SIGNAL V. NOISE

Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. By the makers (and friends) of Basecamp . Since 1999. QUOTE: ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES. FIRST Noise. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Quoted by Jamie on February 20 2010. There are 16 comments . There’s an important inversion to keep humbly in mind, which is that not every thing that is ridiculed is truth. REMOTE WORKING: THE HOME OFFICE DESKS OF BASECAMP March 20, 2020 / 53 Comments. on Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp. People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here’s what came in. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT WORK TODAY? The magic of these check-ins is two-fold. First, it almost completes nixes the need for those awful status meetings. Second, it allows everyone to keep a diary of their thoughts, interests, and work. Before Basecamp, I worked at a few other tech companies where I went to an office and worked with colleagues in-person. THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the INTRODUCING BOOSTS: AN ALL-NEW WAY TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT IN Sometimes Likes are called Faves, Hearts, Reactions, Claps, or something else, but the basic idea is the same: they’re a small, quick way to express your feelings about something, usually accompanied by a count of other people who had that same feeling.. Until today, we had exactly this sort of feature in Basecamp 3.We called it Applause.If you liked a post, you’d clap for it. ON WRITING: THE 1972 CHOUINARD CATALOG THAT CHANGED A While talking to Grant Petersen from Rivendell, he mentioned his love of decades old Chouinard climbing catalogs.. I grew up reading catalogs. The Herter’s catalogue* was the most opinionated one out there, but it was also the most entertaining.Sometimes I’ll read an online comment that, “Rivendell (or Grant) is so opinionated” and it’s supposed to be a criticism. AMAZON.COM IDEA: EASILY SEND SOMEONE A GIFT THEY DON'T OweBoat 28 Mar 05. Add something from their wishlist, then add the item that you really want to send. When it comes time to review the

order, remove the

THE DEAL JEFF BEZOS GOT ON BASECAMP posted on. July 27, 2017. In 2006, Jeff Bezos bought a minority, no-control stake of Basecamp from Jason and me. We didn’t need any money to run the company, as we’d been profitable from the get-go, so none of it went to fund “our incredible journey”. As the Valley players say, we took money off the table. It was an unusual deal for a QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception.

SIGNAL V. NOISE

Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. By the makers (and friends) of Basecamp . Since 1999. QUOTE: ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES. FIRST Noise. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Quoted by Jamie on February 20 2010. There are 16 comments . There’s an important inversion to keep humbly in mind, which is that not every thing that is ridiculed is truth. REMOTE WORKING: THE HOME OFFICE DESKS OF BASECAMP March 20, 2020 / 53 Comments. on Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp. People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here’s what came in. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT WORK TODAY? The magic of these check-ins is two-fold. First, it almost completes nixes the need for those awful status meetings. Second, it allows everyone to keep a diary of their thoughts, interests, and work. Before Basecamp, I worked at a few other tech companies where I went to an office and worked with colleagues in-person. THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the INTRODUCING BOOSTS: AN ALL-NEW WAY TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT IN Sometimes Likes are called Faves, Hearts, Reactions, Claps, or something else, but the basic idea is the same: they’re a small, quick way to express your feelings about something, usually accompanied by a count of other people who had that same feeling.. Until today, we had exactly this sort of feature in Basecamp 3.We called it Applause.If you liked a post, you’d clap for it. ON WRITING: THE 1972 CHOUINARD CATALOG THAT CHANGED A While talking to Grant Petersen from Rivendell, he mentioned his love of decades old Chouinard climbing catalogs.. I grew up reading catalogs. The Herter’s catalogue* was the most opinionated one out there, but it was also the most entertaining.Sometimes I’ll read an online comment that, “Rivendell (or Grant) is so opinionated” and it’s supposed to be a criticism. AMAZON.COM IDEA: EASILY SEND SOMEONE A GIFT THEY DON'T OweBoat 28 Mar 05. Add something from their wishlist, then add the item that you really want to send. When it comes time to review the

order, remove the

THE DEAL JEFF BEZOS GOT ON BASECAMP posted on. July 27, 2017. In 2006, Jeff Bezos bought a minority, no-control stake of Basecamp from Jason and me. We didn’t need any money to run the company, as we’d been profitable from the get-go, so none of it went to fund “our incredible journey”. As the Valley players say, we took money off the table. It was an unusual deal for a QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception. SIGNAL V. NOISE BY BASECAMP Craig Mod has an interesting story about publishing a guide book to the Tokyo art world. Here’s Craig’s description of what happened: I coauthored and designed a guide book to the Tokyo art world: Art Space Tokyo. It came out in 2008 to much acclaim and sold out rather

quickly.

