David Heinemeier Hansson

Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE. Won at Le Mans as a racing driver. Fought the big tech monopolies as an antitrust advocate. Invested in Danish startups.
May 20, 2021

Speeding up HEY's The Feed

Modern emails are essentially HTML pages. Particularly newsletters, which are full of images, styles, and tables. Showing these HTML emails inside a web-based email client is not a trivial problem. Unlike a normal HTML page that has the whole browser to itself, these HTML emails have to be shown inside the navigational chrome of the em...
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May 20, 2021

After the storm

It's been three weeks since Jason and I announced the set of workplace policychanges that led to a public firestorm and a really difficult, stressful time for everyone at Basecamp. Since then, we've been regrouping, hiring new colleagues, and continued operating our services without a hitch. We have a great team in place, and everyone ...
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April 28, 2021

Let it all out

Casey's reporting for The Verge brought some of the dirty laundry that helped motivate our change of directionregarding societal politics at Basecamp onto the public record. It erased part of that fine line we try to toe between sharing as much of the inner workings at the company as possible while respecting the confidentiality of emp...
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April 27, 2021

Mosaics of positions

If you learn enough about someone, you'll eventually be disappointed or dismayed. This is nature, this is normal. While some conservatives love to throw the word snowflake around as an insult, I take it as a compliment. The most interesting people I know really are unique, quirky, and even contradictory. To illustrate, I'm going to lis...
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April 26, 2021

Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work

Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees at Basecamp. As c...
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April 26, 2021

Don't promise, just ship

Despite telling ourselves and the world that software roadmaps are a bad idea for well over a decade, we still made the mistake with HEY and custom domains. I'm sympathetic to why we did that – given just the endless avalanche of requests! – but a mistake it was. The first problem with roadmaps, and other kinds of explicit or implicit ...
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April 23, 2021

HEY will soon let you recycle your emails

Gmail taught us to save every email forever so they'd have an endless data trove to mine for purchases, behaviors, and connections. Endless fields for machine learning to roam wild, sowed by the anxiety of WHAT IF I NEED IT ONE DAY. But saving every email you've ever gotten does not make any sense. Neither ecologically, practically, or...
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April 23, 2021

Legacy without nostalgia

It was Signal v Noise that connected Jason and I, back in 2001. A quick call for programming help, answered from four thousand miles away, lead to a twenty-years-and-counting partnership. It was on Signal v Noise where Jason and I first wrote most of the essays that became REWORK, which has since sold over half a million copies around ...
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April 21, 2021

Apple is an accomplice to fraud

Today's blockbuster story in The Verge about Apple's gross negligence in managing the App Store is wild. Wilder than wild, it's bananas. Absolutely bonkers. Go read it right now, then come back. Didn't I tell you? B-a-n-a-n-a-s. How on earth does a two-trillion-dollar company like Apple allow themselves to be exposed like this? That's ...
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April 20, 2021

What is a computer?

When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it was a milestone for the tech industry. They called it a phone, but the revolution was shrinking a general-purpose computer to fit in your pocket. That was the progress. But when Apple introduced the App Store the next year, it cemented the fundamental regression that had been present with the ...
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April 9, 2021

The App Store is broken because it wasn't designed to work

When Kosta Eleftheriou first started revealing scam upon scam in the App Store, I have to admit I didn't quite get it. How were all these multi-million dollar scams being allowed into the App Store in the first place? And why weren't they being expediently removed when scores of customers complained in their 1-star reviews? The answer ...
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April 5, 2021

Stop talking about product

Business people just can't stop referring to whatever their company makes as "the product". It's the great tell of whether someone's in it for the business or the beat. You hear it all the time. Car executives who talk about "producing compelling products" rather than "making good cars". Game executives who talk about "best-selling pro...
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March 31, 2021

It's hard to draw lessons from your own failures

Andrew Wilkinson's tale of how he blew $10,000,000 building a to-do list app perfectly illustrates the danger of trying to analyze your own failures. It's so easy to fall in love with one of those infinite alternate universes where you just did that one thing differently and everything worked out. Like "if only we had raised venture ca...
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March 26, 2021

No more platforms please

We have enough social media platforms, and they are all broken. Content moderation is bust at even moderate scale, and algorithmic amplification is broken at any scale. We need a reboot. We need to double down on the ideas of Web 1.0, and the tools that make carving out your own place on the internet possible. Not more platforms luring...
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March 19, 2021

A world without trust is not better

One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression. (There are a millio...
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March 17, 2021

