The first Rails World in Amsterdam was a roaring success back in 2023. Tickets sold out in 45 minutes, the atmosphere was electric, and The Rails Foundation set a new standard for conference execution in the Ruby community.| David Heinemeier Hansson
The best engineering teams take control of their tools. They help develop the frameworks and libraries they depend on, and they do this by running production code on edge — the unreleased next version. That's where progress is made, that's where participation matters most. This sounds scary at first. Edge? Isn't that just another word ...| world.hey.com
Omarchy 2.0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment! It's crazy that it took me more than thirty years ...| world.hey.com
The Danish flag is everywhere in Denmark. It's at the airport when parents greet their kids coming back from holiday. It's on the birthday cake when you invite people over. It's swinging from the flagpoles in house after house, especially in the countryside. It's on the buses on the monarch's birthday. It's everywhere and all the time....| world.hey.com
You can just change things! That's the power of open source. But for a lot of people, it might seem like a theoretical power. Can you really change, say, Chrome? Well, yes! We've made a micro fork of Chromium for Omarchy (our new 37signals Linux distribution). Just to add one feature needed for live theming. And now it's released as a ...| world.hey.com
“One day, I got a chance. It just seemed to show up. It acted like it knew me, as if it wanted something.” This is how Kobi Yamada's book What do you do with a chance? starts. I've been reading that beautiful book to the boys at bedtime since it came out in 2018. It continues: “It fluttered around me. It brushed up against me. It circl...| world.hey.com
We're going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals. Over the next three years, as the regular churn of hardware invites it, we're switching everyone on our Ops and Ruby programming teams to our own Arch-derived Linux distribution (and of course sharing all the improvements we make along the way with everyone else on Omarchy!). It's funny how n...| world.hey.com
Have I told you how much I've come to dislike the 90s? The depressive music, the ironic distance to everything, the deconstructive narratives, the moral relativism, and the total cultural takeover of postmodern ideology. Oh, I did that just last week? Well, allow me another go. But rather than railing against the 90s, let me tell you a...| world.hey.com
When Ruby on Rails was launched over twenty years ago, I was a twenty-some young programmer convinced that anyone who gave my stack a try would accept its universal superiority for solving The Web Problem. So I pursued the path of the crusade, attempting to convert the unenlightened masses by the edge of a pointed argument. And for a l...| world.hey.com
I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4.5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster! And finally, it's simply f...| world.hey.com
I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the bu...| world.hey.com
Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(!) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-to-Linux enthusiasts. We have about 3,500 early adopters on the Omarchy Discord, 250 pull requests processed, and one heck of an awesome Arch...| world.hey.com
If your executive calendar is packed back to back, you have no room for fires, customers, or serendipities. You've traded all your availability for efficiency. That's a bad deal. Executives of old used to know this! That's what the long lunches, early escapes to the golf course, and reading the paper at work were all about. A great fic...| world.hey.com
Ideals are supposed to be unattainable for the great many. If everyone could be the smartest, strongest, prettiest, or best, there would be no need for ideals — we'd all just be perfect. But we're not, so ideals exist to show us the peak of humanity and to point our ambition and appreciation toward it. This is what I always hated about...| world.hey.com
The world is waking to the fact that talk therapy is neither the only nor the best way to cure a garden-variety petite depression. Something many people will encounter at some point in their lives. Studies have shown that exercise, for example, is a more effective treatment than talk therapy (and pharmaceuticals!) when dealing with suc...| world.hey.com
John McWhorter's new book Woke Racism ends with with plea to all of those who haven't been taken in by what he calls "The New Religion". Especially if they find themselves accused of being a "racist" after daring to dissent on any racially-charged topics: “We must say no to these people, in quest of a result: An understanding will grad...| world.hey.com
People seem to be continuously disappointed by the fact that public companies are run by professional managers who don't operate from deep principles. But they shouldn't be. It's in everyone's interest that corporations set their sails to the wind and whims of the prevailing culture. It's the essence of capitalism: Give people what the...| world.hey.com
It's only been two months since I discovered the power and joy of this new generation of mini PCs. My journey started out with a Minisforum UM870, which is a lovely machine, but since then, I've come to really appreciate the work of Beelink. In a crowded market for mini PCs, Beelink stands out with their superior build quality, their c...| world.hey.com
