A couple of months ago, I made a big decision. I joined Basecamp as its first-ever COO. Once I came aboard, I was immediately reminded what’s tough about joining a new company. There’s a lot about the company you don’t know. And one of the hardest things is where to start. Especially when you’re in… keep reading
At the end of 2014, Highrise was spun-off from Basecamp so it could get some well deserved love, and boy did we give it some love last year. I don’t how you guys accomplished so much. I really don’t. –dhh One of the ways we’ve been able to accomplish a lot with such a small… keep reading
Illustration by Nate Otto These are some of the things I can do because I’m fortunate to work for a company that lets me work from anywhere: Hug my kids and feed them breakfast before they leave for school in the morning. Greet and make a snack for them when they get home; hear all about… keep reading
Shipping! One of the biggest challenges of shipping a product is knowing when to put on the shipping goggles. The shipping goggles make you less sensitive to little nits and scrapes and things that might be able to be a little bit better, but really don’t need to be right now. Stuff that we could… keep reading
A few times a week I get an email from someone asking if they can pick my brain for 15 minutes. I appreciate their interest in what I might have to share, but when it’s pitched as a brain pick they’re making it hard to say yes. I’m all for giving back, and I try… keep reading
Here at Basecamp we do a lot of paper sketching. Usually we jump straight to code after making a rough sketch. But it’s not a black and white rule. Sometimes we make tappable prototypes to test an interaction, or a pixel perfect Photoshop image to communicate a concept. How do we choose which level of… keep reading
James Scott Bumgarner, more famous as James Garner, film and TV star, passed away recently at the age of 86. Many people shared how great a guy he was and stories about his life. A few things caught my attention. Not the least of which was how lucky he seemed. How does a guy without… keep reading
Incidents escalated to PagerDuty are generally “all hands on deck”. tldr; The bottom line is that we had fewer actual site down interruptions and false alarm escalations in 2015. Here’s a non exhaustive list of contributing factors to these improvements over the years: Eliminating scheduled maintenance that would take a site offline Limiting API abuse (and… keep reading
Weird truck Often I get asked a variation of: I’ve been writing for a couple years, but I have no more inspiration, and little readership. How do you write? Where do you get inspiration? How do you get out of the rut and get people to start reading? We all get this way. But here’s… keep reading
Illustration by Nate Otto On the day after Christmas, as buckets of freezing rain and sleet fell on the Chicago area, I white-knuckled my way to the 61-year-old Uptown Tavern in the suburb of Westmont to interview the owner, Bill Carlson. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone at the bar, but when I walked in, there… keep reading