SIGNAL V. NOISE BY BASECAMP Yesterday we alluded to a new Sortfolio promotion we’ll be running across The Deck Network.The promotion started yesterday and will run for at least the next 60 days. How it works. We purchased a slot on The Deck for Sortfolio. THE 5 MOST COMMON BASECAMP WORKAROUNDS Basecamp can’t be everything to everyone — when you err on the side of simplicity, you have to say no a lot. But when customers take the time to explain what they’re looking for and ask whether it’s possible, we want to give them something other than “nope, sorry!” So we end up suggesting QUOTE: UNTIL ONE IS COMMITTED, THERE IS Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. REMOTE WORKS: BEBANJO, SPAIN Name: Jorge Gómez Sancha Title: Founder and Managing Director Company: BeBanjo Based in: Madrid, Spain Established: 2008 Jorge Gómez Sancha What does BeBanjo do? We build software for the video-on-demand industry. Basically, a video-on-demand service is something like Netflix. All of the oper BASECAMP 3 FOR IOS: HYBRID ARCHITECTURE Basecamp 3 for iOS is written 100% in Swift 3.1 (soon to be 4), using the latest version of Xcode. We only have a few dependencies, but the ones we do have we manage with Carthage. The core library for enabling this hybrid architecture is Turbolinks. We use Turbolinks on the web, and our companion frameworks for iOS and Android let us use it in THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception. NINTENDO SWITCH DOES MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS RIGHT Nintendo Switch Does Multiple Accounts Right. Multiple Accounts in a product is a difficult to design for. It’s not a typical thing, though. Most have just one Google, Apple, Instagram account. However, some might want to share an iPad or HomePod with family. Since those don’t support multiple accounts, the owner’s profile ends up

overrun

HOW I GOT HIRED BY BASECAMP December 17, 2019 / 18 Comments. on How I got hired by Basecamp. I saw the Senior Programmer offer one day before going to bed. I decided I wasn’t going to apply. I had tried four times since 2013, and I never got to pass the first filter. Each attempt took me a good amount of time and energy, and I didn’t want to go through that pain again.

SIGNAL V. NOISE

Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. By the makers (and friends) of Basecamp . Since 1999. QUOTE: ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES. FIRST Noise. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Quoted by Jamie on February 20 2010. There are 16 comments . There’s an important inversion to keep humbly in mind, which is that not every thing that is ridiculed is truth. REMOTE WORKING: THE HOME OFFICE DESKS OF BASECAMP March 20, 2020 / 53 Comments. on Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp. People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here’s what came in. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT WORK TODAY? The magic of these check-ins is two-fold. First, it almost completes nixes the need for those awful status meetings. Second, it allows everyone to keep a diary of their thoughts, interests, and work. Before Basecamp, I worked at a few other tech companies where I went to an office and worked with colleagues in-person. THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the INTRODUCING BOOSTS: AN ALL-NEW WAY TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT IN Sometimes Likes are called Faves, Hearts, Reactions, Claps, or something else, but the basic idea is the same: they’re a small, quick way to express your feelings about something, usually accompanied by a count of other people who had that same feeling.. Until today, we had exactly this sort of feature in Basecamp 3.We called it Applause.If you liked a post, you’d clap for it. ON WRITING: THE 1972 CHOUINARD CATALOG THAT CHANGED A While talking to Grant Petersen from Rivendell, he mentioned his love of decades old Chouinard climbing catalogs.. I grew up reading catalogs. The Herter’s catalogue* was the most opinionated one out there, but it was also the most entertaining.Sometimes I’ll read an online comment that, “Rivendell (or Grant) is so opinionated” and it’s supposed to be a criticism. AMAZON.COM IDEA: EASILY SEND SOMEONE A GIFT THEY DON'T OweBoat 28 Mar 05. Add something from their wishlist, then add the item that you really want to send. When it comes time to review the

order, remove the

THE DEAL JEFF BEZOS GOT ON BASECAMP posted on. July 27, 2017. In 2006, Jeff Bezos bought a minority, no-control stake of Basecamp from Jason and me. We didn’t need any money to run the company, as we’d been profitable from the get-go, so none of it went to fund “our incredible journey”. As the Valley players say, we took money off the table. It was an unusual deal for a QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception.

