Illustration by Nate Otto John Stallworth has been selling hardware and fixing bikes at his shop on Chicago’s South Side for 50 years, helping to anchor a neighborhood that’s struggled with population loss and divestment. John’s Hardware and Bicycle Shop is the kind of old-fashioned business that’s happy to sell customers two nails instead of a… keep reading
And GIFs! Before I worked on Basecamp’s support team, I freelanced as a writer and editor. One of my less glamorous gigs was contributing to a textbook teaching non-native speakers how to write business emails in English. Language stuff aside, I’d be researching emoji or “netiquette” or how tone rarely transmits over text, and catch… keep reading
“Talk to one user…start jumping to a solution. Talk to 5+ users…start understanding the problem.” — Luke Wroblewski As I looked on from a corner of a cramped camera storage room, the junior Production Assistant asked a simple question about film editing. He and his team were in the middle of a tense conference call, trying to… keep reading
The greatest summer camp there ever was This summer, we worked on building the best Basecamp we know how to build. We chatted around Campfires, and as interns, were guided along the way with a mentor. We leave with new skills — not necessarily learning how to fish, how to fight off a bear, or how to live… keep reading
Improve instead of redoing The Basecamp 3 app for Android is designed and maintained by a team of three people: Dan Kim, Jay Ohms, and me. We keep pace with the rest of the company because it’s a hybrid app—native code plus mobile web views. New Basecamp features usually work in the Android app without us… keep reading
One of the most important Basecamp features I ever designed never actually made it into the product. Back in 2009, I designed the due dates for To-dos feature in Basecamp Classic (looking back it’s hard to believe Basecamp was without due dates on To-dos for its first 5 years!). Shortly after we thought it might be… keep reading
A reasonable amount of indulgence makes reasonable sense I think Noah Lorang is exactly right on the data-nutritional value of real-time dashboards. It’s all empty calories. Like a bag of M&Ms or a serving of McD french fries. Salt, fat, and sugar. If that’s the main diet of information you’re using to grow your business,… keep reading
What you call it is probably better than what we called it Recently we launched a major new feature in Basecamp 3 that allows people to rename Basecamp’s six core tools on a project-by-project basis. Quick refresher: Every Basecamp project includes these six tools: Message Board (for writing up long-form announcements, pitches, presenting work, sending something… keep reading
My greatest weakness, and how I’m learning to overcome it… My parents were in town last week. During one conversation we had, my mom shared an opinion that I strongly disagreed with. And as I responded to her, she said this to me: “You’re getting defensive.” Throughout my life, I’ve heard this quite often. Getting defensive… keep reading
One of the real delights of programming is picking great variable, method, and class names. But an even greater treat is when you can name pairs, or even whole narratives, that fit just right. And the very best of those is when you’re forced to trade off multiple forces pulling in different directions. This is… keep reading