Creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-owner & CTO of 37signals (Basecamp & HEY), NYT best-selling author, and Le Mans 24h class-winner. No DMs, email: dhh
@hey
.com
ONCE/Campfire is now for sale! One-time price of $299 gets you a complete chat system that nails the basics, all the code used to power it, an invitation to do a code walk w/ me if you care, and a minimum of 3 years of security patches. Enjoy!
The
@AppleCard
is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time. Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work.
"I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies."
Wow. I'm literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll REMOVE THE APP.
Oh for fucks sake 🙄. Don’t sacrifice your 20s – or any other decade of life! – on the erroneous belief that unless you work round the clock, you’re not going to be “successful”. The world is full of people who were all work and now are all regret.
Hilarious how much mansplaining is flowing in this thread. Every single poster questioning my wife’s credit score, a man. Every single defense of Apple blaming GS, a man. Almost like men are over represented in the defense/justification of discrimination that doesn’t affect them?
The HEY stack:
- Vanilla Ruby on Rails on the backend, running on edge
- Stimulus, Turbolinks, Trix + NEW MAGIC on the front end
- MySQL for DB (Vitess for sharding)
- Redis for short-lived data + caching
- ElasticSearch for indexing
- AWS/K8S
This is such a shallow, disappointing take. If we relegate all responsibility for discrimination to the individuals discriminated against, nothing is going to change! Individual action against structural problems is INSUFFICIENT.
Do you know of a tech company that’s asking people who could work from home to come to the office? Reply to this thread, so we can track these irresponsible organizations, and remember their names even after this is over.
The best Zoom alternative is fewer virtual meetings and more considered, long-form write-ups. It won’t replace them all, but if your remote day is nothing but a long series of Zoom meetings with small breaks in between, you’re probably doing it wrong.
The Musk biography is really a business book dressed in a personal tale. Easily worth the read alone for the vivid tutorial in how to apply The Algorithm.
So nobody understands THE ALGORITHM. Nobody has the power to examine or check THE ALGORITHM. Yet everyone we’ve talked to from both Apple and GS are SO SURE that THE ALGORITHM isn’t biased and discriminating in any way. That’s some grade-A management of cognitive dissonance.
The productivity boost from working remotely does not come from replacing all those in-office meetings with a bunch of video calls. It comes from turning all those meetings into write-ups instead. Status updates, pitches, ideas. Write. Them. Down.
The web isn’t just another software platform. It’s the greatest software platform the world has ever seen. No permissions, no masters, readable source code. Let’s protect the heritage, work in its service, and remind ourselves just what a marvel it all really is ❤️🙏
The iPhone XS is faster than an iMac Pro on the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark. It's the fastest device I've ever tested. Insane 45% jump over the iPhone 8/X chip. How does Apple do it?! ✨
So obviously we both furiously signup for the fucking $25/month credit-check bullshit shakedown that is TransUnion. Maybe someone stole my wife’s identity? Even though we’ve verified there was nothing wrong previously. Guess what: HER CREDIT SCORE WAS HIGHER THAN MINE!!!
I love that while the 10x programmer is still a controversial concept to some in the tech world, Steve Jobs went straight for the claim that 50-100x programmers are possible.
So yeah, I completely stand by my original charge:
@AppleCard
is a sexist program. It does not matter what the intent of individual Apple reps are, it matters what THE ALGORITHM they’ve placed their complete faith in does. And what it does is discriminate. This is fucked up.
Any gig-worker app that cannot make the business model work while paying $15/hour (after expenses!), basic benefits, vacation time, and family leave should not exist. Running a modern-day serf economy behind a slick UI is disgraceful.
Facebook and Google literally pay engineers an order of magnitude more to trick people into clicking on ads than Boeing pay some of its engineers to write airplane software.
No wonder Zoom bombing is happening. All you need to join a meeting is a URL made up of a single ten-digit number. It's like Zoom has turned all the world's conferences into chat roulette! Just iterate through the digits until you hit a room.
My most cherished luxuries:
All the sleep (8.5h+), none of the ⏰.
A flow of clean, filtered air.
Regular exercise driven by an instructor.
Fresh, home-cooked meals.
A view of nature and water.
Meaningful work for 40h/wk (or less).
