Google's announcement that they're done discussing politics at work widely echoed the policy changes Coinbase and we at 37signals did a few years back. So yesterday, I did two separate interviews with media outlets on the topic. And we spoke in part about those early weeks of reaction to our changes, as Twitter went crazy in response to the story. What was it like to briefly be the main, hated characters on the internet? In the moment, it was awful, but in retrospect, it was a gift.  A gift as a mirror, causing me to reflect on how I might have been part of a similar mob, on other topi ..read more

After the disastrous launch of their Gemini AI, which insisted that George Washington was actually Black and couldn't decide whether Musk's tweets or Hitler was worse, Google's response was timid and weak. This was just a bug! A problem with QA! It absolutely, positively wasn't a reflection of corrupted culture at Google, which now appeared to put ideology over accuracy. Really, really! Anyone watching that shit show would be right to wonder whether one of America's great technology companies had fallen completely into the hands of the new theocracy. I certainly did.  But now comes evi ..read more

I never actually cared whether we call it master or main. So when the racialized claims started over how calling the default branch in Git repositories "master" was PrObLEmAtIC, I thought, fine, what skin is it off anyone's or my back to change? If this is really important, can make a real difference, great. Let's do it.  How naivé. This was a classic exploit of good faith, and I fell for it. Changing master to main changed less than nothing. Because nothing was or is ever enough in this arena. As soon as this word battle was won, it was just on to the next and the next (and the next ..read more

The engine is in wrong place in a Porsche 911. It's hanging out the back, swinging the car like a pendulum. And that's key to why it's the most iconic sports car ever made. This fundamental imperfection is part of how it creates the connection. This is true of mechanical watches too. They're hilariously complicated pieces of engineering that tell time worse than a $20 Casio quartz watch. And that's why we love them. The imperfection of timekeeping, the need to manually wind the things, cements the connection. That's how computers used to feel too. The Amiga, and the Commodore 64 before it ..read more

I've always hated the saying "we're like family here" when it comes to work. Because it's obviously not true, and it's usually cynically invoked by management to entice an undue obligation of sacrifice. Implying that you should give it all to The Company -- constantly working weekends, always being available on vacations, and all the rest -- but when the necessities of the business change, you'll realize the obligation was never truly mutual. So far, so agreeable to most people. They usually already have a family. They're not looking to supplant it with a fake corporate version. And they don ..read more

This will be my 11th attempt. The first time I showed up on the grid at Le Mans was in 2012 -- some five years after I had first driven a real race car, and even less time since I made participating in the world's greatest endurance race the ultimate goal. But it almost didn't happen this year. See, motorsports relies on a curious mix of money and talent. It's usually not enough just to be good at driving to get a seat in a competitive car. The majority of teams competing, certainly in sports car racing, either are or have been funded by passionate privateers who bring the budget to make rac ..read more

This book nails it. What it's like to be a parent with school-age children in America right now. So many kids with a diagnosis of one sort or another, so much monitoring of children's every move, so much anxiety over the most trivial things, like the sugar content of a cupcake. Abigail Shrier ties all these threads together into a damning tapestry of well-cited arguments for why much of modern parenting in America is failing the kids it purports to care for so catastrophically. I simply couldn't put it down. I've read a few parenting books, and I usually have to somewhat dig to find somethin ..read more

I break the essential responsibilities of the company executive into three distinct buckets. They are:   1. Chart the course Where are we going? What are we building? Who is it for? Any executive running anything has to know the answer to these questions in order to lead anyone anywhere. If you don't have a clue where you're going, any road can take you there, and running in circles is as good as making progress. This is not viable.   That doesn't mean having a five-year plan! Or even a quarterly target! We decide on what features we're going to build for Basecamp and HEY every 6-8 ..read more

I've been pleading with antitrust authorities around the world to do something about Big Tech for years now. Especially with those awful app store monopolies that have been choking out developers left, right, and center. But now that something finally looks to be happening, I'm suddenly concerned that it might, and that we'll end up wishing that it didn't. It's not because I suddenly have a newfound appreciation for Apple's or Google's right to milk their mobile tollbooths for billions more. Au contraire. My concern is rather that the sovereign leviathans of the world, be it the EU or the US ..read more

It's a double whammy of anxiety for developers at the moment. On the one hand, the layoffs are dragging on. The industry has shed more jobs in a shorter period than any time since the dot-com bust over twenty years ago. Seasoned veterans who used to have recruiters banging on their door nonstop can suddenly barely get a callback. And now the threat of AI suddenly got even more urgent and imminent with the launch of Devin. If you zoom out, though, developers are still flying high on tailwinds that took them to the moon over the past decade. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their ..read more