David Heinemeier Hansson

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 1 Oct 2018

Dedication From Jason Fried: To my family, to opportunity, and to luck—I’m fortunate to have you. Love and thanks. From David Heinemeier Hansson: To Jamie, Colt, and Dash for the love that gives patience and perspective to seek calm at work. Contents Cover Title Page Dedication First It’s Crazy at Work A Quick Bit About Us Your Company Is a Product Curb Your Ambition Bury the Hustle Happy Pacifists Our Goal: No Goals Don’t Change the World Make It Up as You Go Comfy’s Cool Defend Your Time 8’s Enough, 40’s Plenty Protectionism The Quality of an Hour Effective > Productive The Outwork Myth Work Doesn’t Happen at Work Office Hours Calendar Tetris The Presence Prison I’ll Get Back to You Whenever FOMO?

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Harper’s Bazaar, February 26, 2018. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a15895631/oprah-daily-routine/.Accessed June 2018. Resources Email us So, what did you think of the book? Let us know at calm@basecamp.com. We read every email, and we’ll do our best to respond. Find us on Twitter On Twitter we’re at @jasonfried for Jason Fried, @dhh for David Heinemeier Hansson, and @basecamp for the company. Check out Basecamp, the product Used by over 100,000 companies worldwide, Basecamp is the calmer way to organize work, manage projects, and streamline communication companywide. Sign up for a free trial at basecamp.com. Read our employee handbook Our values, our structure, our methods, our benefits, and more are online for everyone to see at basecamp.com/handbook.

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He started the company back in 1999 and has been running the show ever since. Along with David, he wrote Getting Real, REWORK, and REMOTE. When it comes to business, he thinks things are simple until you make them complicated. And when it comes to life, we’re all just trying to figure it out as we go. DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON is the cofounder of Basecamp and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of REWORK and REMOTE. He’s also the creator of the software toolkit Ruby on Rails, which has been used to launch and power Twitter, Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Square, and over a million other web applications. Originally from Denmark, he moved to Chicago in 2005 and now divides his time between the US and Spain with his wife and two sons.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

And in the end, more than 10 million people got to see Zach’s story. (Take that, baby meerkats!) Part II LEVERAGE Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. —DR. SEUSS Chapter 4 PLATFORMS “The Laziest Programmer” I. The team was in third place by the time David Heinemeier Hansson leapt into the cockpit of the black-and-pink Le Mans Prototype 2 and accelerated to 120 miles per hour. A dozen drivers jostled for position at his tail. The lead car was pulling away from the pack—a full lap ahead. This was the 6 Hours of Silverstone, a timed race held each year in Northamptonshire, UK, part of the World Endurance Championship.

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Though most of his fellow racers don’t know it, he’s indirectly responsible for the development of Twitter. And Hulu and Airbnb. And a host of other transformative technologies for which he receives no royalties. His work has contributed to revolutions, and lowered the barrier for thousands of tech companies* to launch products. All because David Heinemeier Hansson hates to do work he doesn’t have to do. DHH lives and works by a philosophy that helps him do dramatically more with his time and effort. It’s a principle that’s fueled his underdog climbs in both racing and programming, and just might deliver a win for him as the cars slide around the rain-slicked Silverstone course.

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.* For so long, “innovation” in education has amounted to more class time, more memorization, more tests. Smaller classes, but the same classes. Finland actually got better, through lateral thinking. Edward de Bono, who coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967, put the “Einstein” quote a bit differently: “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.” IV. David Heinemeier Hansson was in a deep hole. Halfway through his stint, the sprinkling rain had become a downpour. Curve after curve, he fishtailed at high speed, still in third place, pack of hungry competitors at his rear bumper. LMP cars run on slick tires—with no tread—for speed. The maximum surface area of the tire is gripping the road at any moment.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

If production runs on intrinsic motivation, money is an extrinsic motivator that is thought to interfere with an already well-coordinated system. Although the commons might not be as profitable as the firm, it’s also more resilient, because the currency of its transactions is the desire to participate, rather than money. David Heinemeier Hansson, who created Ruby on Rails, is a vocal advocate for a commons-based approach to open source production: External, expected rewards diminish the intrinsic motivation of the fundraising open-source contributor. It risks transporting a community of peers into a transactional terminal. And that buyer-seller frame detracts from the magic that is peer-collaborators.119 But today, not every open source project looks like a commons.

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Information goods are thought to have zero or negligible marginal cost, meaning that, while the first unit is expensive to produce, each additional unit costs little to the producer. (Information goods are commodities whose value is derived from the information they contain, such as articles, books, music, or code.) If I publish code to GitHub, it should make no difference to me, from a cost perspective, whether ten or 10,000 people use it. David Heinemeier Hansson, arguing why we shouldn’t think about software in market terms, uses zero marginal cost to demonstrate his point: The magic of software is that there is virtually no marginal cost! That’s the economic reality that Gates used to build Microsoft’s empire. And what enabled Stallman to “give away” his free software (albeit with strings attached).

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l=linux-kernel&m=111288700902396. 116 Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” 378. 117 M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson, and B. A. Tague, “UNIX Time-Sharing System: Foreword,” The Bell System Technical Journal 57, no. 6 (1978): 1902, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1978.tb02135.x. 118 Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” 379. 119 David Heinemeier Hansson, “The Perils of Mixing Open Source and Money,” November 12, 2013, https://dhh.dk/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html. 120 Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, “The Simple Economics of Open Source,” NBER Working Paper 7600, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2000, 32, https://doi.org/10.3386/w7600. 121 Eugene Wei, “Status as a Service (StaaS),” Remains of the Day, February 19, 2019, https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service. 122 Michael Wesch, “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam,” Explorations in Media Ecology 8, no. 2 (2009): 19–34. 123 Robert E.

