We started work on Basecamp Next back in April of last year. Initially it was just a tiny team: JF, JZ, and me exploring whether it would even be a good idea to rewrite Basecamp from scratch. That phase lasted about two months.

After the first two months, we were convinced that there was enough value to do The Big Rewrite. Basecamp Next did enough things differently that would be very hard to retrofit into Classic. So we committed to making it real. We then spent another two months or so fleshing out all the major functionality, still with just a small team. Sam and Ryan joined the game during that phase.

After that we slowly ramped up the team. Adding people here and there as there was enough decisions made to proceed implementing with. Everyone, more or less, was involved on/off taking the rough shell and making it solid. This phase took about four months.

The last two months we’ve been in crunch mode. Everyone in the company has been involved polishing, refining, and improving. This is also the time we spent building out our wonderful new calendar.

Take a look at the Github impact diagram to see the ebb and flow of the development process:

Or enjoy the light show of this commit animation:

It’s been a fantastic journey over the 10 months or so building an incredible version 1 of the new Basecamp. We’re finally at the end of the tunnel. Next week we’ll be ready to share it all with you.

Today, Jeffrey Zeldman shared a new alternative to the venerable Phark CSS image replacement method better known by its surely-that’s-far-enough negative 9999 pixel indent. I’ve long since found my own way so it is with a touch of nostalgia and a humble bow to Messrs Fahrner and Phark that I share my favorite alternative.

The idea is still based on a fixed size element (that matches the dimensions of the image to be displayed instead of it’s text equivalent. Overflow:hidden reliably ensures that whatever we push outside the box is invisible. The difference is in how it’s pushed. Instead of a negative index, I prefer to set the height of the element to zero and instead set the top padding to the desired height. The element still ends up the right size and the text is gently nudged from view via padding. Here’s an example:

.replaceme {
  width: 100px; /* image width */
  height: 0;
  padding-top: 50px; /* image height */
  display: inline-block;
  overflow: hidden;
  background: url(images/image.png);
}

Curious to hear what method you use.

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.

It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.

It’s easy to talk about knee jerk reactions as if they are things that only other people have. You have them too. If your neighbor isn’t immune, neither are you.

This came to a head back in 2007. I was speaking at the Business Innovation Factory conference in Providence, RI. So was Richard Saul Wurman. After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn’t have to do that.

And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.

His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.

This was a big moment for me.

Richard has spent his career thinking about these problems. He’s given it 30 years. And I gave it just a few minutes. Now, certainly he can be wrong and I could be right, but it’s better to think deeply about something first before being so certain you’re right.

There’s also a difference between asking questions and pushing back. Pushing back means you already think you know. Asking questions means you want to know. Ask more questions.

Learning to think first rather than react quick is a life long pursuit. It’s tough. I still get hot sometimes when I shouldn’t. But I’m really enjoying all the benefits of getting better.

If you aren’t sure why this is important, think about this quote from Jonathan Ive regarding Steve Jobs’ reverence for ideas:

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

That’s deep. Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss.

There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

I’ve been with 37signals as a remote system administrator for a month now and thought I would share some observations on Operations:

User Experience
I’ve been thoroughly impressed by how much everyone genuinely cares about the user experience with the applications they maintain. Everything from page response times increasing by a few milliseconds to minimizing interruptions during deployments or even the impact of the number of http redirects on load times – it’s all constantly being discussed and debated. This is often supplemented with hard data in logs and pretty graphs (thanks Noah!) from the multitude of resources made available internally to help diagnose issues.

It’s more than just observation and discussion, though – frequently these chats morph into immediate direct action in code or configuration changes.

Communication
37signals definitely embraces remote employees and treats them like any other. In my first month I’ve used Campfire, Basecamp, Jabber, Skype, Gmail, Github, Confluence, Google Docs, and more to stay connected and learn how some of the pieces fit together. Thanks to the resources made available from day one and the accessibility of the other Operations team members, I honestly haven’t felt left out in the slightest when working from home.

