37 Signals

Testimony before the North Dakota Senate Industry, Business and Labor Committee

Chairman Klein and members of the Senate Industry, Business and Labor Committee- My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chica…

Reiterating our Use Restrictions Policy

The attack on the US Capitol, and subsequent threats of violence surrounding the inauguration of the new US administration, has moved us to reflect and reacquaint ourselves with the reality that ho…

HTML over the wire

You can write fast, modern, responsive web applications by generating your HTML on the server, and delivering that (with a little help) directly to the browser. You don’t need JSON as an in-b…

Validation is a mirage

Spend enough time talking with entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and anyone charged with proving something, and you’ll bump into questions about validation. “How do you validate…

The Making of a Dumpster Fire

A few weeks ago we launched a new marketing project for HEY.com at dumpsterfire.email. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a flaming dumpster with a printer and conveyor. You email dumpsterfire@hey.co…

How to waste half a day by not reading RFC 1034

HEY uses a branch deploy system that I’ve written about here on SvN and talked about frequently on Twitter. Plenty of other companies have implemented their own version of branch deploys (typ…

Basecamp has offset our cumulative emissions through 2019

Earlier this year, we announced that Basecamp was committing to getting to carbon negativefor our cumulative history and moving forward. Today, I want to share an update on that commitment.

Introducing the Basecamp security bug bounty

We’ve run a private security bug bounty program since 2014. Invited testers reported numerous security vulnerabilities to us, many of them critical. We investigated and fixed the vulnerabilities th…

Don’t take their word for it

A few weeks ago, we needed some hardware fast. After some back and forth with the vendor, they promised “expedited delivery”. That sounded like a good thing, but it meant nothing. To us…

Basecamp is hiring a Product Designer

Basecamp’s Core Product team is hiring a Senior Designer! We’ll be accepting applications for the next two weeks, with a flexible start date in December. It’s been over 4 year…

We write code, not documents

Recently a student asked me: Could you describe one instance where you had to use a diagramming tool (eg. Google Slides Drawings, Lucidcharts, Miro, Whimsical, Gliffy etc) to accomplish a task? The…

Demand Side Sales 101, a new book on sales by Bob Moesta.

Bob Moesta is a dear friend, mentor, and all around original thinker. He’s helped me see around corners, shine lights on things I didn’t know were there, and approach product developmen…

Options, Not Roadmaps

Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question: I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadm…

Inside a CODE RED: Network Edition

I wanted to follow up to Jeremy’s post about our recent outages with a deeper, more personal look behind the scenes. We call our major incident response efforts “CODE REDs” to sig…

Three Basecamp outages. One week. What happened?

Basecamp has suffered through three serious outages in the last week, on Friday, August 28th, on Tuesday, September 1, and again today. It’s embarrassing, and we’re deeply sorry. This is more than …

How Basecamp Became a 100% Remote Company

Moving is never fun. It’s bad enough when it’s your stuff, but ten years of stuff at an office you only spent two years in can be daunting! I’m Navid, and part of my job at Basecamp the…

We’re hiring Rails programmers

We have two rare openings on our Core Product team for Rails programmers. We’ll be accepting applications for the next two weeks, aiming for a flexible start date in October. We…

Remote work is a platform

Back in the mid-90s, just as Netscape Navigator was giving us our first look at what the visual internet could be, web design came in two flavors. There was the ultra basic stuff. Text on a page, m…

Take a video tour of HEY

Heard about HEY, but haven’t had a chance to check it out yet? In this 37-minute video, I walk through the big ideas, the philosophical underpinnings, and the specific features that make HEY …

Spy pixels are evolving like malware, so HEY’s adapting

We knew that spy-pixel pushers might go down the rabbit hole of escalation once we gave HEY users the power to defend themselves. Just like virus and malware makers are constantly trying to defeat …

On Apple’s monopoly power to destroy HEY

This statement was delivered to the democratic side of the House Antitrust Subcommittee upon invitation on July 17, 2020 in the committee’s preparation for the forthcoming July 27, 2020 showd…

Basecamp’s Ops Team is Hiring

Basecamp is looking for three new people to join our Operations team!

How we achieve “simple design” for Basecamp and HEY

Yesterday I got an email asking how we achieve simple designs for Basecamp and HEY, so I hastily tweeted

The evolution of HEY: from humble beginnings to a multi-platform email service

Two weeks ago we released HEY into the world, the culmination of 2+ years of explorations and intensely focused work. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: inventing a new product from sc…

Towards carbon negativity

At Basecamp, we’re committing to becoming carbon negative for our cumulative history and moving forward.

Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS

Since we started working on HEY, one of the things that I’ve been a big proponent of was keeping as much of the app-side compute infrastructure on spot instances as possible (front-end and as…

Black Lives Matter

It is important to us to take a pause and publicly recognize organizations, activists, campaigns, and journalists that have been doing the work, fighting everyday for a more just tomorrow.

Celebrating 3 million accounts (fewer)

We recently deleted over three million accounts across all our apps. This was the answer to a question we asked ourselves last year: what should we do about  accounts that weren’t cancelled, b…

On current events

It’s easy to say what a year, what a week. But that’s a shortsighted, privileged point of view. I’m guilty of holding that occasional perspective. It’s moments like these th…

Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp

We’ve been teaching people how to do remote work well for the better part of two decades. We wrote a whole book about the topic in 2013, called REMOTE: Office Not Required. Basecamp has been a remo…

Hiring programmers with a take-home test

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or…

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes

Basecamp’s newest product HEY has lived on Kubernetes since development first began. While our applications are majestic monoliths, a product like HEY has numerous supporting services that ru…

We’ve refreshed our policies

We've consolidated our policies across all products, added more detail to our Privacy policy, and introduced a standalone Use Restrictions policy.

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of service…

Why HEY had to wait

We had originally planned to release HEY, our new email service, in April. There was the final cycle to finish the features, there was a company meetup planned for the end of the month to celebrate…

Working remotely builds organizational resiliency

For many, moving from everyone’s-working-from-the-office to everyone’s-working-at-home isn’t so much a transition as it is a scramble. A very how the fuck? moment. That’s na…

Live Q&A on remote working, working from home, and running a business remotely

In this livesteam, David and I answer audience questions about how to work remotely. At Basecamp we’ve been working remotely for nearly 20 years, so we have a lot of experience to share. This…

A live tour of how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run Basecamp

David and I spent nearly 2-hours giving a livestream tour of our very own Basecamp account. We wanted to show you how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run projects, communicate internally, share announcem…

Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp

People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here&…

How we acquired HEY.com

Back on June 9, 2018, I cold emailed help@hey.com: Hey there-Curious… Would you entertain an offer to sell hey.com? I’d like to use it for something I’m working on, and willing to make …

Keep digging

I’m reviewing transcripts from interviews we did with customers last year and came across a nice example of interview technique. The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where t…

The books I read in 2019

Here are all my extracted answers from our monthly Basecamp check-in question of What are you reading? for 2019. (See also my answers from 2016, 2017, and 2018). The Sane Societ…

Mailing list software should stop spying on subscribers

The internet is finally coming out of its long haze on privacy, but it’s with one hell of a hangover. So many practices that were once taken for granted are now getting a second, more critical look…

Integrated systems for integrated programmers

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 sim…

Testimony before the House Antitrust Subcommittee

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 launche…

Basecamp is hiring a Programmer

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 a…

Down in front!

Look around YouTube at car reviews, and you’ll a lot of people standing in front of cars. Below I’ve snapped captures of early frames in six car reviews. These represent the first time the car is…

True brand awareness

It’s been said that your name is your favorite word. Likewise, a brand’s name is its favorite word. Pair their name with their logo, and it’s a self-love fest. You can see this play out when you…

Become A Facebook-Free Business

If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether…

How about fixing the workplace rather than avoiding it at 4am?

Oh those superhuman CEOs who get up at 4am for that killer start to the day! Aren’t they just amazing? Such sacrifice, such grit, such tenacity. If you’re the CEO, and you can’t get work done at…

Happy Pacifists

Business rhetoric is rife with the language of war — there’s constant talk of conquering markets and dominating the competition. These tropes indicate a dangerous way of thinking that can have real…

Leaders, doing what you’re good at hurts your team.

That’s the conventional advice we all receive. And there’s no shortage of StrengthsFinders assessments and personality tests urging us to triangulate which strengths we should zoom in on. However, I…

All Basecamp policies are now on GitHub and licensed under creative commons

We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans, for humans. But I’m sure we don’t always succeed. And…

The Chase Jarvis Live show

Back in October I was in San Francisco to record an episode of the Chase Jarvis Live show. We talked for nearly two hours about work, life, building calm (and crazy) companies, FOMO + JOMO…

Transform your Phone with a Boring Plastic Stand

When the Pixel 3 was announced a few months ago there was a lot of press about the incredible Camera and the enormous Notch. Lost in this noise is a wireless charging accessory that Google calls the…

Sometimes It’s Crazy At Work

In October, Jason Fried and DHH released their new book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. The book featured their writing, as well as cover art and interior illustrations from Basecamp designers…

The Support Side of Downtime

There used to be a panicked feeling that would set in when we’d have any sort of outage or issue in Basecamp past — that stomach-dropping, heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed feeling. But on November…

Why scrap scrappy?