Roads and Bridges
by Nadia Eghbal

Pragmatism is core to open source’s culture, as evidenced by its strategic break from the free software movement in the late 1990s. Some open source contributors fear, perhaps justifiably, that money will introduce bloat into the system, with developers creating new projects simply to get funding, rather than because the solution is needed. David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH), who created the popular software framework Ruby on Rails, warned in 2013 against mixing open source with money: Open source has been such an incredible force for quality and community exactly because it's not been defined in market terms. In market terms, most open source projects should never have had a chance.

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Modern open source support is not just about preventing worst-case scenarios (for example, security breaches), but rather empowering more people to build more things. This concept is a hallmark of today’s open source culture and also helps build a legacy of support. Consider how you can include more people from different backgrounds, skill sets, and abilities in your strategy, rather than limiting work to benefitting existing participants. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, compared open source to a coral reef: It's more sensitive than you think, and it's [hard] to underestimate the beauty that's unwittingly at stake. Please tread with care.[192] Priming the landscape It is too early to say what long-term institutional support should look like from a programmatic perspective, but there are several critical areas of work that would help us get there.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

Less than a year later, ESPN and ABC News lured Silver away from the Times (which tried to retain him by promising a staff of up to a dozen writers) in a major deal that would give Silver’s operation a role in everything from sports to weather to network news segments to, improbably enough, Academy Awards telecasts. Though there’s debate about the methodological rigor of Silver’s hand-tuned models, there are few who deny that in 2012 this thirty-five-year-old data whiz was a winner in our economy. Another winner is David Heinemeier Hansson, a computer programming star who created the Ruby on Rails website development framework, which currently provides the foundation for some of the Web’s most popular destinations, including Twitter and Hulu. Hansson is a partner in the influential development firm Basecamp (called 37signals until 2014).

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Nate Silver, of course, with his comfort in feeding data into large databases, then siphoning it out into his mysterious Monte Carlo simulations, is the epitome of the high-skilled worker. Intelligent machines are not an obstacle to Silver’s success, but instead provide its precondition. The Superstars The ace programmer David Heinemeier Hansson provides an example of the second group that Brynjolfsson and McAfee predict will thrive in our new economy: “superstars.” High-speed data networks and collaboration tools like e-mail and virtual meeting software have destroyed regionalism in many sectors of knowledge work. It no longer makes sense, for example, to hire a full-time programmer, put aside office space, and pay benefits, when you can instead pay one of the world’s best programmers, like Hansson, for just enough time to complete the project at hand.

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Daily Caller, November 1, 2012. http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/01/is-nate-silvers-value-at-risk/. Marcus, Gary, and Ernest Davis. “What Nate Silver Gets Wrong.” The New Yorker, January 25, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/what-nate-silver-gets-wrong.html. Information about David Heinemeier Hansson comes from the following websites: • David Heinemeier Hanson. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/. • Lindberg, Oliver. “The Secrets Behind 37signals’ Success.” TechRadar, September 6, 2010. http://www.techradar.com/us/news/internet/the-secrets-behind-37signals-success-712499. • “OAK Racing.”

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Jun 2007

Chicago-area startup 37signals has strongly aligned themselves with the idea of simplicity: simple, easy to use apps like Backpack and the simple, easy to use programming framework Ruby on Rails. For 37signals, simplicity is an “-ism,” practically an international political movement. Simplicity is not just simplicity, oh no, it’s summertime, it’s beautiful music and peace and justice and happiness and pretty girls with flowers in their hair. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, says that their story is “one of beauty, happiness, and motivation. Taking pride and pleasure in your work and in your tools. That story simply isn’t a fad, it’s a trend. A story that allows for words like passion and enthusiasm to be part of the sanctioned vocabulary of developers without the need to make excuses for yourself.

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The implications of this, I’m afraid, are ironically Orwellian: giant corporations manipulating their public image in a way which doesn’t even make sense (like, uh, they’re a computer company—what the hell does that have to do with being against dictatorships?) and successfully creating a culture of identity that has computer shoppers around the world feeling like they’re not just buying a computer, they’re buying into 8. David Heinemeier Hansson, “Rails steps into year three,” www.loudthinking.com/arc/000594.html, August 6, 2006. A Field Guide to Developers a movement. When you buy an iPod, of course, you’re supporting Gandhi against British Colonialism. Every MacBook you buy takes a stand against dictatorship and hunger! Anyway.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

I remind them that one of two things is true: either they’re wrong and their teams are capable of far more than they realize, or they’re right and they need to make an immediate change. What is not okay is to linger in a state of distrust and second-guessing. Have the courage of your convictions, one way or the other. Minimum Viable Policy. Maximizing freedom means minimizing policy. In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp warn that isolated incidents can too easily lead to bureaucracy. “Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual.” This is governing for the exception rather than the rule.

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A complete list of influences would be far too long (you should see my Brave New Work library), so I’ll simply thank those who have taught me the most: Dennis Bakke, Steve Blank, Jos de Blok, Bjarte Bosgnes, Jacob Bøtter, Brian Carney, James Carse, W. Edwards Deming, David Dewane, Peter Drucker, Amy Edmondson, Charles Eisenstein, Gerard Endenburg, Robin Fraser, Jason Fried, Isaac Getz, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Deborah Gordon, Paul Graham, Adam Grant, Dave Gray, Gary Hamel, David Heinemeier Hansson, Tim Harford, Frederick Herzberg, Jeremy Hope, Steven Johnson, Daniel Kahneman, Kevin Kelly, David Kidder, Doug Kirkpatrick, Henrik Kniberg, Lars Kolind, John Kotter, Frederic Laloux, Jason Little, David Marquet, John E. Mayfield, Douglas McGregor, Greg McKeown, Melanie Mitchell, Taiichi Ohno, Tom Peters, Niels Pflaeging, Daniel Pink, Adam Pisoni, Eric Ries, Brian Robertson, Ricardo Semler, Peter Senge, Simon Sinek, Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb, Ben Thompson, Geoffrey West, Meg Wheatley, Keith Yamashita, Jean-Francois Zobrist, and the few I forgot.

