Computers have gotten so ridiculously fast that there is scarcely any organization in the world that can overwhelm a web-based information system running on a single server. All the complexity and sophistication required to run web services today stem from multi-tenancy. From having a single system serve millions of users at the same t...

The first major Rails conference on the European continent in over a decade was a smashing success this past October in Amsterdam. Not only did the conference sell out more than 700 tickets in less than 40 minutes, but it was the atmosphere from those in attendance that really made it soar. It was simply electric. So much so that I was...

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...

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...

I’ll admit it was a bit cheeky to make our new HEY Calendar app “do something” by including Apple’s own history as a preview for people who don’t have an account. And I didn’t give the gambit better than 30% odds of succeeding, but lo and behold, it did! Apple has approved our app, and it’s now available in the App Store! What a relief...

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...

“I feel it in the feed. I feel it in the discourse. I smell it in the vibes. Much of the pessimism that once was is lost, for none now wish to remember it.” We’ve lived through some strange years in the recent past. Much stranger than any I can remember since my earliest, solid memories of the broader world from the mid-80s. I’m not go...

It was a big year for ops at 37signals. In 2023, we moved seven major applications out of the cloud. Including HEY, our email service, which had been born there, and has an extremely high level of uptime criticality. Moving out of the cloud could not interfere with that obligation, and thankfully it did not. In 2023, HEY had a stellar ...

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 builtourbusiness on the web. The greatest, freest computing platfor...

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...