Two kids and a wife to love and laugh with.
The myth of the collaborative wonders of the open office debunked in new study. A tyranny of interruption, distraction, and stress for workers that require uninterrupted time for creative work. A way to squander the attention of highly paid workers to save money on real estate.
It’s also fucked up how they chose to raise my wife’s limit without ever addressing the root of the issue. Let’s just, essentially, bribe one loud mouth on Twitter, then we don’t have to actually examine our faulty faith in THE ALGORITHM.
Apple just called to let us know they're rejecting the HEY Calendar app from the App Store (in current form). Same bullying tactics as last time: Push delicate rejections to a call with a first-name-only person who'll softly inform you it's your wallet or your kneecaps.
American fears utterly foreign to European parents:
- My kid will get shot dead in school.
- Our family will go bankrupt if we get the wrong kind of sick.
- Crushing student-loan debt will follow my college-graduate offspring for decades.
- Work doesn’t give any paternity leave.
I hear that this has turned into a formal internal complaint that’s being investigated. Hopefully a moment to revisit some assumption about black-box algorithms, bias, and customer service! 🙏
"Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere — while still paying San Francisco and New York salaries" 😍. This is making Twitter and Facebook look awful with their if-you-move-we'll-dunk-your-pay policy. Same remote-capable work, same pay 👏
Facebook was tricking 5-year olds into spend hundreds or thousands on platform games, then refusing to refund the charges when shocked parents found out. Facebook employees referred to big-spender kids as “whales”, and kept denying refunds 😦
The first brand-new product from us at Basecamp in many years is coming this April: An email service (not a client) built for people who both love and hate email. We'll fix the hate, and leave you with the love. Email is amazing, and it deserves our best.
I miss LAN parties. The internet is great and all, but dragging your PC tower and monitor over to a mate’s house, such that you could PHYSICALLY connect them was ❤️
Cognitive pyramid of needs:
1) Full sleep!
2) Fresh air.
3) Healthy diet.
4) Adequate exercise.
...
137) Pump-me-up YOU CAN DO IT inspirational slogans.
Nail the basics.
She spoke to two Apple reps. Both very nice, courteous people representing an utterly broken and reprehensible system. The first person was like “I don’t know why, but I swear we’re not discriminating, IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM”. I shit you not. “IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM!”.
This gets to the crux of how diverse teams make better products. I’d be surprised to learn if the team at Apple working on this wasn’t over-represented with men, or at least women who haven’t had to worry about credit approval. Easy to go with status quo when it flows for you.
Going to the doctor in Denmark after living in the US for the past 15 years is surreal. There was zero paperwork! No copays. The prescription was digitally available in all pharmacies in the country immediately following the appointment. SOCIALIST BUREAUCRACY RUN AMOK 😂
Let’s no forget why this college admission scandal is a thing: Because so many American companies use a diploma from a brand-name university as a caste sorting system. This isn’t about “education”, it’s about gate-keeping the aristocrats.
Five business books that lit a bulb 💡
- Blue Ocean Strategy: Build something novel.
- Maverick: You can be different.
- The Intelligent Investor: Fundamentals are eternal.
- The Effective Executive: You’re wasting most moments.
- Drive: How to keep going.
Hotwire aka NEW MAGIC is finally here: An alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire. This includes our brand-new Turbo framework and pairs with Stimulus 2.0 😍🎉🥂
Apple and Goldman Sachs have both accepted that they have no control over the product they sell. THE ALGORITHM is in charge now! All humans can do is apologize on its behalf, and pray that it has mercy on the next potential victims.
@dhh
I had the same experience! Better credit score than my husband, at first they denied credit!! After a day on the phone, an email to Tim Cook I was asked to reapply, got a lower credit limit than my husband, told by an arrogant GS rep “we have an algorithm and have no control!
Apple is going to poison the one victory Epic secured in their lawsuit so bad nobody would ever think to use it. They want a 27%(!!!!) commission on any link from an app to a website, reporting every few weeks, AND the right to audit your books?? Insane.
Ever notice how the biggest fans of overwork are usually investors or company owners? And the primary victims of this culture are workers? If you’re in the latter group, developing a bit of class consciousness would serve you well.