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internet-famous employee handbook: Valve, Handbook for New Employees (Bellevue, WA: Valve Press, 2012), www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf. retention, operations, and promotions: “Our Story,” David Marquet, accessed September 1, 2018, www.davidmarquet.com/our-story. “Policies are organizational scar tissue”: Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework (New York: Crown Business, 2010), 260. authority structures is W. L. Gore: “Our Beliefs & Principles,” Gore, accessed September 1, 2018, www.gore.com/about/our-beliefs-and-principles. “leaders and members of their teams”: Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago, and Fang Liu, “The Haier Road to Growth,” strategy+business, April 27, 2015, www.strategy-business.com/article/00323?

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

I had to let go of people whom I considered very good friends—people whom I felt had built the company with me. And decisions about whom to let go relied more on where we could save most, rather than on what made the most sense for the business. Ironically, one of the über-talented guys I had to let go was David Heinemeier Hansson—who later became the father of Ruby on Rails, the framework we later built Zendesk on, and a cofounder of 37signals (now Basecamp), which became an inspiration for a whole generation of software startups, including Zendesk. Letting people go wasn’t even the worst part. There were many tough things about being in charge of the business.

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Salesforce.com was built on a new delivery model, and founder Marc Benioff was evangelizing “the End of Software” as we knew it. 27 Page 27 Svane c01.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:14 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D 37signals in Chicago was lean and small, another company blazing the trail. As mentioned earlier, it’s ironic that one of its key people, Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson, had been let go at Caput. (It was assuredly not one of the most joyful times of his career; he had started working for us right before the issues and the problems.) Although we couldn’t keep him, we knew he was incredibly talented, and it was exhilarating to see him create Ruby on Rails as a free web application framework and use it to create 37signals’ first product, Basecamp (now the company name)—transforming the company from a web design firm to a software company. 37signals was almost like a religion; it established a new school focused on placing user experience above fussy features.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

You’re always going to be short of people, you’re always going to be short of money, you’re going to be short of source supply value. So you have to find leverage points, versus working your way up through tiny little rungs and seeing if you get there. Think like a big dog, and find leverage to get there. C H A P T E 23 R David Heinemeier Hansson Partner, 37signals David Heinemeier Hansson helped transform 37signals from a consulting company to a product company in early 2004. He wrote the company’s first product, Basecamp, an online project management tool. He also wrote companion products Backpack, Ta-da List, and Campfire. In July 2004, he released the layer of software that underlies these applications as an open source web development framework.

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For Da and PG Contents FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii CHAPTER 1 MAX LEVCHIN PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 2 SABEER BHATIA Hotmail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 CHAPTER 3 STEVE WOZNIAK Apple Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 CHAPTER 4 JOE KRAUS Excite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER 5 DAN BRICKLIN Software Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 CHAPTER 6 MITCHELL KAPOR Lotus Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 CHAPTER 7 RAY OZZIE Iris Associates, Groove Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 CHAPTER 8 EVAN WILLIAMS Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 CHAPTER 9 TIM BRADY Yahoo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 CHAPTER 10 MIKE LAZARIDIS Research In Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 v vi Contents CHAPTER 11 ARTHUR VAN HOFF Marimba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 CHAPTER 12 PAUL BUCHHEIT Gmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 CHAPTER 13 STEVE PERLMAN WebTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 CHAPTER 14 MIKE RAMSAY TiVo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 CHAPTER 15 PAUL GRAHAM Viaweb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 CHAPTER 16 JOSHUA SCHACHTER del.icio.us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 CHAPTER 17 MARK FLETCHER ONElist, Bloglines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 CHAPTER 18 CRAIG NEWMARK craigslist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 CHAPTER 19 CATERINA FAKE Flickr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 CHAPTER 20 BREWSTER KAHLE WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 CHAPTER 21 CHARLES GESCHKE Adobe Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 CHAPTER 22 ANN WINBLAD Open Systems, Hummer Winblad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 CHAPTER 23 DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON 37signals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 CHAPTER 24 PHILIP GREENSPUN ArsDigita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 CHAPTER 25 JOEL SPOLSKY Fog Creek Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 CHAPTER 26 STEPHEN KAUFER TripAdvisor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 CHAPTER 27 JAMES HONG HOT or NOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 CHAPTER 28 JAMES CURRIER Tickle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 CHAPTER 29 BLAKE ROSS Firefox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Contents vii CHAPTER 30 MENA TROTT Six Apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 CHAPTER 31 BOB DAVIS Lycos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 CHAPTER 32 RON GRUNER Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com . . . . . . . . . . 427 CHAPTER 33 JESSICA LIVINGSTON Y Combinator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Foreword Sprinters apparently reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.

