One of the great tragedies of modern web development over the last five years or so has been the irrational exuberance for microservices. The idea that making a single great web application had simply become too hard, but if we broke that app up into many smaller apps, it’d all be much easier. Turned out,… keep reading
My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chicago that sells project-management and team-collaboration software. When we launched our main service back in 2004, the internet provided a largely free, fair, and open marketplace. We could reach customers and provide them with our software… keep reading
We’re hiring a programmer to join our Research & Fidelity team to help shape the front end of our Rails applications and expand our suite of open-source JavaScript frameworks. We’re accepting applications for the next two weeks with a start date in early April. We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to… keep reading
At Basecamp we have an internal project called “Your proudest moments”. My colleague Dan set it up so that people at Basecamp could share anything we’re proud of. So far people have shared impressive, really feel-good accomplishments, such as performing complicated house renovations without professional help, writing books, or taking their parents on an unforgettable… keep reading
A few days ago my wife and I went to see Uncut Gems at a Regal theater in Chicago. We booked our ticket online, reserved our seats, showed up 15 minutes ahead of time, and settled in. After the coil of previews, and jaunty, animated ads for sugary snacks, the movie started. About 20 minutes… keep reading
Back in November, we noticed something odd happening with large uploads to Amazon S3. Uploads would pause for 10 seconds at a time and then resume. It had us baffled. When we started to dig, what we found left us with more questions than answers about S3 and AWS networking. We use Amazon S3 for… keep reading
Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh. But 2020 isn’t 2010. Our naiveté around data, who captures it, and what they do with it… keep reading
We just published “The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication“. It’s a collection of philosophies and day-to-day practices that help guide the way we communicate with each other at Basecamp. We cover when to write stuff up in detail vs. when to chat about it. Why meetings are a last resort, not a first option. How… keep reading