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...

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...

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...

Programmers at large seem eternally skeptical of style. And I’m not just talking about the stereotype of nerds in uncoordinated outfits or using pocket protectors. But style in the broad sense of aesthetics. Many appear imbued with fundamental opposition to the idea that how something looks should even matter. That somehow such a focus...

We’ve spent the last year tackling the number one request for our email service HEY.com: Adding a calendar! And now, in celebration of the new year, it’s finally ready, and we’re rolling it out to the first customers starting today 🎉 See, it turns out that lots of people would love to switch their email to HEY, whether it’s because the...

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 ...

Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after surviving a concentration camp during World War II. He observed the outer extreme of what happens to people who no longer have a WHY to live for. They’d wither and die in the camp. Even the most dire rations and punishing labor could be survived by many, as long as they had a purpose s...

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...

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...

I swear the intention isn’t to constantly start fights with guardians of every sacred paradigm in the tech world. To be honest, it’s been a bit exhausting at times to concurrently argue on at least three major flanks. But that’s just how this year has turned out, given the work we’ve been pursuing. Whether it’s telling people that you ...

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...

It’s been an incredibly productive year at 37signals. Perhaps our most productive one yet, in terms of total number of product improvements, new product developments, and open source extractions. But it’s only by looking back at the work from a distance that you can really appreciate it. So allow me to do that here. To appreciate the b...

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...

We’re in the final phase of getting the first ONCE product out the door. As with any new development, there are a million little details we need to nail for a successful launch that’s up to our standards. That’s usually where the temptation to cut corners on internal quality beckons, but we’ve handcuffed ourselves to the virtue of beau...

I continue to see new B2B software startups struggle with native mobile apps. Consumer software makers can usually start by going all-in on a single platform, but for business tools, that’s rarely an option. So they must face the tall task of tackling web, iOS, and Android at the same time. Hence the proliferation of toolkits like Reac...

I’ve found that you eventually get bored or at least used to every form of material trapping you can buy. Cars, watches, cameras, computers, whatever. It’s not that fancy stuff stops being nice, but it does stop being wow. That’s the essence of the hedonic treadmill. But do you know what never gets old? Nature. And I mean nature in the...

I grew up in a home where music was always playing. My father repaired electronics, so an endless stream of speakers, amplifiers, turntables, and TVs passed through the household. And all of it had to be tested, of course. At max volume. Sometimes at odd hours. While that was frequently a bit of a nuisance, it did seed a deep appreciat...

I can't thank Honeypot and Carolina Cabral enough for the producing The Rails Documentary that was just released today. Looking back on those early, formative years of Ruby on Rails with Tobi, Jamis, Jeremy, and Jason was actually kind of profound. I usually don't spend much time looking back, so for once to stop and marvel at how we g...

I've owned a lot of great cars in my time. It's been one of the few places where hitting it big has allowed for something that wouldn't otherwise be possible. From Lamborghini to Pagani, Porsche to Ferrari, Aston Martin to Bentley, I have owned and loved them all. A+ use of lottery money, would do it again! It's against all these delig...

During my three years in Denmark, I invested in five local startups. All on the premise that we'd work towards becoming profitable, remaining in the country, and avoiding the VC timebomb. The one that has already fulfilled all the objectives is Workfeed, and now they're ready to take on the American market. It's a proud moment! Workfee...

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...

Musk has taken a cleaver to the costs and complexity at X. It hasn't always been pretty, but it sure has been effective, and in the process, he's proven his detractors wrong time and again. Not only has the site stayed up, despite hysteric proclamations that it would crater soon after his personnel changes, but X has been able to incre...

We've just moved the 37signals podcast to Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting is to some extent a commodity market, so this was less about pining for a specific feature or even working to reduce the bill. This was about buying from Tom Rossi, the technical cofounder of HigherPixels (who make Buzzsprout), and his team, because we'd just prefer ...

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...

One of the common objections to our cloud exit has been that we shouldn't have expected good outcomes from a lift'n'shift operation. That the real value of the cloud is in managed services and new architectures, not just running the same software on rented cloud instances. It's basically the "you're holding it wrong" argument for the c...

In our quest for making programming simpler, faster, and prettier, no logical fallacy provides as much of an obstacle as “we tried that, didn’t work”. The fallacy that past failed attempts dictates the scope of what's possible. That just because someone, somewhere, one time attempted something similar and failed, nobody else should try...

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...

Celebrating twenty years of Ruby on Rails with more than 700 happy developers packed into the coolest conference venue possible in Amsterdam was epic. Safe to say, Rails World was a roaring success. Which is deeply satisfying to conclude, because it really wasn't a given outcome when I started working on The Rails Foundation last year....

Walter Isaacson's new book about Elon Musk is a fine biography, but a better business book. And like all the best business books, it's not merely an instruction manual, but an inspirational guide too. Not since reading Ricardo Semler's Maverick in the early 2000s have I been this impressed with the foresight, fortitude, and ferocity of...

When we announced Hotwire a few years back, it was always meant as a triptych. The center piece is Turbo. That's the drop-in level-up that makes multi-page web apps feel like single-page web apps – without giving up any of the development advantages to server-side programming. Then Stimulus brought order and structure to JavaScript spr...