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I was the only programmer and I was dedicating 10 hours a week to this, while we were developing it. 37signals was paying me to do this out of its consultancy revenue, since we didn’t have funds to fund it. So we had only a quarter of a programmer dedicated to the development and no funds really for doing this. The designers David Heinemeier Hansson 311 were giving it a third of their time at most. And we realized through this process that those constraints—which sound negative—were actually the greatest gift to the development of Basecamp. That whole constrained development model really focused our view on what we needed, and it forced us to make tough decisions about making less software all the time.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms
by Danielle Laporte
Published 16 Apr 2012

When I do the following, I am guaranteed to feel close to 100 percent improved, lighter, and focused: When I do the following, I will likely feel a sense of relief or improvement: As for downing a carton of cookie dough ice cream, drunk dialing your former flame, sneaking a smoke in the airplane bathroom, watching Gene Simmons Family Jewels reruns instead of going to yoga class, and all manners of vengeful vandalism…let’s put that “comfort list” in its place. Even though I think that doing the following things will bring me relief and comfort, they actually aren’t helpful at all: A lot of the time, it’s better to quit than to be the hero. —Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson, authors of Rework NO MAKES WAY FOR YES One of Frank Gehry’s first buildings was a shopping mall, the Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. Think bad eighties jungle gym. To please his investors he went L.A. style with a twist. He hated it. Meanwhile, for his own creative outlet, Frank went full-out “Gehry” on building his own home: sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks.

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Getting ripped off: Not going to happen. We’ll dig into what you truly value in the next worksheet: “Freely Associating with Money.” Raising money? Don’t do it until you have to. And then question if you really need to. And then think twice about it. And then get a second opinion. The boys from Rework (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson) sum up my sentiments on raising money perfectly. Allow me to paraphrase: You give up control. “Cashing out” begins to trump building a quality business. Spending other people’s money is addictive. It’s usually a bad deal. Customers move down the totem pole. Raising money is incredibly distracting.

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
by Austin Kleon
Published 6 Mar 2014

You don’t get the feeling that any of this is calculated, it’s just the way they operate—they started out as beginners, and so they feel an obligation to pass on what they’ve learned. Of course, many chefs and restaurateurs have become rich and famous by sharing their recipes and their techniques. In their book, Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson encourage businesses to emulate chefs by out-teaching their competition. “What do you do? What are your ‘recipes’? What’s your ‘cookbook’? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?” They encourage businesses to figure out the equivalent of their own cooking show.

The New Kingmakers
by Stephen O'Grady
Published 14 Mar 2013

Worse, there were more than a hundred standards, each with its own set of documentation—and the documentation for each standard often exceeded a hundred pages. What made sense from the perspective of a business made no sense whatsoever to the legions of developers actually building the Web. Among developers, the web services efforts were often treated as a punchline. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web framework, referred to them as the “WS-Deathstar.” Beyond the inherent difficulties of pushing dozens of highly specialized, business-oriented specifications onto an unwilling developer population, the WS-* set of standards had to contend with an alternative called Representational State Transfer (REST).

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

Is it really? That kind of hustling, putting work above everything else, is inconsistent with the mind-set of running a company of one—with working better instead of working more. A company of one who disagrees with this idea that workaholism is required to succeed in tech and big business alike is David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish programmer who created the popular Ruby on Rails web framework and is a partner at the software development firm Basecamp. Hansson despises this paradigm of working more as the only way to be successful. He believes that the pressure to work more doesn’t just get passed down from leadership; rather, it’s amplified as it moves outward through a company.

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Hofmann, “The Hidden Advantages of Quiet Bosses,” Harvard Business Review ( December 2010), https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-hidden-advantages-of-quiet-bosses. 49 empowered, self-directed, or autonomous teams: Drita Kruja, Huong Ha, Elvisa Drishti, and Ted Oelfke, “Empowerment in the Hospitality Industry in the United States,” Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management (March 3, 2015). 52 “a little bit about a lot”: Meghan Casserly, “The Secret Power of the Generalist—And How They’ll Rule the Future,” Forbes, July 10, 2010, https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/07/10/the-secret-power-of-the-generalist-and-how-theyll-rule-the-future/#57821b312bd5. 55 stop hustling: David Heinemeier Hansson, “Trickle-down Workaholism in Startups,” Signal vs. Noise, May 30, 2017, https://m.signalvnoise.com/trickle-down-workaholism-in-startups-a90ceac76426. Workaholism: Wayne E. Oates, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts About Work Addiction (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1971). 56 the term “power paradox”: Jerry Useem, “Power Causes Brain Damage,” Atlantic, July/August 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/. 56qualities that lead to the leadership roles: Useem, “Power Causes Brain Damage.” 58 when people take the time: Rik Kirkland interview with Adam Grant, “Wharton’s Adam Grant on the Key to Professional Success,” McKinsey & Company, June 2014, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/whartons-adam-grant-on-the-key-to-professional-success. 4.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Uber is an app on a smartphone screen. Drivers rarely talk to actual human managers at Uber, except when being recruited, and sometimes not even then. They answer to a software “boss” that tracks their performance and deactivates them if their score falls below a certain point. Software entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson says Uber drivers and other gig-economy workers represent a new caste of people—an automaton class, who are “treated as literal cogs in transportation and delivery machines.” The machine—the software—is the essence of the company, not the humans. The humans are ancillary to the machine. We are meat puppets, tethered to an algorithm.

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Yet fourteen years later they’re doing so well that executives and entrepreneurs from around the world travel to their headquarters in Chicago and pay good money to attend their seminars, where they explain their unconventional management philosophy. Last year I had the chance to become one of their students. CHAPTER ELEVEN BASECAMP: BACK TO BASICS Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson run a software company called Basecamp, in Chicago. By the rules of Silicon Valley, they are doing everything wrong. They have never raised venture capital. They will never go public. They are not obsessed with growth. They have no sales reps, and they spend nothing on marketing. Their fifty-four employees work forty hours a week, maximum.

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

If Internet protocol is secure enough for the US military, it’s probably secure enough for you. You don’t have to be Big You don’t have to be a big company to create a powerful platform. You just have to create something that’s valuable and supports people in their work. 37signals is a small software company with fewer than 30 full-time employees. In 2003, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals was working on the company’s core software product, Basecamp, a web-based project-management application. He was writing code in a language called Ruby, first created in Japan in the early 1990s. As he worked, Heinemeier Hansson developed a series of libraries and frameworks that made it easier for him to do the work.