There's no country on earth that does hype better than America. It's one of the most appealing aspects about being here. People are genuinely excited about the future and never stop searching for better ways to work, live, entertain, and profit. There's a unique critical mass in the US accelerating and celebrating tomorrow. The contras...| world.hey.com
According to Statcounter, Linux has claimed 5% market share of desktop computing in the US. That's double of where it was just three years ago! Really impressive. Windows is still dominant at 63%, and Apple sit at 26%. But for the latter, it's quite a drop from their peak of 33% in June 2023. These are just browser stats, though (even ...| world.hey.com
When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance t...| world.hey.com
I've never seen so many developers curious about leaving the Mac and giving Linux a go. Something has really changed in the last few years. Maybe Linux just got better? Maybe powerful mini PCs made it easier? Maybe Apple just fumbled their relationship with developers one too many times? Maybe it's all of it. But whatever the reason, t...| world.hey.com
I've been talking about our departure from renting computers via AWS to owning them in a colocated datacenter as our "cloud exit". But I recognize this terminology can rub some people the wrong way. There's an entire generation of technologists who see themselves as "cloud native", and alienating them just because we want to own our ha...| world.hey.com
The birth rate is dropping all over the world. In some places, like South Korea (0.72), it is so low people are starting to worry about a national extinction. In other places, including all of Europe (average 1.5, Spain 1.29), it's merely bad and alarming. And nobody seems to know exactly why. Even in Denmark, it's now so low (1.5) tha...| world.hey.com
Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot. This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movie...| world.hey.com
I still remember how the car industry got all excited back in 2017 about how steering wheels would soon be obsolete. Every concept car then was a living room on wheels, seats facing inwards. The self-driving revolution was imminent, they said. Well, it wasn't... but now it actually is! Humans have a hard time with scenarios like this. ...| world.hey.com
My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer environment should look...| world.hey.com
It's been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excit...| world.hey.com
The Copenhagen International School is a wonderful private school located in the North Harbor of the city. It's home to over 900 students from around the world. This is where ambassadors, international executives, and other expats send their kids to get a great education in English while stationed in Denmark. As a result, it's perhaps the most diverse, inclusive school in all of Copenhagen. Lovely.| David Heinemeier Hansson
The recent disconnection of the ICC's chief prosecutor, at the behest of the American administration, could not have come at a worse time for Microsoft. Just a month prior, the folks from Redmond tried to assure Europe that all was well. That any speculation Europeans could get cut off from critical digital infrastructure was just fear...| world.hey.com
Over the years, I've learned not to question inspiration. To simply let it drive when it shows up with a full tank. Quite often, I don't exactly know where we're going or even why we're going, but it's repeatedly taken me to just the right place at just the right time, so now I just hop in and say: Let's go! Case in point: Arch + Hyprl...| world.hey.com
Our battle with Apple over their gangster attempt to extort 30% of our HEY revenues was one of the defining moments of my career. It was the kind of test that calls you to account for what you believe and asks what you're willing to risk to see it through. Well, we risked everything, but also secured a four-year truce, and now near-tot...| world.hey.com
Have you thought about doing the opposite of whatever you're doing or considering? It's a really helpful way to test your assumptions and your values. What does the opposite look like, how would it work? It's so easy to get stuck in a groove of what works, what you believe to be right. But helpful assumptions have a half-life, just lik...| world.hey.com
For the past week, I've been working off the Minisforum UM870. A tiny mini PC with an 8-core/16-thread AMD 8745H CPU, which retails for $343 (or €379) as a bare-bone unit, and stays below $550, even after adding 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm shocked to report that I really don't need more than this! I mean, I knew that Apple's Ma...| world.hey.com
The appeal of "vibe coding" — where programmers lean back and prompt their way through an entire project with AI — appears partly to be based on the fact that so many development environments are deeply unpleasant to work with. So it's no wonder that all these programmers stuck working with cumbersome languages and frameworks can't wai...| world.hey.com