Accountability
Operations definitely sets the bar high for accountability to users and the rest of the company. Every issue I’ve seen raised by support, programmers, or other admins is looked into and taken as seriously as any other.

When larger production issues are dealt with, detailed postmortems are made available so the same mistakes aren’t repeated. These have been great for learning what not to do.

Monitoring
The amount and depth of monitoring at 37signals is impressive. They have thousands of checks for everything from hardware issues, application error rates, backups, and scheduled jobs. On top of this, we have remote monitoring and systems in place for notifying users of ongoing issues.

Overall I’ve been impressed with the high standard of work in the Operations group and I’ll be doing my best to live up to it.

It’s been an interesting and enjoyable first month with 37signals, largely thanks to everyone who’s made me feel so welcome and valued, especially Taylor, John, Eron, Will and Anton. Thank you!

Over the last year, we’ve spent a ton of time on little details that really make using the all new Basecamp a real pleasure. That’s not to say it’s perfect – we still have a lot of work to do to realize our full vision – but we’re very happy with what we’ll be launching with. And launch is literally right around the corner.

Here’s a video showcasing some of the little details and power user features we’ve baked in. We think you’re really going to enjoy exploring these little corners once you start using the all new Basecamp.

My guitar instructor recently had me start practicing with a jam track (basically, a recorded song minus the lead guitar and vocals). I’m still learning my way around a minor pentatonic scale, so my improvisation “jam sessions” are halting and awkward, but it’s amazing how much fun it is. As long as I stay on the scale, I can’t go wrong. Any note works. It’s freeing, and powerful, and I’m able to express myself musically in a way I’d never known I could.

If my instructor had said to me, “improvise a melody on top of this track”, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I would have had no idea where to start or what to do. There are too many possibilities: which strings to hold at which frets, and whether to strum or pluck. It’s overwhelming! But instead he taught me a minor pentatonic scale and said “play any note on that scale while this track is playing”. Suddenly the possibilities were narrowed and instead of feeling straitjacketed, I felt free. I was given power, because my options were constrained.

A similar story: my wife is setting up a new business and one of the things she offers is piano lessons. In preparing to teach these lessons she came across a technique to use with very young children just beginning the piano (though it is awesome for adults, too). You sit them at the piano, hold down the sustain pedal for them (if they can’t reach it themselves), and tell them to play any of the black keys, in any order. The result is remarkably musical, and gives the students a real sense of ability and accomplishment. With no piano training at all you can make something that sounds beautiful! All because you’ve constrained what keys may be pressed.

Sometimes, our options are constrained because of circumstances we have no control over. Obviously, very few of us have unlimited funds or time, and we have to work within those constraints. But whether we choose the constraints or are chosen by them, we can decide to embrace them and find the power there. By embracing them, we grow.

Eventually, we may outgrow those constraints. I won’t always be limited to playing just the minor pentatonic scale. Beginning pianists will learn how to use the white and black keys together to make music. Your business won’t always be on a shoestring budget. But it is a mistake to cast off your constraints too early, or to chafe against them. Make them work for you. Get as much utility from them as you can, for as long as you can.

Perhaps it’s my inner engineer, but seeing behind the scenes of workshops, be they real or digital, always fascinates me. Maybe that’s why How it’s Made is so compelling. The show proves that there’s more than just the end product: the workspace and the process that surround the product that turn out to be just as interesting than what was produced.
A recent discussion internally about using standing desks got me thinking: what do our workspaces look like? Does something about them inspire our craft and code? Is it the lack of clutter, or the general disarray of your everyday stuff that helps ideas flow better? Is your space a blank canvas? A workbench? A retreat?
Here’s what some of our workspaces looked like yesterday and today. Feel free to share yours!

Jamis’ desk

Jason F’s desk

Jeff’s desk