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Complexity can be managed locally and doesn’t have to be controlled by the organization. Notes for Chapter Fifteen US MILITARY INTERNET PROTOCOL Next-Generation Internet Protocol to Enable Net-Centric Operations, US Department of Defense, news release no. 413–03, June 13, 2003. RUBY ON RAILS David Heinemeier Hansson, “Good Programming is Like Good Writing,” BigThink, August 3, 2010, http://bigthink.com/ideas/21598. PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGIES Miriah Meyer, “Gamer cracks code, finds jewel,” The Chicago Tribune, August 28, 2006. Chapter 16. How connected companies learn You can’t make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
by Cal Newport
Published 2 Mar 2021

“It’s just not gonna work.” As my research on email continued, I pushed the office hours concept to the periphery of my thinking. As I later learned, however, I perhaps shouldn’t have been so hasty in dismissing this solution. * * * — Let’s jump ahead to 2018, when Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the iconoclastic cofounders of the software company Basecamp, published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.10 The book describes a collection of ideas for cultivating an effective workplace culture they call “the calm company,” and nestled among its suggestions is a familiar strategy: office hours.

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I tend instead to bring on assistants temporarily to help during particularly busy periods, such as those surrounding book launches. This would not have been possible in an age before web-based part-time remote work platforms. 9. Cal Newport, “A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email,” Harvard Business Review, February 18, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/02/a-modest-proposal-eliminate-email. 10. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (New York: Harper Business, 2018). 11. Fried and Hansson, Crazy at Work, 56. 12. Fried and Hansson, Crazy at Work, 57. 13. Scott Kirsner, “I’m Joining the Open Office Hours Movement, November 24th,” Boston.com, November 20, 2009, http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/11/im_joining_the_open_office_hou.html. 14.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

What we are fighting for, in the twenty-first century, is the continued existence of conclusions not already foregone—the continued relevance of judgment and discovery and figuring out, and the ability to continue to exercise them. Reacting Locally “Rockstar environments develop out of trust, autonomy, and responsibility,” write programmers and business authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. “When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.” Fellow business author Timothy Ferriss concurs. He refers to micromanagement as “empowerment failure,” and cites an example from his own experience. He’d outsourced the customer service at his company to a group of outside representatives instead of handling it himself, but even so, he couldn’t keep up with the volume of issues coming in.

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Padesky, Mind over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think (New York: Guilford, 1995). 8 Sting, “All This Time,” The Soul Cages (A&M, 1990). 9 Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1979). 10 Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason. 11 Josué Harari and David Bell, introduction to Hermes, by Michel Serres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 12 Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework (New York: Crown Business, 2010). 13 Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Crown, 2007). 14 Bill Venners, “Don’t Live with Broken Windows: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas,” Artima Developer, March 3, 2003, www.artima.com/intv/fixit.html. 15 U.S.

Ruby by example: concepts and code
by Kevin C. Baird
Published 1 Jun 2007

Matz himself has said that the two most influential languages on Ruby’s design were Common Lisp and Smalltalk—they were so influential, in fact, that he has jokingly referred to Ruby as MatzLisp. On the other hand, some Ruby aficionados stress Ruby’s 1 According to http://ruby-lang.org. similarities with Smalltalk and Perl, as did David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, in a June 2006 Linux Journal interview. Hansson also describes Ruby as “a language for writing beautiful code that makes programmers happy.” I couldn’t agree more.2 NOTE If you’re interested in learning more about Ruby’s heritage, see the appendix for a comparison of Ruby to other languages.

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This book introduces Rails (with a focus on general design philosophy, rather than an exhaustive list of the API), but it would be silly to think that a few chapters could give Rails the attention it deserves. The definitive text on Rails is Agile Web Development with Rails, now in its second edition, by Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails), and others (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006). Other members of the Rails community also give high praise to Ruby for Rails by David Alan Black (Manning Publications, 2006). Ru by Gem s a nd R ai ls Pr ep ar at ion 227 What Is Rails? According to its website (http://rubyonrails.org), Rails is “an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

As technologies like these have eaten the world, a relatively small number of people have come to own much of the infrastructure on which ever more human discourse, motion, buying, selling, reading, writing, teaching, learning, healing, and trading are done or arranged—even as many of them make public pronouncements about fighting against the establishment. David Heinemeier Hansson is the cofounder of a Colorado-based software company called Basecamp, a successful but modest business that stayed relatively small and avoided the lure of Silicon Valley and of trying to swallow the world. “Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe,” he has written.

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Lyft, Case No. 13-cv-04065-VC, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Dockets No. 69 and 74. On Bill Gates’s faith in technology’s leveling powers, see his book The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995). On Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s faith in the Internet’s powers, see their “Letter to Our Daughter” (Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, December 2015). David Heinemeier Hansson’s critique of the Silicon Valley ethic comes from his essay “Reconsider” (Signal v. Noise blog on Medium, November 5, 2015). Maciej Ceglowski’s critique is quoted in “California Capitalism Is Starting to Look a Lot Like Polish Communism,” published on Quartz (September 24, 2015), or in its original form here: http://idlewords.com/​talks/​what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

Instead, they’re trapped in a dark playground of guilt, not spending time with their kids like they ought to be. Don’t be an arch-procrastinator. Lock that monkey back in its box. 7. Inspiration and enthusiasm Strike while the iron is hot. Anon In ReWork, visionary business people Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this life-altering advice: “Inspiration is perishable… If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now[463].” Inspiration comes from everywhere, especially from people you know. A few Christmases ago, a friend who never writes on Facebook revealed in a casual post that she’d read 89 books over the past year.