The web will be far worse off if Google is forced to sell Chrome, even if it's to atone for legitimate ad-market monopoly abuses. Which mean we'll all be worse off as the web would lose ground to actual monopoly platforms, like the iOS App Store and Google's own Play Store. First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building ...| world.hey.com
We received over 2,200 applications for our just-closed junior programmer opening, and now we're going through all of them by hand and by human. No AI screening here. It's a lot of work, but we have a great team who take the work seriously, so in a few weeks, we'll be able to invite a group of finalists to the next phase.| David Heinemeier Hansson
I've been running Linux, Neovim, and Framework for a year now, but it easily feels like a decade or more. That's the funny thing about habits: They can be so hard to break, but once you do, they're also easily forgotten. That's how it feels having left the Apple realm after two decades inside the walled garden. It was hard for the firs...| world.hey.com
When things are going well, managers can fool themselves into thinking that people trying their best is all that matters. Poor outcomes are just another opportunity for learning! But that delusion stops working when the wheels finally start coming off — like they have now for Apple and its AI unit. Then you need someone who cares about...| world.hey.com
One of the longest running schisms in programming is that of static vs dynamic typing. I've heard a million arguments from both sides throughout my entire career, but seen very few of them ever convinced anyone of anything. As rationalizations masquerading as reason rarely do in matters of faith. The rider will always justify the way o...| world.hey.com
Back in the mid 90s, I had a friend who was really into raytracing, but needed to nurture his hobby on a budget. So instead of getting a top-of-the-line Intel Pentium machine, he bought two AMD K5 boxes, and got a faster rendering flow for less money. All I cared about in the 90s was gaming, though, and for that, Intel was king, so to ...| world.hey.com
Europe has become a third-rate power economically, politically, and militarily, and the price for this slowly building predicament is now due all at once. First, America is seeking to negotiate peace in Ukraine directly with Russia, without even inviting Europe to the table. Decades of underfunding the European military has lead us her...| world.hey.com
Just a day after JD Vance's remarkable speech in Munich, 60 Minutes validates his worst accusations in a chilling segment on the totalitarian German crackdown on free speech. You couldn't have scripted this development for more irony or drama! This isn't 60 Minutes finding a smoking gun in some secret government archive, detailing a pl...| world.hey.com
The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest t...| world.hey.com
Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we've been busy at work making it so. After a brief detour down a blind alley with an enterprise Kubernetes provider, we found our stride building our own tools, and successfully moved the first small application out of the cloud a few weeks ago. Now our sights are set on a t...| world.hey.com
For decades, the debate in Denmark around problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully...| world.hey.com
I'm sure there are truly pathological cases of ADHD out there, and maybe taking amphetamines really is a magic pill for some folks. But there clearly is also an entire cottage industry cropping up around convincing perfectly normal people that they suffer from ADHD, and that this explains many unwanted aspects of the human condition. T...| world.hey.com
I haven't felt any urge to tinker with my Linux setup in months. This after spending much of the spring and into summer furiously and obsessively trying every PC out there to find the perfect replacement for the Mac, diving deep with Ubuntu, and codifying my findings in the Omakub project. But now it's done, and I'm left enjoying the A...| world.hey.com
We finished pulling seven cloud apps, including HEY, out of AWS and onto our own hardware last summer. But it took until the end of that year for all the long-term contract commitments to end, so 2024 has been the first clean year of savings, and we've been pleasantly surprised that they've been even better than originally estimated. F...| world.hey.com
I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It's beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I've spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize...| world.hey.com
I'm solidly in favor of the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) model of open source stewardship. This is how projects from Linux to Python, from Laravel to Ruby, and yes, Rails, have kept their cohesion, decisiveness, and forward motion. It's a model with decades worth of achievements to its name. But it's not a mandate from heaven. I...| world.hey.com
Automattic demanding 8% of WP Engine's revenues because they're not "giving back enough" to WordPress is a wanton violation of general open source ideals and the specifics of the GPL license. Automattic is completely out of line, and the potential damage to the open source world extends far beyond the WordPress. Don't let the drama or ...| world.hey.com
