Signal v. Noise

The web isn’t just another software platform. It’s the greatest software platform the world has ever seen. And yet even in its obvious glory, we’re still learning how to be grateful for all its constituent parts. Take View Source, for example.

I owe much of my career to View Source. It’s what got me started with web development in the first place. Going to sites that I liked, learning how they did what they did. Yes, I also bought a bunch of animal books from O’Reilly, and I read WIRED’s Webmonkey, and the web was full of tutorials even then. But it’s not the same. Seeing how something real is built puts the individual pieces of the puzzle together in a way that sample code or abstract lessons just don’t.

I’m clearly not alone in this story. Jason learned HTML the same way. Lots of people on the internet owe their formative steps to the marvelous wonder that is View Source.

Unfortunately View Source has been receding in recent years. Building stuff for the web has never been more complicated. And few of these new tools, frameworks, or techniques have seemed to prioritize making the web readable through View Source. That’s a real shame, because progress needn’t be the enemy of learning.

Keep reading “Paying tribute to the web with View Source”

I wish ad-supported services could look at my average usage (# of pages I’ve viewed, ads I’ve seen, etc), and give me an option to directly pay them the same amount they would have charged the advertisers for my slice of views/clicks/etc. No ads for me, they get paid as if they were serving me ads.

I’ll even put my credit card on file. Just show me a running receipt of the charges I’m running up. They get paid the same amount as an advertiser would pay them, I get to support a publication I like, everything’s transparent, and anyone can opt in or out. Don’t want ads? Pay your own way. Ok with ads? Let advertisers support your usage.

Silicon Valley has become especially good at turning software, the highest margin product ever, into many of the worst performing businesses imaginable. With few exceptions, the amount of money being lost by the leaders of the new school is absolutely staggering.

During the dotcom boom back in the late 90s, I did a bunch of Photoshop-cut jobs. You know, where a designer throws a PSD file over the wall to an HTML monkey to slice and dice. It was miserable.

These mock designs almost always focused on pixel perfectness, which meant trying to bend and twist the web to make it so. Spacer pixels, remember those? We were trying to make the raw materials of the web, particularly HTML, then latter CSS, do things they didn’t want to do. Things they weren’t meant to do.

Then I got the pleasure of working with designers who actually knew HTML and CSS. It was a revelation. Not only would the designs feel like they were of the web, not merely put on the web, but they’d always be better. Less about what it looked like, more about what it worked like.

I attribute this in no small part to the fact that it was real. The feedback loop of working with the actual HTML/CSS, as it was destined to be deployed, gave designers the feedback from the real world to make it better. And the fact that designers had the power to do the work themselves meant that the feedback loop was shorter. It wasn’t make a change, ask someone else to implement the change, ponder its effectiveness, and then repeat. It was change, check, change, repeat.

For a while that felt like it was almost the norm. That web designers confined to the illusions of Photoshop mocks were becoming more rare. And that web designers were getting better at working with their materials.

But as The Great Divide points out, regression is lurking, because the industry is making it too hard to work directly with the web. The towering demands inherent in certain ways of working with JavaScript are rightfully scaring some designers off from implementing their ideas at all. That’s a travesty.

Keep reading “Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS”

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

David Foster Wallace, “This is Water”

David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried are fans of Marie Kondo’s 2014 bestseller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which is back in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to her new Netflix show. In this bonus episode of the Rework podcast, DHH talks about how he’s applied the KonMari framework to code, business decisions at Basecamp, and his own belongings.

Last week I was in NY to record a podcast with Kara Swisher of Recode. I’ve been reading and watching Kara for years, so it was a distinct thrill to finally get to sit opposite her and talk tech, business, VC, why it doesn’t have to be crazy at work, and a variety of other topics. We covered a ton, and it was a fun conversation.

You can listen to the full podcast here. You’ll also find an intro article as well as a lightly edited transcript for the roughly one hour conversation. Hope you dig.

And BTW, if you didn’t know, we have our own podcast called The REWORK Podcast. We record new episodes every two weeks, and sometimes hit with a bonus episode on off weeks. We hope you’ll listen in there as well.

Playing to your strengths as a leader doesn’t make you a good manager. Here’s why.

Of all the tips to be a good manager, “leaning into your strengths” has got to be one of the most frequently cited.

“Do what you’re good at. Focus on your strengths.” That’s the conventional advice we all receive. There’s no shortage of StrengthsFinders assessments and personality tests urging us to triangulate which strengths we should zoom in on.

However, I recently had a conversation with Peldi Guilizzoni, CEO of Balsamiq, on The Heartbeat. His insight on this topic turned my head sideways… in a good way. Peldi asserted:

“Doing what you’re good at hurts the team.”

Huh? Let me explain.

Keep reading “Leaders, doing what you’re good at hurts your team.”

Now a tradition in its third year (see 2016 and 2017). Here are all my extracted answers to our monthly Basecamp check-in question of What are you reading?

Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was one of those authors I had heard about in school but never really contemplated reading directly. He lived 1821-1881 and wrote such classics as Crime and Punishment that I never considered myself invited to read. What a mistake. This isn’t exactly the first classic that I’ve given myself permission to read that rendered the inhibition to do so silly, but it really nailed home the point.

It’s such a lovely weird book. Partly, it’s Dostoyevsky giving us an account, through the fictional narrator, of his view on the human condition. Just one quote: “But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic”. The idea of humans being suckered into living only according to “logic”, and not only the vanity of such a pursuit, but the impossibility of it, is a wonderful antidote to much of contemporary morality and wonkness.

Keep reading “The books I read in 2018”

Looks like I may be doing it right. This is exactly why we don’t have shared calendars at Basecamp.

At Basecamp, everyone controls their own calendar, and no one can see anyone else’s schedule. You can’t claim time on anyone else’s calendar, either. Other people’s time isn’t for you — it’s for them. You can’t take it, chip away at it, or block it off. Everyone’s in control of their time. They can give it to you, but you can’t take it from them.

And by the way, this isn’t a special privilege for ownership or the CEO. Everyone controls their own days at Basecamp. Time isn’t a commodity we trade. No one can turn your day into theirs.

Note: We have a whole chapter called “Calendar Tetris” in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work on this very topic. You’ll find it on page 62.