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Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Think Rich to Get Rich. Piatkus, 2005. Fisker, Jacob Lund. Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence. ERE, 2010. Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust. Rider, 2004. Fried, Jason, and David Heinemeier Hansson. ReWork. Vermilion, 2010. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers. Penguin, 2009. Greene, Robert. Mastery. Profile, 2012. Handley, Ann. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content. John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Hardy, Darren. The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success.

Remote: Office Not Required
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 29 Oct 2013

Carabi + Co Alex Carabi Lincoln Loop Peter Baumgartner The Jellyvision Lab Amanda Lannert Accenture Samuel Hyland and Jill Smart Brightbox John Leach Herman Miller Betty Hase TextMaster Benoit Laurent Ideaware Andrés Max Fotolia Oleg Tscheltzoff FreeAgent Olly Headey BeBanjo Jorge Gomez Sancha HE: Labs Pedro Marins SimplySocial Tyler Arnold The IT Collective Chris Hoffman American Fidelity Assurance Lindsay Sparks SoftwareMill Aleksandra Puchta Perkins Coie Craig Courter Finally, we thank Jamie Heinemeier Hansson for all her help interviewing, researching, rewriting, and critiquing the manuscript. It would have been a far lesser book without her work. To Jamie and Colt Heinemeier Hansson, Working remotely has allowed the whole family to spend more time together in more places. Thank you both for your love and inspiration. —DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON For all those sitting in traffic right now. —JASON FRIED Copyright © 2013 by 37signals, LLC All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

Getting Real
by Jason Fried , David Heinemeier Hansson , Matthew Linderman and 37 Signals
Published 1 Jan 2006

When I wrote the book Agile Web Development With Rails, there was a lot of pent up demand among developers: give us the book now — we want to learn about Rails. But I'd fallen into the mindset of a publisher. "It isn't ready yet," I'd say. But pressure from the community and some egging on from David Heinemeier Hansson changed my mind. We released the book in pdf form about 2 months before it was complete. The results were spectacular. Not only did we sell a lot of books, but we got feedback — a lot of feedback. I set up an automated system to capture readers' comments, and in the end got almost 850 reports or typos, technical errors, and suggestions for new content.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

—DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER, COGNITIVE SCIENTIST AND PULITZER PRIZE- WINNING AUTHOR OF GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID People are consistently and uniformly horrendous at planning. As uncomfortable as this sounds, any plan created by even the most intelligent and skilled CEO or project manager is very likely to be grossly inaccurate. As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson memorably quip in their book Rework, “Planning is guessing.” The reason we’re so bad at planning is because we’re not omniscient—unforeseen events or circumstances can dramatically impact even the most detailed plans. When we create plans, we’re simply guessing and using Interpretation to fill in the blanks, no matter how much we cloak that uncomfortable reality in official-sounding language and fancy-looking charts.

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Drucker PROJECT MANAGEMENT ▶ Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun ▶ Results Without Authority by Tom Kendrick OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION ▶ The New Business Road Test by John Mullins ▶ How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan Kennedy ENTREPRENEURSHIP ▶ Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson ▶ The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki ▶ The Knack by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham ▶ The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss ▶ Escape from Cubicle Nation by Pamela Slim ▶ Bankable Business Plans by Edward Rogoff VALUE CREATION AND DESIGN ▶ Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson ▶ Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank ▶ The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman ▶ Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler MARKETING ▶ All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin ▶ Permission Marketing by Seth Godin ▶ The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout ▶ Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham SALES ▶ The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes ▶ Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss ▶ SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham ▶ The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer VALUE DELIVERY ▶ Indispensable by Joe Calloway ▶ The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt ▶ Lean Thinking by James Womack and Daniel Jones NEGOTIATION ▶ Bargaining for Advantage by G.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

For a large and growing number of businesses, that’s no longer the case. The Social Network, the movie chronicling Facebook’s rise to a multi-billion dollar company depicts Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook in his college dorm room. Basecamp, a multi-million dollar project management software company, was started by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, while living in different countries and while also running a web development consultancy. But it’s not just tech companies. Rent to Own: The Sharing Economy Over the last decade, a more publicly available internet has enabled the “Sharing Economy,” which has democratized the tools of production.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
by John Warrillow
Published 5 Feb 2015

With this model, you take the profits from your traditional business, and instead of putting them in your pocket, you reinvest them into building your subscription offering. Pursuing this strategy usually takes longer than raising a seven-figure seed round of outside money, but you get to keep control of your product and take your time building it. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson used this cash-flow strategy to build their company, 37signals, which was renamed Basecamp in 2014. Basecamp started out as a project-based web-design company building sites for big companies and has evolved into one of the leading project-management software platforms available for small and mid-size companies.

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git
by Travis Swicegood
Published 1 Dec 2008

This is the newly updated Second Edition, which goes beyond the Jolt-award winning first edition with new material on: • Migrations • RJS templates • Respond_to • Integration Tests • Additional ActiveRecord features • Another year’s worth of Rails best practices Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, and Andreas Schwarz (750 pages) ISBN : 0-9776166-3-0. $39.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/rails2 Prepared exclusively for Trieu Nguyen Download at Boykma.Com Stuff You Need to Know Learn the best ways to use your own brain and the best ways to use Ubuntu Linux.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

He was beat up, from inside the company, from the press, from Reddit users. He was overtired. Everything started aching. “I was under enormous amounts of stress, and I was not really able to recognize and appreciate that,” he recalled later. The public criticism only mounted when news of the office consolidation leaked. David Heinemeier Hansson, a creator of the Ruby on Rails programming framework and a partner at the project management software firm Basecamp, got wind of Wong’s decision to move employees to San Francisco and called it a “shit sandwich” on his blog. In reporting on the limited notice employees were given to decide, he wrote, “Can you imagine a more serious fuck you from your supposedly hip employer?

