January 28, 2022
Spotify must be afraid of canceling Rogan, right? Right?!
What's stood out most to me about the latest Rogan round over Neil Young's ultimatum is the iron-clad assumption that Spotify surely must – MUST! – agree with the underlying premise. That Rogan is a menace to society because he host guests with divergent views on covid, and because he shares his unsanctioned opinion on the matter. Ther...
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January 28, 2022
We can't thrive without friction
Social media platforms have been on relentless quest since their inception to remove all friction from all acts of engagement. The distance from emotion to reaction has been whittled away one A/B test at the time, and there's barely any left. You don't even have to portray any original sentiment today, just like or retweet that of some...
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January 26, 2022
A pandemic dispatch from Denmark
Next week, virtually all pandemic restrictions will be gone from Danish society. No mask mandates, no vaccine passports, no distancing, no limitations on bars, restaurants, or night clubs. This follows a determination by the government's pandemic council that the virus is no longer threat to the functioning of society, and thus no long...
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January 25, 2022
Just the cost of doing business [crimes]
The Dutch competition authorities just slapped Apple with a five million euro fine for refusing to comply with the country's new requirements on App Store policies. These new requirements are somewhat oddly contained to just dating apps, as they came as a consequence of a specific complaint from a specific provider, but even with that ...
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January 21, 2022
The Mac proves Apple can safely open the iPhone
The Mac is such an inconvenient platform for Apple. It prevents the company from making any credible claim of an impending security catastrophe, if lawmakers force the iPhone to allow installation of apps without the App Store. With the Mac, we have almost forty years of proof that computers don't need an App Store to be safe. Made by ...
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January 20, 2022
Free is never forever
Google gave away free email on custom domains for years. This unsurprisingly lured lots of people into switching to Gmail. But now the party is over, and what used to be free will now easily cost $500/year or more (if you have 10 users on a custom domain). Yikes. Unsurprisingly, I'm not actually against Google charging for email. The l...
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January 19, 2022
Apple turns the legislative contempt up to 11
In North Dakota, Apple sent Erik Neuenschwander, a chief privacy engineer, to make its case that opening up the App Store to free and fair competition on payment processing would be bad for privacy. He focused in a relatively sober tone on the sanctity of Apple's integration and curation as arguments for why they deserved their monopol...
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January 17, 2022
Case study in motivated reasoning
A few days ago, an anonymous Twitter user claiming to be an employee at a Big Tech company wrote a thread about work that went viral (since deleted, possibly partly by Twitter). Hazard Harrington's thread depicted a company drowning in woke excesses, so of course it sent the internet to the trenches. "This is EXACTLY what we suspected!...
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January 14, 2022
This swapping of roles is making me dizzy
Matt Taibbi wrote a great piece called The Left is Now the Right last year. It detailed how many of the tactics and thought processes anyone who came of age in the 90s would recognize as "of the right" are now being used by the opposite side of the political spectrum. A clip: “Conservatives once tried to legislate what went on in your ...
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January 14, 2022
HEY is running its JavaScript off import maps
The advent of import maps, and the bundler-less JavaScript reality it introduced, was undoubtedly my favorite advancement in web tech for 2021. Between Guy Bedford's excellent shim and native support in Chrome 89, we've finally been granted an escape from a decade's worth of frustrating complexity with excess tooling. Usually progress ...
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January 13, 2022
The monopoly playbook is depressingly uniform across big tech
I finally had a chance to read ILSR's blockbuster report on Amazon's squeeze of independent retailers who sell through their marketplace. It's unusually well-written and researched, and the picture it paints is depressingly familiar to anyone who've been at the sharp end of a big tech monopoly spear. The overarching conclusion is that ...
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January 12, 2022
Why is Denmark able to have these vaccine debates?
It continues to fascinate me to no end how different countries have ended up with such different approaches to this late-stage pandemic game. While the French president is talking about "pissing off the unvaccinated", the Australians are trying to a martyr of Djokovic, and the Americans continue to render everything virus through the b...
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January 12, 2022
The thrill of changing your mind
I've changed my mind on a lot of topics over the last few years, and it's frankly been exhilarating. Especially if the topic had been one left unquestioned for a long time. To me, it feels similar to the rush of solving a hard problem. When the pieces suddenly fit into place, and an elegant solution emerges, you can't help but smile. T...
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January 10, 2022
The merit of hiring by merit
I've spent years pushing back against hiring practices based on years of irrelevance, pedigree gates, and brainteasers. These indirect measures of talent have proven both unreliable and unfair. If you can, why not look directly at merit? When it comes to programmers, that merit is chiefly their ability to program! And program well. It'...
