Chairman Klein and members of the Senate Industry, Business and Labor Committee- My name is David Heinemeier Hansson, and I’m the CTO and co-founder of Basecamp, a small internet company from Chicago that sells project-management software and email services. I first testified on the topic of big tech monopolies at the House Antitrust...

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,...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...