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Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul 141 million people visited the site: Andy Greenberg, “Hacked Celeb Pics Made Reddit Enough Cash to Run Its Servers for a Month,” Wired, September 10, 2014. servers for twenty-seven days: Ibid. Wong says the number was a vast exaggeration, but could not provide one more accurate. Tiny Boxes “shit sandwich”: David Heinemeier Hansson, “Reddit’s crappy ultimatum to remote workers and offices,” Short Logic, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20141004175215/http://shortlogic.tumblr.com/post/99014759324/reddits-crappy-ultimatum. Unbelievable Because It’s So Weird “unbelievable because” and “If the job had been an energizing one”: Post on Quora by Yishan Wong in response to “Why did Yishan Wong resign as Reddit CEO?

Ship It!: A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects
by Jared R. Richardson and William A. Gwaltney
Published 15 Mar 2005

. $44.95 • Learn all about this new open-source, full-stack web framework. • Develop sophisticated web applications quickly and easily. • Use incremental and iterative development to create the web apps that users want. • Get to go home on time. Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson (450 pages) ISBN : 0-9766940-0-X. $34.95 Visit our store at The Pragmatic Bookshelf The Pragmatic Bookshelf features books written by developers for developers. The titles continue the well-known Pragmatic Programmer style, and continue to garner awards and rave reviews. As development gets more and more difficult, the Pragmatic Programmers will be there with more titles and products to help programmers stay on top of their game.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims
Published 18 Apr 2011

Scott Belsky is a former Goldman Sachs banker who traded a finance job for starting a creative consulting firm, Behance, and became an author in order to help companies develop their ideas. Belsky’s book is well done, a how-to guide for corporate intrapreneurs, managers, and entrepreneurs to frame creative thinking processes and systems. Fried, Jason, and David Heinemeier Hansson. Rework. New York: Crown, 2010. Fried and Hansson, founders of 37Signals, a web software company, play an important role with web businesses these days: They provide common-sense frameworks to build web businesses in an era that rewards little betting. They take principles from agile software development and apply those to any startup.

The Data Journalism Handbook
by Jonathan Gray , Lucy Chambers and Liliana Bounegru
Published 9 May 2012

Things changed thanks to the development of two free/open source rapid development frameworks: Django and Ruby on Rails, both of which were first released in the mid-2000s. Django, which is built on top of the Python programming language, was developed by Adrian Holovaty and a team working in a newsroom—the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. Ruby on Rails was developed in Chicago by by David Heinemeier Hansson and 37Signals, a web application company. Though the two frameworks take different approaches to the “MVC pattern,” they’re both excellent and make it possible to build even very complex web applications very quickly. They take away some of the rudimentary work of building an app. Things like creating and fetching items from the database, and matching URLs to specific code in an app are built into the frameworks, so developers don’t need to write code to do basic things like that.

Working Hard, Hardly Working
by Grace Beverley

At the point of compiling this list, the books in the series are: How to Build It: Grow Your Brand (Niran Vinod and Damola Timeyin), How to Change It: Make a Difference (Joshua Virasami), How to Write It: Work With Words (Anthony Anaxagorou), How to Calm It: Relax Your Mind (Grace Victory), How to Save It: Fix Your Finances (Bola Sol) and How to Move It: Reset Your Body (Joslyn Thompson Rule) Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg (2013) Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, Otegha Uwagba (2017) Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World, Layla Saad (2020) Mind Over Clutter: Cleaning Your Way to a Calm and Happy Home, Nicola Lewis (2019) ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (2010) Self-Care for the Real World, Nadia Narain and Katia Narain Phillips (2017) Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek (2011) Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, Steven D.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

A Book of Practical Counsel Benjamin Graham One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market Peter Lynch The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing Burton G. Malkiel Rework Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson The Road Ahead Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions Christian Lander Documentaries Connections (series 1-3, 1978-1997) Series presented by James Burke. The Corporation (2013) Film on the concept of the corporation.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

But great companies embrace the Ask Your Developer mindset as an everyday practice, freeing their developers to be creative all the time. A great example of how to do this is Basecamp, a small but thriving software company in Chicago with about sixty employees. Jason Fried and his cofounder, David Heinemeier Hansson, run Basecamp almost like a laboratory dedicated to studying new ways of working that will make employees happy and enable them to do their best work. David, known as DHH, is a software developer who became famous after creating Ruby on Rails, a widely used web development framework. But he and Jason also do a lot of thinking and writing about the subject of work itself.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

With ubiquitous broadband, cheap computers, and the cloud, the only physical thing you need to make software is a bunch of ergonomically designed black office chairs for your programmers to sit on and tables where they can rest their MacBooks and empty pizza boxes. It doesn’t take tens of thousands of programmers to make great software; in fact, once you add too many cooks to the development kitchen, software tends to get worse. Michael Staton and his buddies speak with awe about coders like David Heinemeier Hansson, a thirty-four-year-old Danish wunderkind, the “Elvis of software engineers,” who created the popular Ruby on Rails Web development framework, races sports cars in his spare time, and is, they say, worth one hundred ordinary men. The cost of reproducing software is essentially zero, which means large profit margins on every copy you sell or every customer you add after the first one.

More Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 25 Jun 2008

Chicago-area startup 37signals has strongly aligned themselves with the idea of simplicity: simple, easy to use apps like Backpack and the simple, easy-to-use programming framework Ruby on Rails. For 37signals, simplicity is an “-ism,” practically an international political movement. Simplicity is not just simplicity, oh no, it’s summertime, it’s beautiful music and peace and justice and happiness and pretty girls with flowers in their hair. David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, says that their story is “one of beauty, happiness, and motivation. Taking pride and pleasure in your work and in your tools. That story simply isn’t a fad, it’s a trend. A story that allows for words like passion and enthusiasm to be part of the sanctioned vocabulary of developers without the need to make excuses for yourself.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

Available data might include an applicant’s list of contacts, GPS information, SMS logs, app download history, phone model, available storage space, and other data scraped from mobile phones. In August of 2019, Apple introduced its first credit card with Goldman Sachs and faced immediate regulatory discipline for its “sexist” credit limits. High-profile tech leaders, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson, took to social media to voice their complaints, noting that female spouses were approved for a minuscule percentage of the credit limits that their male spouses received, despite having identical assets and shared bank accounts. Calling it a sexist algorithm, Hansson tweeted: “My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

I’m not sure how, but iCloud managed to delete 20 years of calendar history. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had a recent backup. 20Some of them are inherent: Roger A. Grimes (8 Jul 2014), “5 reasons why software bugs still plague us,” CSO, https://www.csoonline.com/article/2608330/security/5-reasons-why-software-bugs-still-plague-us.html. David Heinemeier Hansson (7 Mar 2016), “Software has bugs. This is normal,” Signal v. Noise, https://m.signalvnoise.com/software-has-bugs-this-is-normal-f64761a262ca. 20Microsoft spent the decade after 2002: In 2002, Bill Gates sent his landmark “trustworthy computing” memo to all employees. In that same year, Windows development shut down completely so that every employee could take security training.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

The greater the uncertainty, the bigger the gap between what you can measure and what matters, the more you should watch out for overfitting—that is, the more you should prefer simplicity, and the earlier you should stop. When you’re truly in the dark, the best-laid plans will be the simplest. When our expectations are uncertain and the data are noisy, the best bet is to paint with a broad brush, to think in broad strokes. Sometimes literally. As entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explain, the further ahead they need to brainstorm, the thicker the pen they use—a clever form of simplification by stroke size: When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ball-point pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

Gardner thinks this same principle is why Apple has been comparatively better at building privacy and encryption into its phones and laptops than other firms. Apple’s customers are paying for the tech up front. “When your customers are paying you money, you can actually call them customers and not users, which is a term from drug dealing,” jokes David Heinemeier Hansson. He’s a coder who watched ad-based businesses fall apart in the dot-com crash of the ’90s and thus decided to write only software that people would be willing to pay money for. So he started making an organizational tool called Basecamp, and charging a relatively low subscription fee; soon he was employing dozens of people and catering to oodles of paying customers, without needing to track them or trick them into overusing his wares.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications
by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson
Published 24 May 2011

This would not be possible in traditional open source projects, where most conversation takes place on IRC and mailing lists and the wiki (if present) is only used for documentations and links to development resources. For a newcomer, it's much more difficult to reconstruct context from unstructured IRC logs and mail archives. 19.8.3. Embrace Time Zone Differences David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, once remarked on the benefit of distributed teams when he first joined 37signals. "The seven time zones between Copenhagen and Chicago actually meant that we got a lot done with few interruptions." With nine time zones between Taipei and Palo Alto, that was true for us during SocialCalc's development as well.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Money Mustache—Living Beautifully on $25–27K Per Year (#221)—tim.blog/mustache Lessons from Warren Buffett, Bobby Fischer, and Other Outliers (#219)—tim.blog/buffett Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss—Dr. Rhonda Patrick (#237)—tim.blog/rhonda 5 Morning Rituals That Help Me Win the Day (#105)—tim.blog/rituals David Heinemeier Hansson: The Power of Being Outspoken (#195)—tim.blog/dhh Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers (#173)—tim.blog/chrisyoung The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training (#158)—tim.blog/gst Becoming the Best Version of You (#210)—tim.blog/best The Science of Strength and Simplicity with Pavel Tsatsouline (#55)—tim.blog/pavel Tony Robbins (Part 2) on Morning Routines, Peak Performance, and Mastering Money (#38)—tim.blog/tony How Seth Godin Manages His Life—Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (#138)—tim.blog/seth The Relationship Episode: Sex, Love, Polyamory, Marriage, and More (with Esther Perel) (#241)—tim.blog/esther The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency—Nick Szabo (#244)—tim.blog/crypto Joshua Waitzkin (#2)—tim.blog/josh The Benevolent Dictator of the Internet, Matt Mullenweg (#61)—tim.blog/matt Ricardo Semler—The Seven-Day Weekend and How to Break the Rules (#229)—tim.blog/ricardo Extended Conversations I’ve recorded extended interviews with many of the people in this book.

Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
by Dave Thomas , Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt
Published 15 Dec 2000

It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management. This is the newly updated Third Edition, which goes beyond the award winning previous editions with new material covering the latest advances in Rails 2.0. Agile Web Development with Rails: Third Edition Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeier Hansson, et al. (784 pages) ISBN : 978-1-9343561-6-6. $43.95 http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3 RubyCocoa RubyCocoa brings together two enthusiastic development communities: now the joy of Cocoa meets the joy of Ruby. Through this hands-on tutorial, you’ll learn all about the Cocoa framework for programming on Mac OS X.

Ajax: The Definitive Guide
by Anthony T. Holdener
Published 25 Jan 2008

When you throw in Microsoft Visual Studio for development, programming times are reduced thanks to the GUI for designing and building individual pages in an application that it provides. The large available class library and the GUI for designing site pages allow more rapid deployment of Ajax web applications than traditional coding. Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (RoR or just Rails), which David Heinemeier Hansson developed while he was working on Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/), is a web-based project collaboration tool. It is an open source framework that is based on the MVC pattern, and you can find it at http://www.rubyonrails.org/. It is considered to be a full-stack framework, meaning that all the components in the framework are integrated, so you don’t have to set anything up manually.