The speed of change in technology often appears to be the industry's defining characteristic. Nothing highlights that perception more than the recent and relentless march of AI advancements. But for as much as some things in technology change, many other things stay the same. Like vi! vi is a programming text editor that was created by...| world.hey.com
We had originally planned to go all-in on passkeys for ONCE/Campfire, and we built the early authentication system entirely around that. It was not a simple setup! Handling passkeys properly is surprisingly complicated on the backend, but we got it done. Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out...| world.hey.com
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: "If Linux is so good, why aren't more people using it?" And it's a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment's consideration. Linux is even free, so what's stopping mass adoption, if it's actually better? My response: “If exercising is so healthy, why don't more peo...| world.hey.com
For over twenty years, the Mac was the default at 37signals. For designers, programmers, support, and everyone else. That mono culture had some clear advantages, like being able to run Kandji and macOS-specific setup scripts. But it certainly also had its disadvantages, like dealing with Apple's awful reliability years, and being cut o...| world.hey.com
Since the dawn of computing, humans have sought to estimate how long it takes to build software, and for just as long, they've consistently failed. Estimating even medium-sized projects is devilishly difficult, and estimating large projects is virtually impossible. Yet the industry keeps insisting that the method that hasn't worked for...| world.hey.com
I used to find the American self-image of being this uniquely freedom-loving, freedom-having people delusional. Sure, I'd think, you're not North Korea or Venezuela, but is that really a standard worth celebration? Shouldn't America compare itself to higher alternatives, like Europe or even the rest of the Anglosphere? Turns out I just...| world.hey.com
The dream has come true. It’s now possible to build fast, modern web applications without transpiling or bundling either JavaScript or CSS. I’ve been working towards this personal nirvana ever since we begrudgingly started transpiling and bundling assets in the late 2000s. Browsers just weren’t good enough back then to avoid it. But th...| world.hey.com
It's an exciting time in web development. After a decade's worth of front-end progress kept demanding ever more complicated setups, we're finally moving in the opposite direction. With simpler tools that are still able to hit those high-fidelity user interface notes, but at a sliver of the cost in complexity. The long expansion of enab...| world.hey.com
When we introduced a default setup for system tests in Rails 5.1 back in 2016, I had high hopes. In theory, system tests, which drive a headless browser through your actual interface, offer greater confidence that the entire machine is working as it ought. And because it runs in a black-box fashion, it should be more resilient to imple...| world.hey.com
Using open source software does not entitle you to a vote on the direction of the project. The gift you've received is the software itself and the freedom of use granted by the license. That's it, and this ought to be straight forward, but I repeatedly see that it is not (no matter how often it is repeated). And I think the problem ste...| world.hey.com
Between running Rubocop style rules, Brakeman security scans, and model-controller-system tests, it takes our remote BuildKite-based continuous integration setup about 5m30s to verify a code change is ready to ship for HEY. My Intel 14900K-based Linux box can do that in less than half the time (and my M3 Max isn't that much slower!). S...| world.hey.com
The engine is in wrong place in a Porsche 911. It's hanging out the back, swinging the car like a pendulum. And that's key to why it's the most iconic sports car ever made. This fundamental imperfection is part of how it creates the connection. This is true of mechanical watches too. They're hilariously complicated pieces of engineerin...| world.hey.com
I've always hated the saying "we're like family here" when it comes to work. Because it's obviously not true, and it's usually cynically invoked by management to entice an undue obligation of sacrifice. Implying that you should give it all to The Company -- constantly working weekends, always being available on vacations, and all the r...| world.hey.com
I love writing and sharing code as open source, but it's not an abstract act of pure altruism. The first recipients of these programming gifts are almost always myself and my company. It's an intentionally selfish drive first, then a broader benefit second. But, ironically, this is what's made my participation in the gift exchange of o...| world.hey.com
The Gemini AI roll out should have been Google's day of triumph. The company made one of the smartest acquisitions in tech when they bought DeepMind in 2014. They helped set the course for the modern AI movement with the Transformer paper in 2017. They were poised to be right there, right at the fore font of a whole new era of computin...| world.hey.com
During Ballmer's reign as CEO of Microsoft, the company always made plenty of money. While the stock traded sideways, Ballmer made sure it was still raining dividends. Yet, today, that era of Microsoft is not looked upon too fondly. It's seen as being anchored in the company's historic paranoia, Windows-centric world view, and as missi...| world.hey.com