For the last decade or so, I’ve been on a number on boards, consulted with a number of entrepreneurs, and have been both formally and informally involved in helping a number of young companies find…

The AI apocalypse is already here

We don’t need to wait for the singularity before artificial intelligence becomes capable of turning the world into a dystopian nightmare. AI-branded algorithms are already serving up new portions of…

You probably won’t make it to the top

So goes the familiar song of entrepreneurial or professional success. The same song being played in a thousand different tunes by a thousand different hucksters. It’s the song we all want to believe…

The Worst Performance Review

Annual, semi-annual, quarterly, 360…no matter what form they take, performance reviews can be anxiety-inducing workplace rituals. In today’s episode of the Rework podcast, we talk to the head of HR…

Dear Jeff

I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an interview, or if you shared it with Jason and me in person in…

Postmortem on the read-only outage of Basecamp on November 9th, 2018

Last Thursday, November 9th, Basecamp 3 was in read-only mode for almost five hours starting 7:21am CST and ending 12:11pm CST. That meant users could access existing messages, todo lists, and files…

Basecamp 3 for Android: The Latest and Greatest

We added a few great features in the latest version of Basecamp 3 for Android. Download version 3.12 from the Google Play Store today. You could always Add a To-do, Upload a File, Post a Message, or…

Update on Basecamp 3 being stuck in read-only as of Nov 8, 9:22am CST

Basecamp 3 is now back online for reading and writing. All data was confirmed to be fully safe and intact. No emails that were sent to Basecamp during the outage were dropped. We may still have some…

Our book launch was botched and it’s been crazy at work trying to fix it

I’m trying to remember when it was last this crazy at work. Before we spent a month fighting poor planning and terrible execution on the publication of our new book It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At…

Listener questions, answered

It’s time for another mailbag episode where Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson answer your questions! In this one, they discuss how to apply calm company principles to client work and…

People, Not Robots: Bringing the Humanity Back to Customer Support

Good help is hard to find. I dread calling the credit card company, the phone company, any service provider, including and maybe especially SaaS companies. I anticipate talking to someone who is…

The Myth of the Overnight Sensation

Before the viral unicorn poop video, before the appearances on Shark Tank and Dr. Oz and Howard Stern — Bobby Edwards was showing his invention at conventions and sending it to alternative health…

The Bezos way: sleep, puttering, and three high-quality decisions a day

Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen. So when I recently came across a fantastic interview with Jeff Bezos, I…

DHH on a calm writing process, #blessings, and late-stage capitalism

DHH is back on the Rework podcast this week for the second half of our interview about his and Jason Fried’s new book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. (Here’s the first part in case you missed…

New in Basecamp: Sort the Message Board

Basecamp 3's Message Board is a central place for your team to post updates and gather feedback on the record. It’s great for announcements, internal pitches, and just bouncing ideas back and forth…

Working in quality time instead of clock time

One of the things I love about our flexible work environment at Basecamp is the freedom to step away from something whenever I need to. Right now I’m exploring designs for a new product idea. R&D…

DHH on a new book, resetting ambition levels, and responsible software design

You might have heard that Jason Fried and DHH have a new book out called It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work that pushes back against the toxic culture of overwork and unhealthy ambitions that’s…

Our new book “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” is out!

A couple years in the making, our brand new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”, is now available in bookstores near you. There’s a hardcover, paperback (UK markets), audiobook, and ebook…

Under Pressure

Is looking at how someone works “under pressure” a good thing?

The next big jump in Basecamp accessibility!

