Signal v. Noise

Why we don't hire programmers based on puzzles and tricks

Give it five minutes

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view. It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant…

Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers

I remember the first time I interviewed for a front-end programming position and got asked how to do something in JavaScript on a white board. The specifics are vague, but it’s crystal clear how stupid it made me feel and how little it had to do with the actual job. Since then I’ve r…

Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies. If we were only trying to hire in Chi…

Some advice from Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos stopped by our office yesterday 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 office. During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who are “right …

How Basecamp Next got to be so damn fast without using much client-side UI

When we started working on Basecamp Next last year, we had much internal debate about whether we should evolve the existing code base or rewrite it. I’ll dive more into that debate further in a later post, but one of the key arguments for a rewrite was that we wanted a dramatic leap forward i…

Testing like the TSA

When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlighten…

No more remote work at Yahoo

Employees at Yahoo have had a rough decade. The company has been drifting aimlessly with little vision, an endless parade of CEOs, and a flatlined stock price. That’s not exactly a conducive environment to be inspired and motivated within, let alone do the stellar work that Yahoo needs to pul…

Your life's work

Facebook is not worth $33 billion

Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…

37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment (2009)

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The…

Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried

Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea. That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. HereR…

Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…

Great design from Apple on an interaction with Siri

Great design from Apple on this interaction with Siri. It was a bit after midnight (which was technically October 21), but since it was so close to the previous day, Siri wanted me to clarify which “tomorrow” 9am I really meant… 9am on the 21st (which was technically wrong, but it…

37signals Works Remotely [video]

We talk a lot about working remotely. Over 70% of our employees work remotely. They work out of homes, coffee shops, and co-working spaces. They play music, garden, and spend time with their families. We dig working remotely so much we wrote a book about it. Meet some of the fantastic pe…

The bar for success in our industry is too low

This weekend the New York Times published a piece called Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit. The piece focused on Evernote, a web-based and smart-phone based application for taking notes, snapping pictures, and storing stuff you want to remember later. The following critique isn’t about Evernote (…

There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work

“Shit from the fucking Mac App Store, ‘designed’ by people who think they get interface design.” That’s the byline for Read the fucking HIG, a blog that pretends to expose apps in the Mac App Store which violate Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Let’s t…

Trust is Fragile

Taylor’s post about our growth in 2011 included a bunch of numbers showing how the pistons inside the 37signals engine are pounding faster, but it all got swept away by what seemed like an innocent side-note: The 100 millionth file was called cat.jpg. Being as it is that the internet is co…

What happens after Yahoo acquires you

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucra…

All the oxygen trapped in a bubble

There are many good reasons to be concerned about whether the internet industry is in another bubble. Once shaky, unproven businesses hit the NASDAQ, the chance that granny is going to lose her pension fund goes up big time. That’s the direct economic consequence that you’ve probably heard already.…

The Programming Books That Meant The Most To Me

There are so many programming books out there, but most focus on specific technologies and their half-life is incredibly short. Others focus on process or culture. Very few focus on the timeless principles of writing good code, period. The following five books had the biggest influence on my progra…

Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery

Ten apps is all I need

Nokia’s new N9 phone based on MeeGo looks wonderful and according to Engadget, it’s a delight to use as well. But supposedly it’s dead on arrival because it’s not going to have a massive platform. Excuse my french, but fuck the platform. For all the 200,000 apps in Apple&…

Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: GitHub

Below: Q&A with Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Chris and Tom from GitHub have also answered reader questions i…

An office with "library rules"

This is what 864GB of RAM looks like now

From the very start, we wanted Basecamp Next to be fast. Really, really fast. To do so we built a russian-doll architecture of nested caching that I’ll write up in detail soon. But for now I just wanted to share where all this caching is going to live as we just installed it at the hosting ce…

Microsoft's dystopian pitch for remote work

Microsoft is launching a new marketing campaign for Office 365 that celebrates working during your kid’s recitals, on vacation, and while enjoying the appetizer at a restaurant. All this under the guise of “balance” between work and life. Yes, it’s horrible. Remote w…

The Next Generation Bends Over

Mint’s sale to Intuit really pissed me off. Why should I care? Because I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint i…

How key-based cache expiration works

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things — Phil Karlton Doing cache invalidation by hand is an incredibly frustrating and error-prone process. You’re very likely to forget a spot and let stale data get served. That’s enough to turn…

The first step is to start

Many people ask me, “How can I get started in web design?” or, “What skills do I need to start making web applications?” While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you do…