SIGNAL V. NOISE

Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. By the makers (and friends) of Basecamp . Since 1999. QUOTE: ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES. FIRST Noise. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Quoted by Jamie on February 20 2010. There are 16 comments . There’s an important inversion to keep humbly in mind, which is that not every thing that is ridiculed is truth. REMOTE WORKING: THE HOME OFFICE DESKS OF BASECAMP March 20, 2020 / 53 Comments. on Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp. People are always curious about work-from-home (WFH), remote working setups. So, I posted a Basecamp message asking our employees to share a photo of their home office, desk, table, whatever. Here’s what came in. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT WORK TODAY? The magic of these check-ins is two-fold. First, it almost completes nixes the need for those awful status meetings. Second, it allows everyone to keep a diary of their thoughts, interests, and work. Before Basecamp, I worked at a few other tech companies where I went to an office and worked with colleagues in-person. THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the INTRODUCING BOOSTS: AN ALL-NEW WAY TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT IN Sometimes Likes are called Faves, Hearts, Reactions, Claps, or something else, but the basic idea is the same: they’re a small, quick way to express your feelings about something, usually accompanied by a count of other people who had that same feeling.. Until today, we had exactly this sort of feature in Basecamp 3.We called it Applause.If you liked a post, you’d clap for it. ON WRITING: THE 1972 CHOUINARD CATALOG THAT CHANGED A While talking to Grant Petersen from Rivendell, he mentioned his love of decades old Chouinard climbing catalogs.. I grew up reading catalogs. The Herter’s catalogue* was the most opinionated one out there, but it was also the most entertaining.Sometimes I’ll read an online comment that, “Rivendell (or Grant) is so opinionated” and it’s supposed to be a criticism. AMAZON.COM IDEA: EASILY SEND SOMEONE A GIFT THEY DON'T OweBoat 28 Mar 05. Add something from their wishlist, then add the item that you really want to send. When it comes time to review the

order, remove the

THE DEAL JEFF BEZOS GOT ON BASECAMP posted on. July 27, 2017. In 2006, Jeff Bezos bought a minority, no-control stake of Basecamp from Jason and me. We didn’t need any money to run the company, as we’d been profitable from the get-go, so none of it went to fund “our incredible journey”. As the Valley players say, we took money off the table. It was an unusual deal for a QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception. SIGNAL V. NOISE BY BASECAMP Craig Mod has an interesting story about publishing a guide book to the Tokyo art world. Here’s Craig’s description of what happened: I coauthored and designed a guide book to the Tokyo art world: Art Space Tokyo. It came out in 2008 to much acclaim and sold out rather

quickly.

SIGNAL V. NOISE BY BASECAMP Yesterday we alluded to a new Sortfolio promotion we’ll be running across The Deck Network.The promotion started yesterday and will run for at least the next 60 days. How it works. We purchased a slot on The Deck for Sortfolio. THE 5 MOST COMMON BASECAMP WORKAROUNDS Basecamp can’t be everything to everyone — when you err on the side of simplicity, you have to say no a lot. But when customers take the time to explain what they’re looking for and ask whether it’s possible, we want to give them something other than “nope, sorry!” So we end up suggesting QUOTE: UNTIL ONE IS COMMITTED, THERE IS Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. REMOTE WORKS: BEBANJO, SPAIN Name: Jorge Gómez Sancha Title: Founder and Managing Director Company: BeBanjo Based in: Madrid, Spain Established: 2008 Jorge Gómez Sancha What does BeBanjo do? We build software for the video-on-demand industry. Basically, a video-on-demand service is something like Netflix. All of the oper BASECAMP 3 FOR IOS: HYBRID ARCHITECTURE Basecamp 3 for iOS is written 100% in Swift 3.1 (soon to be 4), using the latest version of Xcode. We only have a few dependencies, but the ones we do have we manage with Carthage. The core library for enabling this hybrid architecture is Turbolinks. We use Turbolinks on the web, and our companion frameworks for iOS and Android let us use it in THE INCREDIBLE DELIVERY SYSTEM OF INDIA'S DABBAWALLAHS Code The mostly illiterate crew of deliverymen relies on a color coding system to route lunches to the proper recipients.. Tiffins in the wild. (source: NY Times) The code explained. The dabbawallahs even deliver in the pouring rain or during political strife. And business is growing, at a steady rate of 5-10% a year. This CBS News story says two main reasons for the success of the QUOTE: WE HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED TO HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY Quote: We have been privileged to have had the opportunity. – Signal v. Noise. We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Volkswagen for the past four years and are extremely proud of all that we have accomplished together. As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current accounts and this will not be an exception. NINTENDO SWITCH DOES MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS RIGHT Nintendo Switch Does Multiple Accounts Right. Multiple Accounts in a product is a difficult to design for. It’s not a typical thing, though. Most have just one Google, Apple, Instagram account. However, some might want to share an iPad or HomePod with family. Since those don’t support multiple accounts, the owner’s profile ends up

