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 Chicago that sells project-management software and email services. I first testified on the topic of big tech monopolies at the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s field… keep reading
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 however good the maker’s intentions, technology can amplify the ability to cause great harm. This includes us and our products at Basecamp. Therefore, we… keep reading
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-between format. You don’t need client-side MVC frameworks. You don’t need complicated bundling and transpiling pipelines. But you do need to think different.… keep reading
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 if it’s going to work?”“How do you know if people will buy it to not?”“How do you validate product market fit?”“How do you validate if a feature is worth… keep reading
Earlier this year, we announced that Basecamp was committing to getting to carbon negative for our cumulative history and moving forward. Today, I want to share an update on that commitment. Note: I edited this post on Nov 5, 2020 to include the prices paid for all carbon offsets and explain a little more about the… keep reading
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 they reported and thanked them with cash rewards. Before 2014, and concurrently with the private bounty program, we ran a public “Hall of Fame” program where we… keep reading
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, expedited delivery meant overnight delivery. That’s what we had in our head. Our experiences elsewhere equated expedited as overnight, but expedited isn’t… keep reading
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 development from unusual angles. Every time we talk, I come away inspired and full of optimism. So when he asked me to help him with… keep reading
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 roadmap? The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do… keep reading
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 signify that it is an all-hands-on-deck event and this definitely qualified. I want to go beyond the summary and help you see how an… keep reading