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January 6, 2022
It's not a lottery
The opening for director of engineering at Basecamp has barely been up for a day, and there's already an inbox full of applicants. Virtually none of whom seem to have bothered reading the basic requirements for the opening or comply with the instructions on how to make a successful application. And I'm just left thinking: What's the po...
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January 6, 2022
It's harder hiring managers
We just opened a position for a Director of Engineering to help us manage our rapidly expanding technical teams at Basecamp. We already have more programmers on staff than we've ever had, and we intend to double that crew within the next 12-18 months. We're going all-in on becoming a multi-product business again, and that means hiring ...
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January 4, 2022
It could be worse
I grew up with persistent reminders of how any bad thing that happened could easily have been worse. Oh, you scraped your knee? It could be worse, you could have broken your leg! Oh, you broke your leg? It could be worse, you could have cracked your skull! Oh, you cracked your skull? It could be worse, you could have died! It wasn't ju...
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January 3, 2022
Celebrating the silence of high uptimes
It was a very loud year, 2021. Which makes the satisfying silence of technical incidents at Basecamp all the more of a celebration. In the year that went, every single application we offer had at least 99.99% uptime! This is through repeated AWS outages, zero-day security alerts, and the drama of the world in those twelve months. But i...
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January 1, 2022
Should you vaccinate your kids?
On the face of it, this seems like a basic medical question. One where reasonable people can weigh the same trade offs, yet arrive at different conclusions. And, as foreign as that might seem to Americans at the moment, that's largely how this question has been tackled in Denmark in the public forum so far. There are Danish pediatricia...
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December 22, 2021
How we manage programming projects in Basecamp
That we manage all our programming projects in Basecamp is perhaps an obvious admission since its our own product. But it's less obvious to some how that's possible, given the apparent lack of affordances to tie todos, messages, or check-ins together with code commits automatically. Some teams who are Basecamp curious can't seem get ov...
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December 21, 2021
Email is the antidote
It's easy to get down on the internet as a medium for reasoned debate. Every discussion on social media that touch controversial topics seems to descent into the depths of hell in less than sixty seconds. But social media is not the internet. It's merely one distorted expression of it. There are other ways to connect, to reason, to lea...
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December 21, 2021
Are we past peak "woke"?
Could John McWhorter have gone on MSNBC or The View or PBS or NPR a year ago to talk about a new book called Woke Racism? Would a book with a title like that even have been welcome at that moment in such chambers? I doubt it. But now it is. McWhorter has not only written an important book that's rightfully garnering broad attention, he...
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December 17, 2021
That shipping feeling
"Real artists ship" was one of Steve Jobs' mottos. You can clearly see that ethos still in present-day Apple. There are no far-future tech demos from things in the R&D lab at Apple keynotes. While their car project is the perhaps one of the worst kept secrets in company history, they aren't deliberately trying to flaunt it. Because a t...
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December 16, 2021
The One Person Framework
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...
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December 15, 2021
The art of not having a take
The most liberating aspect for me of writing emails rather than tweets is the natural limit on topics I might be tempted to have a take on. When I was primarily writing tweets, I could easily involve myself in a dozen topics in a day. HERE'S A TAKE, THERE'S A TAKE, TAKE THAT! With email, it's a sliver of that. But it goes even deeper t...
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December 13, 2021
Heaven is hazy
In trying to understand the ideology of The Elect, as John McWorter calls them, I've found a historical dive into the late 60s and early 70s tremendously productive. The echoes of history provide a strange comfort: We are not the first people to be struggling with this. I don't just mean that in a general sense. That other peoples at o...
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December 13, 2021
I won't let you pay me for my open source
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...
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December 10, 2021
Everything popular is problematic
I can completely see why Joe Rogan's podcast has become so popular. I've listened to maybe a dozen shows, and the way he lets his guests talk, at length, feels like a throwback. It doesn't have the intellectualism of a Bryan Magee or the inquisitiveness of a William Buckley, but it does have the spirit of letting people – with whom he,...
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December 7, 2021
The time is right for Hotwire
It's not exactly been a big secret that I've harbored a fair skepticism towards single-page applications over the years. Not because of some innate animosity with JavaScript, at least not the modern variety, which we first tasted in the form of CoffeeScript, then as transpiled ES Next. But because writing and updating HTML like that ne...
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December 2, 2021
Worrying yourself into excess
When we were developing this HEY World system in the beginning of the year, we ended up spending a very considerable amount of time worrying about and discussing all the ways it might be abused. This is the internet after all! Full of savage trolls! Surely we must fortify lest we be overrun? But the trolls never came. Since we launched...
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