I probably wouldn't have done a deep dive on Apple alternatives without the announcement that they were killing progressive web apps (PWAs) on the iPhone in the EU. Most people don't switch operating systems willy-nilly, and for good reason: They're different! And different is weird at first! But I'm actually glad Apple gave me the fin...| world.hey.com
I always thought it was a software problem — or at least a difference of aesthetics expressed in software. But it turns out the reason many Mac owners, including yours truly, so strongly dislike how fonts typically look on Windows is actually a hardware problem! See, every Mac with a screen has since 2018 shipped with a retina-class di...| world.hey.com
Some programmers can code under any conditions. Open office? They'll bring headphones. Whatever editor is on their system? They'll make it work. Using a different framework or language every few years? No problem. I envy that level of versatility, but I've come to accept it just isn't me. I bond with a quiet room, an editor, and a prog...| world.hey.com
Seven is the version of Rails I've been longing for. The one where all the cards are on the table. No more tricks up our sleeves. The culmination of years of progress on five different fronts at once. The backend gets some really nice upgrades, especially with the encryption work that we did for HEY, so your data can be encrypted while...| world.hey.com
Rails has been unapologetically full stack since the beginning. We've continuously sought to include ever-more default answers to all the major infrastructure questions posed by modern web development. From talking to a database, to sending and receiving emails, to connecting web sockets, to rendering HTML, to integrating with JavaScri...| world.hey.com
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explores the fascinating history of debt and economies. It starts out by debunking the common myth that prior to coinage, everyone were trapped in this inefficient mode of barter. If you had a chicken to give and wanted sugar from Gandalf, but Gandalf was a vegetarian, you ha...| world.hey.com
It was a rough 2023 for DEI. After the ideology completely conquered both the corporate and cultural world from 2020-2022, the reversal last year was astounding. The Supreme Court ruled the use of race in college admissions illegal, Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracst Research center fell apart in scandal, the former Meta DEI executive plead gu...| world.hey.com
Apple’s recent threat of financial audits for developers who dare link to their own website was a big, revealing moment to a lot of people. Folks who perhaps didn’t think Apple would be “that kind of company”. That they wouldn't so blatantly threaten developers into compliance with such overtly onerous and punitive terms. But they did....| world.hey.com
Apple is protecting its App Store racket with the same kind of indignant entitlement that characterized Microsoft during its darkest monopoly days. They’re in full “cut off the air supply” mode in Cupertino, pursuing Epic for a $73m legal bill in a lawsuit they partially lost. But the red mist of vindictiveness is blinding Apple’s view...| world.hey.com
A quarter of a million tech workers were laid off last year from the likes of Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and thousands of other big and small companies in the industry. And it looks like this year is not going to bring any relief. Google just announced more layoffs, Twitch cut 35% of staff, Discord is axing 17%, and Unity is cutt...| world.hey.com
The absurd egress fees charged by major hyperscalers have been one of the biggest impediments for companies to leave the cloud. We’ve been preparing for our own departure from AWS S3 at 37signals, and the price for taking our data elsewhere is in the crazy-land region of $300,000-$400,000! So imagine my surprise seeing the announcement...| world.hey.com
Apple waited until end of business on Friday to send us the formal rejection of the HEY Calendar app. It seems they love to play these little games to try to drown any controversy with the cover of a weekend. But we don’t roll over that easy, so the team worked through the weekend to prepare a new build to appease the App Store’s bully...| world.hey.com
If there’s one value Jason and I put above all else in business, it's independence. The freedom to make our own choices, good or bad, without ever having to ask anyone for permission. Not from investors, not from naysayers, not from platform gatekeepers. It’s why we’ve built our business on the web. The greatest, freest computing platf...| world.hey.com
There should at least be a standard of double jeopardy when it comes to the app store monopoly regimes. If you’ve managed to overturn a rejection of your service once, they can’t come after you on the same service again later. We could have used that today! But unfortunately there is no rule of law with the app stores, except that of t...| world.hey.com
Denmark has long ranked high on the list of societies that American liberals dream about turning the United States into. And for many good reasons. Education is state-funded, and students are even paid a stipend to go to university. Health care is equally free of individual charge, and there’s generally a robust social safety net for u...| world.hey.com