Holy fuck. The word dystopian is not nearly strong enough to describe the fresh hellhole Microsoft just opened up. Just as the reputation of a new and better company was being built, they detonate it with the most invasive work-place surveillance scheme yet to hit mainstream.
Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it's built into MS 365.
A new feature to calculate 'productivity scores' turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool:
And the best defense of all: THAT’S JUST HOW THE CREDIT INDUSTRY WORKS. Ehh, okay? How is that anything but the most damning charge upon Apple’s pitch with their card? Did the iPhone launch pledging to please carriers and the status quo as its modus operandi? No.
Programmers spend far too much time worrying about whether their stack will scale up, and far too little addressing the real danger of whether it can scale down. Small teams bet – and lose! – the farm on big tech solutions to banal problems all the fucking time.
I’m surprised that they even let her apply for a card without the signed approval of her spouse? I mean, can you really trust women with a credit card these days??!
Apple has definitively approved HEY in the App Store!! No IAP, no 30% cut, but we’ve opened the door to a free temp address service, and use same app for work accounts. I’m so incredibly relieved! And now HEY is open to EVERYONE! No invite code needed 🎉❤️
Apple has handed the customer experience and their reputation as an inclusive organization over to a biased, sexist algorithm it does not understand, cannot reason with, and is unable to control. When a trillion-dollar company simply accepts the algorithmic overlord like this...
Every position we open at Basecamp receives hundreds of applications. Our secret recipe: 1) Pay well, 2) Hire remotely, 3) Explain the position thoroughly, 4) Have a reputation for being a good place to work, 5) Stop dog whistling overwork with “strong work-ethic” bullshit.
It continues to blow my mind that "it's just a few bad apples" is being used as an excuse to do nothing, when the proverb is literally "a few bad apples SPOILS THE BUNCH". The moral lesson is not about the existence of bad apples, but that failure to remove them SPOILS THE BUNCH.
Life is not a sprint and creatives don’t win by squeezing out single-digit effort advantages. Take fucking Xmas off from whatever the hell you’re doing. Your hustle can wait, gangster.
Whatever you’re hustling for, take note: most people/companies are shut down until ‘18. That means you get 2 extra weeks to outwork your competition. That’s 3.8% more time. For perspective: Usain Bolt won his gold medals running 1.2% faster. These 2 weeks are a gift. Get to work.
The debate over targeted political advertisement keeps dancing tantalizingly close to the eventual conclusion: NO ADVERTISEMENT SHOULD BE TARGETED ON PERSONAL INFORMATION!
"Google will eventually kill every single service you care about, if they can't find a way to directly monetize it with ads at a scale of billions. They're institutionally incapable of being in the product or service business for the long term."
So let’s recap here: Apple offers a credit card that bases its credit assessment on a black-box algorithm that 6 different reps across Apple and GS have no visibility into. Even several layers of management. An internal investigation. IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM!
What pains me about Zoom being such sleazeballs when it comes to both security and privacy is just how unnecessary it is. They have good fundamental tech! But as the skeletons keep falling out of the closet, it’s clear that the organization is fundamentally corrupt.
"So farewell, TypeScript. May you bring much rigor and satisfaction to your tribe while letting the rest of us enjoy JavaScript in the glorious spirit it was originally designed: Free of strong typing."
Apple is speed-running the fastest destruction of goodwill with developers I've ever seen in 40 years of computers. It took Microsoft much longer to poison the pond in the 90s. It's really a sad sight.
Apple just terminated Epic's developer account, and they admitted that this tweet was one of the reasons.
We don't want to think about Apple being evil. It would be so inconvenient. We don't want to switch to Android. But I see ever more signs that power has corrupted them.
It gets even worse. Even when she pays off her ridiculously low limit in full, the card won’t approve any spending until the next billing period. Women apparently aren’t good credit risks even when they pay off the fucking balance in advance and in full.
We're going to make Rails 8 the damn best framework for creating full-stack PWAs. Web Push, badges, install prompts, service workers, the works. I was motivated before, but now it's really on. Let's get back to making apps where we don't have to beg for permission or mercy!
“This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel.” 😞
Google is not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. You search to find stuff, they respond with a full page ad. This is so ludicrously user hostile that it’s only tenable when you operate a monopoly. Break. Them. Up.