overrun

HOW I GOT HIRED BY BASECAMP December 17, 2019 / 18 Comments. on How I got hired by Basecamp. I saw the Senior Programmer offer one day before going to bed. I decided I wasn’t going to apply. I had tried four times since 2013, and I never got to pass the first filter. Each attempt took me a good amount of time and energy, and I didn’t want to go through that pain again.

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SIGNAL V. NOISE

Strong opinions and shared thoughts on design, business, and tech. By the makers (and friends) of Basecamp . Since

1999.

DHH / posted on January 6, 2020 / 5 Comments on The last tracker was just removed from

Basecamp.com

THE LAST TRACKER WAS JUST REMOVED FROM BASECAMP.COM Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh. But 2020 isn’t 2010. Our naiveté around data, who captures it, and what they do with it has collectively been brought to shame. Most people now sit with basic understanding that using the internet leaves behind a data trail, and quite a few people have begun to question just how deep that trail should be, and who should have the right to

follow it.

In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder. The internet needs to know less about us, not more. Just because it’s possible to track someone doesn’t mean we should. That’s the ethos we’re trying to live at Basecamp. It’s not a straight path. Two decades of just doing as you did takes a while to unwind. But we’re here for that work. Every request is now served from our own domains Keep reading “The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com” Jason Fried / posted on January 3, 2020 / 1 Comment on The Basecamp Guide to Internal

Communication

THE BASECAMP GUIDE TO INTERNAL COMMUNICATION We just published “The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication

“. It’s a

collection of philosophies and day-to-day practices that help guide the way we communicate with each other at Basecamp. We cover when to write stuff up in detail vs. when to chat about it. Why meetings are a last resort, not a first option. How companies don’t have communication problems, they have miscommunication problems. Why a single central source of truth is better than different versions all over the place. Why writing benefits everyone, but speaking only benefits those who were there. We hope you find it useful. Check it out

.

Jason Fried / posted on December 24, 2019 / 6 Comments on No one’s complaining NO ONE’S COMPLAINING I’ve heard this one before. I’ve used this one before. “No one’s complaining” so it fine. “No one” really means “no one _has complained to you_“. It doesn’t mean no one is complaining to someone else, somewhere else. In fact, if the thing you make/sell isn’t meeting someone’s expectations, there’s a good chance you’re the last one who’d

hear the complaint.

Contacting the company to complain is pretty far down the list. At the top are friends, family, colleagues. If you aren’t hearing the complaint it’s likely because it’s directed elsewhere. People typically talk truth behind backs, not to faces. Reputation erodes in the shadows before it comes to light. It’s not all that different from a manager or CEO eventually discovering something was wrong but “no one told me sooner”. The higher up you are, you’re often the last to know. Out of everywhere someone will complain, you’re close to nowhere. “I haven’t heard anyone complain about that to me” is a more

accurate statement.