Under the old Twitter regime, politics seemed to seep into everything, especially tech talk. There was scarcely a programming or product topic that couldn’t be turned into a struggle session on account of some perceived transgression or privilege. It was, to use the trauma language of those days, exhausting. It also simply seemed like ...| world.hey.com
One of the driving aspirations behind once.com is the notion that not all software needs to evolve forever. We’ve become so used to digital services being malleable that we’ve confused the possibility of software updates with their necessity. Some software can simply be finished, and a lot would be better if it were. That’s basically t...| world.hey.com
It’s that time of year where people often start thinking about new year’s resolutions. I want to lose 10 lbs, I want to read more books, I want to x, y, and z. Often, it’s just a fantasy. They’re not actually going to lose 10 lbs or they might order some more books but never read them. But at least there’s a spark of hope there. A fund...| world.hey.com
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set! A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell serv...| world.hey.com
For the first time since the 2000s, I'm working on a new Rails application without using any form of real build steps on the front-end. We're making it using vanilla ES6 with import maps for Hotwire, and vanilla CSS with nesting and variables for styling. All running on a delightfully new simple asset pipeline called Propshaft. It's al...| world.hey.com
The most counterintuitive of the Stoic mental exercises is that of negative visualization. Willfully imagining all manner of terrible things that might befall you, but haven't yet. Described like this, it sorta sounds like a fancy word of anxiety, but if you look closer, it's in fact its opposite. The point of visualizing the consequen...| world.hey.com
I've seen a lot of true believers argue for virtues of their favorite paradigms and methods over the decades working in software. And mostly, I look at people with a passionate preference and smile. Isn't it great that people care so much about their craft that they volunteer to extol the benefits of their favorite tools! Yes it is, bu...| world.hey.com
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can announce we're dr...| world.hey.com
After hiring people for twenty years, I've come to accept that it's impossible to know up front what someone is truly capable of. Sure, we try our best to make good, educated guesses during the hiring process, and this is why asking finalists to do sample work projects is so crucial. But it still remains just guessing, and the truth do...| world.hey.com
Affirmative action is right up there with abortion and gun control among the highest-profile, longest-running social fissures in America. So of course the recent ruling from the Supreme Court making its use in college admissions illegal was going to light a political fire. The surprising thing is just how contained the burn has been wi...| world.hey.com
Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it's done. We're out. The last a...| world.hey.com
It's hard to know what'll stick around when shopping for software online. Popular services and crucial products get shut down all the time. You can't even trust that major conglomerates like Google to provide something you can count on two-five-ten years from now. And if you're betting on something backed by venture capital, well, you ...| world.hey.com
It's not even been a full two years since we said no thanks to discussing societal politics internally at 37signals. The drama that decision created was immense, and all-consuming for a few weeks. We trended on Twitter for a while, there were countless, breathless articles covering the move, and ultimately, we said farewell to twenty-s...| world.hey.com
I can't remember a time in my life when so many got so much wrong in their predictions about the future. Not in politics, not in culture, not in technology, not in economics, not in medicine, not anywhere. It's been a profoundly humbling phase of human history for both the experts that predict for a living and the masses trying to sort...| world.hey.com
The acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion entered the common corporate lexicon with overwhelming force in 2020. Executives everywhere quickly learned they needed a passable position on DEI to stay employed, and a cottage industry of consultants sprung up to provide it. There were endless proclamations of "doing the work", some e...| world.hey.com
We've often been accused of being unambitious with Basecamp. Why didn't you just raise a bunch of venture capital and go for The Big Time? Why were you taking profits when you could have invested in growth? Don't you want to own a unicorn? Don't you want to be a billionaire?! This is the Silicon Valley way. Ride the big money to the mo...| world.hey.com
In the two years since the European Court of Justice invalidated the Privacy Shield concept, European companies have been scrambling to pretend to comply with the ruling, without changing anything consequential about how they use American internet services. The erroneous consensus seems to have been that if only they could get an Ameri...| world.hey.com