So sad to read this 😢. Whenever I read about a software service I like hopping on the venture capital train to unicorn-ville, I fully expect them to go to shit. 1PW now need to beome a many billion dollar company OR DIE TRYING. That usually lead to desperate/shitty decisions.
There are many days where I think I’m wasting my time on Twitter. Maybe even most days! But then I think of ceding this place to the narrative of hustle porn and odes to overwork, and I think fuck no. It’s my obligation to play the countermelody and share our story.
Google's CEO tells his employees to stop bringing their politics to work and respect coworkers right to just do their job. Let's see if this causes the same media and Twitter meltdown it did when we asked the same. I doubt it!
Web 4.0 will be everyone discovering that actually Web 1.0 was amazing and bringing the bulk of it back. Less surveillance, less centralization, less complexity.
Hey
@Jack
, can I help make the setting that switches between “top tweets” and “latest tweets” persistent? I’ll do the commit myself. I’ll brush up on iOS programming. I’ll go halfsies on a few days of fasting. Anything. Please! 😄✌️
Crazy to think that we were spending $150,000/month on cloud rentals just eight months ago. The savings booked since we started our exit has already paid for all the new hardware we bought. Now it's just savings gravy going forward 🤑
New in
@firefox
: "Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to that website, such that it is not allowed to be shared with any other website."
Using the delusion that you’re going to “change the world” to justify your workaholism is the void of meaning in your life desperately crying for help.
Most people that changed the world were workaholics. MLK, Gandhi, Hamilton, Thatcher, etc all worked nights and weekends.
But if you are not interested in changing the world, then working more than 40 hours a week is optional.
I choose to try to change the world.
It’s heart-warming how many people are noting
@tim_cook
’s celebration of working nights’n’weekends and refusing to applaud extractive sacrifices. Overwork isn’t cool, especially not on a regular, expected, and self-imposed schedule. Deal with a crisis, sure. A release ain’t that.
Got the first report that yesterday’s public shaming of tech companies withholding WFH is working. Company execs saw that they were called out, now has mandated WFH ❤️🙏. Pressure works.
There's nothing wrong with you if you can't stand pair programming as a day-in-day-out approach to software development. I love the occasional pairing, but I'd rather quit programming than do it all day, every day.
To create an alternative App Store you have to: "Provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit from an A-rated financial Institution of €1,000,000 to establish adequate financial means in order to guarantee support for your developers and users." 🤣
We've decided to become a Facebook-Free Business at
@basecamp
starting today. No Facebook, Instagram, no WhatsApp. No ads. No profiles. No pages. No usage. No more. Run your own business? Consider joining up.
That THE ALGORITHM often ends up being a biased, discriminating mess isn’t exactly novel ground either. Here’s Amazon shuttering an algorithm for hiring that systemically discriminated against women.
What’s so bizarre about this whole overwork debate is how utterly unambitious and banal my advocacy is! The fact that calling for a 40h work week counts as some sort of radicalism shows just how insane and extreme the entrepreneurial ideology has become.
It's crunch time at Basecamp. We're just ~two months out from launching . This means we're working 8-hour days, five days a week!!
I mean, that's the same number we always work (except for summer hours), but you, know, still. It's a lot of time!
Apple is making the same mistake Microsoft did in the 90s. Given absolute power, they act with absolute disdain towards devs. This "works" while the monopoly forcefield is on, but as soon as there's a platform switch, all that grief comes due. Took MS 20 years to recover trust.
"Programmers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame. The more convoluted the systems diagram, the greater the intellectual masturbation. Our commitment to resisting that is the key ingredient in this uptime success."
Rails 6.0: Action Mailbox, Action Text, Multiple DBs, Parallel Testing, Webpacker by default, and Zeitwerk! What a monumental final release. Massive upgrades, intense conceptual compression. Our Best Rails Yet!
Maybe it’s time we need an algorithmic oath for programmers: I will program no harm by privacy theft, attention hoarding, radicalization optimization. I will not put engagement metrics above the humans they are extracted from.
The underlying issue with bootcamps charging $30,000 for a 9-month curriculum patched together from free online sources and delivered by inexperienced instructors is just how dystopian "the opportunity" really is. It's capitalizing on a failed state approach to higher education.