So next time you say “no one’s complaining” you may be right, but you’re probably wrong. Doesn’t mean you need to do anything about it – not all complaints are worth acting on – but it should serve as a reminder that there’s a lot you don’t know. Rosa Gutiérrez / posted on December 19, 2019 / 2 Comments on Basecamp now supports security keys for two-factor authentication thanks to WebAuthn BASECAMP NOW SUPPORTS SECURITY KEYS FOR TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION

THANKS TO WEBAUTHN

Back in October, we announced our own two-factor authentication

solution

,

dropping the requirement for having a Google account to benefit from this necessary level of protection for your account. This solution is based on TOTP (Time-based One Time Password Algorithm): you configure a special _authenticator_ app with a secret we provide and then your app generates codes depending on the time that we can verify on our side after you have entered your credentials, as the second step before login you in. This kind of second-factor authentication is very convenient and easy to use, but it has weaknesses. A sophisticated phishing page could trick you into entering your username and password and then your second-factor code and use it right away to log in into your Basecamp account. This is where FIDO2: Web Authentication (WebAuthn) comes in. I’m happy to announce WE NOW SUPPORT WEBAUTHN for security keys and other authenticators as an alternative 2FA method. WebAuthn is the newer standard for secure authentication on the web and is more widely adopted and supported by browsers and authenticators than its

predecessor, U2F.

With WebAuthn we can offer a 2FA method resilient to fancy phishing attacks because authentication relies on public-key cryptography to prove to Basecamp that it’s indeed _you_ who is logging in, and this proof only works for https://launchpad.37signals.com/ and not for a fake phishing page that copies perfectly our own Launchpad. WebAuthn is currently supported by all modern browsers in desktop and

mobile platforms :

* Desktop: Chrome 67, Firefox 60, Opera 54, Safari 13, Edge 18 * Mobile: Chrome for Android 78, Firefox for Android 68, Safari for

iOS 13.3

Another cool aspect of WebAuthn is that it opens the door to new kinds of authentication devices and you no longer need to own special hardware keys. You’ll be able to use your phone or laptop and authenticate with a PIN, or use a fingerprint reader or facial recognition. For example, you can use your Android phone’s fingerprint reader in Chrome, Apple’s Touch ID in Chrome for macOS, and facial recognition, fingerprint reader or PIN via Windows Hello

in

Edge. Of course, you can also use specific security keys like Yubico’s YubiKeys , which is what I use. Older keys based on the U2F standard work too as WebAuthn is backwards compatible with U2F authenticators, so if you have one of these, you can register it in your Basecamp account as well.

Read more

about

how to register your security keys and start using this as your second-factor step for your Basecamp account, and, if you haven’t already, please, please enable 2FA for your Basecamp account now

.

------------------------- 🔐👩🏻‍💻IMPLEMENTING WEBAUTHN AND 2FA FOR YOUR OWN

APPLICATION

Providing your users with modern authentication mechanisms is a reasonably easy task thanks to a variety of open-source libraries in multiple languages. For WebAuthn, we relied on the excellent webauthn-ruby

by Cedarcode

. They also have a great Rails demo app

to show how to

use this gem. I encourage checking this out if you want to support WebAuthn in your Rails app, it’s super useful. For the client-side code, we ended up using the webauthn-json wrapper by GitHub that handles all encoding, decoding and building the different JSON

objects.

We’ve got questions by some people about how we implemented our 2FA solution based on TOTP, and this is also fairly easy! We again took advantage of an open-source gem, rotp

by Mark Percival

, although initially, we had implemented the algorithm described in the RFC for HOTP and the TOTP extension

. It’s simple and

totally doable if you prefer not to use an external library. If you do this, I recommend testing your implementation using the provided test vectors . We’ve also followed the security considerations detailed in the RFC

:

* We store secrets for TOTP (and recovery codes) encrypted using

AES-256-GCM.

* To account for time drift between the server and clients and transmission delays, we accept one code generated in the time window before and after the current one and use the recommended time-step

size of 30 seconds.