Google affirms the duopoly grip by following Apple's 15%-on-the-first-million scheme

I can imagine Machiavelli advising Apple on attempting to appease App Store scrutiny by throwing some inconsequential concessions into the ring: What if y'all just lowered the totally obscene 30% cut of revenues to a merely utterly obscene 15%, but then only for the first million in revenue? It would cost you bupkis, but the plebs migh...
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March 17, 2021

Apple in China: Privacy, principles, purses, and pickles

It's easy to commit to principles when they don't cost you anything. That's why most mission statements ring so hollow. They're filled with free platitudes, and thus provide no guidance on how to actually drive "the mission" when trade-offs must be made. That's by design. The flowery mission statement is usually meant as a fig leaf ove...
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March 16, 2021

What you read is none of their business

There's this scene in the 90s movie Se7en where the detectives played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are able to hone in on the serial killer via a secret FBI program that monitors people's library habits. The killer, played by Kevin Spacey, has been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and other books about the seve...
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March 12, 2021

The totalitarians of the attention economy

It's become increasingly common for executives of dominant internet services to see their competition as all of human activity. Not just activity spent on competing or adjacent services, no, all activity of any kind. Any time spent outside their service equating to minutes on the clock to conquer. The latest example of this totalitaria...
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March 11, 2021

Memento mori illuminator

I really like watches. Not so much because I need to precisely tell time all that often – most of my days, the calendar is pretty empty – but because they remind me that I'm going to die. That reminder of death is a reminder to make time count. Forget about productivity, though. The notion that TIME = MONEY – squandered unless invested...
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March 10, 2021

It all began with an email

I must have told the story a hundred times. How I'd been a fan of 37signals since the company was founded in 1999, how I saw a post on Signal v Noise where Jason asked about a programming problem in 2001, and how the answer I sent in an email led to us working together for the next twenty years. But some of the details were always a li...
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March 9, 2021

Keep HEY weird

We're planning the next cycle for HEY right now. As always, there's an almost unlimited number of things we could do. We've never been short on our own ideas, we've never been short on feature requests. That's software development! But with HEY, the process of picking what to do next has a new important directive: Keep HEY weird. Keep ...
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March 8, 2021

Google suffers from a digital petro curse

The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the international market on top of...
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March 8, 2021

The enclosure of internet commons

In Less Is More, Jason Hickel provides a brief history of capitalism from the year circa 1500 onward, which includes an account of the European enclosure movement. Where formerly public commons, like forest, streams, meadows, and land of all types, were turned into private property with titles and deeds for the lords to exploit. Ending...
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March 4, 2021

The Arizona House stands up to Apple and Google

It passed! It fricken passed. I could barely contain my excitement when I saw the tweet from Matt Stoller that the Arizona House passed HB2005. This is the anti-monopoly bill that will prevent Apple and Google from using their gatekeeper role in mobile to force developers to use their exorbitantly-priced payment processing, and stop th...
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March 3, 2021

You gotta read Less Is More

This gushing review was first posted to our automatic check-in question in Basecamp: What are you reading? Normally I do a big batch of everything I've been reading for several months, but right now I'm so enamored with Jason Hickel's new book Less Is More that I didn't want to wait! I've been a fan of Hickel since I heard him on the C...
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March 3, 2021

Thinking about HEY World's potential for abuse

The internet can be a pretty grim place, and if you're building software here, you better think about how it can be abused, because odds are that it will. We thought a lot about that with HEY itself. It was one of the key motivating factors behind the screener. Which, immediately after launch, both Jason and I learned is a life-saver i...
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March 2, 2021

Apple can brick your computer if you miss a payment to Goldman Sachs on the Apple Card

I talk a lot about the problem with big tech not just being monopoly power, but also conglomerate power. Fingers in a million pies. Here's a sample from my testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives: “Apple is now involved in offering credit cards, producing TV shows, curating news, offering fitness classes, commissioning vi...
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March 1, 2021

Remote-work surveillance software is vile

You could have hoped that as the pandemic wore on, the initial rush of companies to adopt employee-surveillance software would peter out. They'd realize that the biggest problem with working remotely is usually not that employees work too little, but that they work too much. No such luck. Employee-surveillance software seems to be as p...
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February 26, 2021

Antitrust comes slowly then all at once

If you would have asked me a couple of years ago whether I thought big tech faced any material threat to their dominance from governments, I would have said no. Because it's been twenty years since the last time any of them did. For basically my entire career, big tech has gotten away with whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Th...
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