Reiterating our Use Restrictions Policy

The attack on the US Capitol, and subsequent threats of violence surrounding the inauguration of the new US administration, has moved us to reflect and reacquaint ourselves with the reality that however good the maker’s intentions, technology can amplify the ability to cause great harm. This includes us and our products at Basecamp. Therefore,...

Jan 2021

HTML over the wire

You can write fast, modern, responsive web applications by generating your HTML on the server, and delivering that (with a little help) directly to the browser. You don’t need JSON as an in-between format. You don’t need client-side MVC frameworks. You don’t need complicated bundling and transpiling pipelines. But you do need to think different. ...

Dec 2020

Validation is a mirage

Spend enough time talking with entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and anyone charged with proving something, and you’ll bump into questions about validation. “How do you validate if it’s going to work?”“How do you know if people will buy it to not?”“How do you validate product market fit?”“How do you validate if a feature is worth...

Dec 2020

The Making of a Dumpster Fire

A few weeks ago we launched a new marketing project for HEY.com at dumpsterfire.email. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a flaming dumpster with a printer and conveyor. You email dumpsterfire@hey.com, it prints out your email, and drops it into the rolling flames on a livestream. Simple, right? What follows is far more than you ever want to learn...

Dec 2020

How to waste half a day by not reading RFC 1034

HEY uses a branch deploy system that I’ve written about here on SvN and talked about frequently on Twitter. Plenty of other companies have implemented their own version of branch deploys (typically under a different name), but this was my own implementation, so I’m proud of it. First, a primer on how it works: Developer makes a code change...

Oct 2020

Basecamp has offset our cumulative emissions through 2019

Earlier this year, we announced that Basecamp was committing to getting to carbon negative for our cumulative history and moving forward. Today, I want to share an update on that commitment. Basecamp has purchased 7,000 verified carbon credits to offset our first twenty years of business (1999-2019) By purchasing carbon...

Oct 2020

Introducing the Basecamp security bug bounty

We’ve run a private security bug bounty program since 2014. Invited testers reported numerous security vulnerabilities to us, many of them critical. We investigated and fixed the vulnerabilities they reported and thanked them with cash rewards. Before 2014, and concurrently with the private bounty program, we ran a public “Hall of Fame” program where...

Oct 2020

Don’t take their word for it

A few weeks ago, we needed some hardware fast. After some back and forth with the vendor, they promised “expedited delivery”. That sounded like a good thing, but it meant nothing.To us, expedited delivery meant overnight delivery. That’s what we had in our head. Our experiences elsewhere equated expedited as overnight, but expedited isn’t overnight...

Oct 2020

Basecamp is hiring a Product Designer

Basecamp’s Core Product team is hiring a Senior Designer! We’ll be accepting applications for the next two weeks, with a flexible start date in December.It’s been over 4 years since we hired for this role, so this is an exciting and rare opportunity to join our team. You’ll start by working on HEY, our brand new email service. In 2021 we’ll also launch...

Oct 2020

We write code, not documents

Recently a student asked me:Could you describe one instance where you had to use a diagramming tool (eg. Google Slides Drawings, Lucidcharts, Miro, Whimsical, Gliffy etc) to accomplish a task?They also provided an example answer I could follow, which consisted of creating a chart to map a user flow, presenting it, getting feedback, adding it to another...

Sep 2020