* We need to ensure a one-time only use of a code, which means we can’t accept the second and subsequent submissions of a code within the same time window. We use Redis to “quarantine” a valid code after it’s been accepted and take advantage of its key expiration

mechanisms,

I hope you find this useful! DHH / posted on December 18, 2019 / 12 Comments on Only 1512 of the Basecamp operations budget is

spent on Ruby

ONLY 15% OF THE BASECAMP OPERATIONS BUDGET IS SPENT ON RUBY We spend about $3 million every year to run all the versions of Basecamp and our legacy applications. That spend is spread across several on-premise data centers and cloud operations. It does not include the budget for our 7-person strong operations team, this is just the cost of connectivity, machines, power, and such. There’s a lot of spend in that bucket. The biggest line item is the million dollars per year we spend storing 4.5 petabyte worth of files. We used to store these files ourselves, across three physical data centers for redundancy and availability, but the final math and operational hassle didn’t pan out. So now we’re just on S3 with a multi-region redundancy setup. After that, it’s really a big mixed bag. We spend a lot of money on databases, which all run on MySQL. There’s ElasticSearch clusters that power our search. A swarm of Redis servers providing caching. There’s a Kafka pipeline and a Big Query backend for analytics. We have our own direct network connections between the data centers and

the cloud.

Everything I’ve talked about so far is infrastructure we’d run and pay for regardless of our programming language or web framework. Whether we run on Python, PHP, Rust, Go, C++, or whatever, we’d still need databases, we’d still need search, we’d still need to

store files.

So let’s talk about what we spend on our programming language and web framework. It’s about 15%. That’s the price for all our app and job servers. The machines that actually run Ruby on Rails. So against a $3 million budget, it’s about $450,000. That’s it. Let’s imagine that there was some amazing technology that would let us do everything we’re doing with Ruby on Rails, but it was TWICE AS FAST! That would save us about ~$225,000 per year. We spend more money than that on the Xmas gift we give employees at Basecamp every year. And that’s if you could truly go twice as fast, and thus require half the machines, which is not an easy thing to do, despite what microbenchmarks might delude you into thinking. Now imagine we found a true silver bullet. One where the compute spend could be reduced by an order of magnitude. So we’d save about $400,000/year, reducing everything we spend running our app and job servers to an unrealistically low $45,000/year. That reduction wouldn’t even pay for two developers at our average all-in cost at

Basecamp!

Now let’s consider the cost of those savings. We spend more money on the 15-strong developer team at Basecamp than our entire operations budget! If we make that team just 15% less productive, it’ll cost us more than everything we spend to run Ruby and Rails at Basecamp! Working with Ruby and Rails is a luxury, yes. Not every company pay their developers as well as we do at Basecamp, so maybe the rates would look a little different there. Maybe some companies are far more compute intensive to run their apps. But for most SaaS companies, they’re in exactly the same ballpark as we are. The slice of the total operations budget spent running the programming language and web framework that powers the app is a small minority of the overall cost. For a company like Basecamp, you’d be mad to make your choice of programming language and web framework on anything but a determination of what’ll make your programmers the most motivated, happy, and productive. Whatever the cost, it’s worth it. It’s worth it on a pure cost/benefit, but, more importantly, it’s worth it in terms of human happiness and potential. This is why we run Ruby. This is why we run Rails. It’s a complete

bargain.

Jorge Manrubia /

posted on December 17, 2019 / 18 Comments on How I got hired by

Basecamp

HOW I GOT HIRED BY BASECAMP I saw the Senior Programmer offer

one

day before going to bed. I decided I wasn’t going to apply. I had tried four times since 2013, and I never got to pass the first filter. Each attempt took me a good amount of time and energy, and I didn’t want to go through that pain again. That feeling didn’t last much: the next day, I was already working on my application. I knew I had made a mistake in the past: a too long cover letter. So this time I decided to fit it into two pages: * The letter itself on one page. * A distilled list of my relevant projects and articles on another. The self-imposed two-pages constraint was arbitrary but served its purpose: reducing my big initial dump of assorted ideas and projects into something essential and easy to digest. I decided to add a third page with a “Basecamp timeline” of my previous attempts. I wanted to highlight my genuine motivation, as well as referring to a demo

I

prepared years ago. I considered this secondary, so I placed it as a light appendix at the end. I tried to make the application look nice with my limited design skills. They asked for a PDF, but I didn’t want to deliver a boring document. This was the version I sent

.

They liked the application, and I was asked to do a technical exercise. Not too big, but interesting and fun. I could solve it on my own terms, and it let me show some technical and communication skills. Then I had three interviews: one with Andrea , the Head of People Ops; another with members of the team: Rosa , Jane

, and Justin

; and a final one with Jeremy , the team lead. Each interview left some candidates out, and I always knew how many of us were left. Interviews were not hard. No difficult questions or puzzles

.