Earlier this year I wrote about How we stopped making excuses and started improving Basecamp’s accessibility. Accessibility improvements in Basecamp 3 have come in two ways: All new features we’ve…

The immeasurable value of customer friendly policies

A while back we bought a duvet cover from Brooklinen based on, of course, a glowing Wirecutter review. We’ve been happy with it (it’s super comfy!), but sometime in the last couple months the…

You know what’s cool? Turning down twenty billion dollars

Brian Acton does not sound like the happy, fulfilled guy the stereotype of billionairedom would have you believe. He sounds like someone racked with regret, guilt, and torment over his decision to…

Illustrating “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”

Every essay in Jason and David’s previous titles, REWORK and REMOTE is accompanied by an illustration that captures the key message of the essay. Contract llustrator Mike Rohde’s iconic original art…

Farewell, Noah

A lot of businesses start as side ventures or hobbies that grow into full-time pursuits. The trick is often in knowing when to quit a comfortable day job to start a new business. We sit down with one…

Basecamp is hiring a data analyst

Basecamp is hiring a data analyst to help us make better decisions in all areas of the business. This includes everything from running A/B tests with statistical rigor to forecasting revenue for the…

How You’re Being Manipulated By Software

There’s a term we use in software design called the happy path. It describes a best-case scenario, in which customers use a product exactly as intended, without bumping into any edge cases or…

The Rework Podcast is back!

👉🏼🎙 Is this thing on? We’re back from sabbatical! In our first post-hiatus episode, Shaun heads to Denver to visit his sister, who left a catering job at a big restaurant chain to run a coffee…

In-store good vs. At-home good

A number of years ago we bought a new bath tub for our master bathroom. The tub looked something like this: We couldn’t use the tub until the full bathroom rennovation was done. But once it was, I…

Basecamp 3: New feature round-up

Summer is winding down, kids are back in school and the Basecamp team has a fresh batch of updates to share. Here’s a quick look at some recent improvements that are available right now in all of…

The future of the Android community is YOU

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s been going on in our community — conferences, meetups, blog posts, podcasts, open source (the list goes on and on) — you’ve probably noticed a really…

Some advice from Jeff Bezos

A number of years ago, Jeff Bezos stopped by our office and spent about 90 minutes with us talking product strategy. Before he left, he spent about 45 minutes taking general Q&A from everyone at the…

Real Work vs. Imaginary Work

Since we launched Hill Charts in Basecamp we’ve been fielding many interesting questions. One common question is: how do we catch more problems in the uphill phase so they don’t surprise us later…

Leaders, stop being so nice all the time.

I don’t mean to sound like an asshole. But when it comes to leadership, it’s true: Prioritizing “being nice” keeps us from being good leaders. Now I’m not advocating for us to be mean. Disrespectful…

Teaching iteration

I’ve written about the class I’d like to teach, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is the class I’d like to attend. Not necessarily now, but when I was growing up. In the 6th grade, let’s say…

New in Basecamp: Recurring Events

Now you can add [daily, weekly, monthly, yearly] repeating events to the Basecamp schedule. Here’s how it works: This feature has been a long time coming. Thanks to everyone who sent in a request, to…

Managers who brag about their stress and exhaustion don’t need our applauds

Managers used to be the object of envy for their leisurely workday. Maybe it included showing up half an hour later than the norm. Maybe it was that mid-day session of golf. Maybe it was skipping out…

Nintendo Switch Does Multiple Accounts Right

Multiple Accounts in a product is a difficult to design for. It’s not a typical thing, though. Most have just one Google, Apple, Instagram account. However, some might want to share an iPad or…

Managers: You’re not prepared for your one-on-one meetings. Here’s what to do.

Or at least that’s what employees think when it comes to one-on-one meetings. In a recent survey we conducted of 125 managers and 45 employees, we found 35% of employees believe their manager is only…

Take a Break

Smell ya later! We here at the Rework podcast are taking off the month of August. Before we left, we interviewed three business owners about sabbaticals. In this episode: Adeline Koh of Sabbatical…

Library Rules: How to make an open office plan work

Last week, DHH skewered the open office floor plan. He was right. But wait, we have an open office floor plan. And we’ve done a respectable job figuring out how to make it work. Maybe I should share…

The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

Not because there aren’t people who actually enjoy working in an open office, there are. Quite a few, actually. But they’re in the distinct minority. The vast majority of people either dislike the…

Temperature Check

One of our colleagues on the Basecamp customer support team, Jayne Ogilvie, wanted to find out how other tech companies with remote staffs handle issues like communication, career development, and…

The 4 questions you should stop asking during your one-on-one meetings

A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been…

Be a Lazy Designer…

Make something… “Be a Lazy Designer…” is published by Jamie Dihiansan in Signal v. Noise

Go Behind the Scenes

A famous guy once said, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” But he was a grifter. In fact, going behind the scenes — whether it’s a factory tour or cooking show — can be a valuable…

Loot’n’leave

I think I’ve cracked the obsession amongst much of the Silicon Valley set with compressing work life, sacrificing everything until the big exit, and running fast while breaking all the things: If you…