They felt like chatting about my background and Basecamp with colleagues. They tried to make me feel comfortable and gave me their full attention, which was a big contrast with other past experiences I have had. I listened to this episode about how Basecamp hires many times during the process, and it is a pretty good depiction of what to expect. Because I imagined how good other candidates would be, I always thought it wasn’t going to be me. At first, that worked as a self-defense mechanism against the likely rejection. But the final interviews, when I knew I had a chance, were incredibly

nerve-wracking.

I hate describing rare fantastic outcomes as just the logical consequence of some actions. I am proud of the job I did but, when it comes to selecting people, there is no _best_ or _right_, and I was very lucky to be the one. Said that, I hope sharing my cover letter and experience can inspire other future candidates, like I was inspired by others Basecampers before

.

Claire Lew / posted on December 16, 2019 / 1 Comment on 6 mistakes to avoid during your first 30 days as a new manager 6 MISTAKES TO AVOID DURING YOUR FIRST 30 DAYS AS A NEW MANAGER YOU’RE BOUND TO MAKE MISTAKES AS A NEW MANAGER – BUT HERE ARE THE BIGGEST, MOST COMMON PITFALLS TO AVOID IN YOUR FIRST 30 DAYS AS A NEW

MANAGER.

I’ve never quite known the proper word to describe the feeling of being simultaneously elated _and_ terrified – but your first 30 days as a new manager is that feeling. You don’t want to mess this up. You’ve been reading The Effective

Executive

and High

Output Management

,

googling “management 101” and “first 30 days as a new manager”, and talking to mentors about the “should’s” and “should not’s” of leadership… all in hopes that you won’t make any egregious blunders during your first month on the job. But quite frankly, it’s bound to happen. You’re going to make a mistake, or two, or twenty. When we’re new as leaders, we operate out of instinct. It’s an instinct formulated from what our former bosses have done, honed by our own value system of what we personally prefer, and our best guess for “So I think this will work?” But we don’t _really_ know if it’ll work. That’s where I can help 🙂 Keep reading “6 mistakes to avoid during your first 30 days as a new

manager”

Claire Lew / posted on December 10, 2019 THE ONE-ON-ONE MEETING TEMPLATE FOR YOUR END OF THE YEAR REVIEW WHAT SHOULD YOU DO FOR YOUR END-OF-THE-YEAR REVIEW WITH AN EMPLOYEE? USE THIS ONE-ON-ONE MEETING TEMPLATE. With December upon us (already!), many managers have been asking me if I have a one-on-one meeting template for their end-of-the-year review with a direct report. Yes, I do have one 🙂 The end of the year is an opportune time – an ideal time, truly – to reflect together with your direct report, on what went well, what didn’t, in what they were most encouraged, and in what ways they

weren’t.

Keep reading “The one-on-one meeting template for your end of the

year review”

Wailin Wong / posted on December 10, 2019

LAB WEEK

Get out your Bunsen burner! It’s time to do some experiments. In the latest episode of the Rework podcast, we talk to two businesses that aren’t afraid to try new things. First, the three founders of The Mad Optimist , a soap company in Indiana, talk about letting customers choose what they pay for their products. Then Natalie Nagele, the co-founder and CEO of software company Wildbit , talks about an ongoing experiment with four-day work weeks and what she’s discovered about productivity, happiness, and deep work. Wailin Wong / posted on December 3, 2019 / 3 Comments on Venture Capital and Control with

Dave Teare

VENTURE CAPITAL AND CONTROL WITH DAVE TEARE Dave Teare is the co-founder and official “heart and soul” of 1Password, which recently raised $200 million in its first round of venture capital. Basecamp is a longtime happy customer of 1Password and also a longtime critic of venture capital, so the funding announcement led to some back-and-forth on Twitter

between Basecamp

co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson and Dave Teare. In the latest episode of the Rework podcast

, DHH

and Dave get on the phone to hash out their feelings about venture capital and what this funding round means for 1Password’s future. (A transcript is also available on the episode page

.)

If you’re new to Rework and enjoyed the conversation between Dave and DHH, be sure to check out this episode

where

DHH and Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg get on the phone to discuss power in open source communities. And subscribe to Rework via your favorite podcast app so you get our new episodes as soon as they’re

released.

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