I've been a Sonos megafan for years. Owned probably two dozen devices for different homes. Mainly amps for in-ceiling speakers, but also some Ones, 3s, 5s. All of it. Because it Just Worked when it came to multi-room music. Now it doesn't, and it hasn't for a long time, so I've been back in the market. I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. The new app has gotten a lot of the blame for Sonos' problems, but to me, the bigger issue has been how unreliable the system at large has become. And that doesn't seem like it's just an app issue. Probably more of a firmware problem. But whatever it is ..read more

We had originally planned to go all-in on passkeys for ONCE/Campfire, and we built the early authentication system entirely around that. It was not a simple setup! Handling passkeys properly is surprisingly complicated on the backend, but we got it done. Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out again. The problem with passkeys is that they're essentially a halfway house to a password manager, but tied to a specific platform in ways that aren't obvious to a user at all, and liable to easily leave them unable to access of their accounts. Much the same ..read more

A big part of the reason that companies are going ga-ga over AI right now is the promise that it might materially lower their payroll for programmers. If a company currently needs 10 programmers to do a job, each have a cost of $200,000/year, then that's a $2m/year problem. If AI could even cut off 1/4 of that, they would have saved half a million! Cut double that, and it's a million. Efficiency gains add up quick on the bottom line when it comes to programmers! That's why I love Ruby! That's why I work on Rails! For twenty years, it's been clear to me that this is where the puck was going ..read more

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: "If Linux is so good, why aren't more people using it?" And it's a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment's consideration. Linux is even free, so what's stopping mass adoption, if it's actually better? My response: If exercising is so healthy, why don't more people do it? If reading is so educational, why don't more people do it? If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it? The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, i ..read more

History is full of long stretches of dominance by noble ideas and despots, times of prosperity and of dark ages. Each of which must have seemed like they would never end to the people who lived through them. If you were a citizen of the Ottoman empire 1452, you probably didn't imagining life any other way. Ditto the height of the Roman empire. Ditto today. Humans of all times have acclimated to their environment, their culture, and their politics. And while we've also always had historians and prophets proclaiming to know the future, through the tea leaves of the past or burning bushes, actu ..read more

I've always had an ambivalent relationship with goals. I don't like goals that feel like checkpoints on a treadmill. They make you reach for a million dollars in revenue, celebrate for a second, and then turn the chase to five million the minute after. No thanks. But specific, material goals aren't the only kind you can set. Here's a goal I remember setting that wasn't like that. I remember seeing Kent Beck -- the creator of eXtreme Programming and author of my favorite programming style guide of all time --  on the conference stage at JAOO 2003. I was mesmerized by Kent's command of th ..read more

After experimenting with a number of management roles over the last few years, 37signals is back to its original configuration: None. We once more have no full-time managers whose sole function is to organize or direct the work of others. Everyone doing management here does so on the side, next to their primary work as an individual contributor. Including Jason and I. And it works. That's not to say that there's no managerial work at 37signals. We still do yearly performance reviews, have onboarding duties for new colleagues, schedule on-call coverage, and supervise junior work. But instead ..read more

The birth rate is dropping all over the world. In some places, like South Korea (0.72), it is so low people are starting to worry about a national extinction. In other places, including all of Europe (average 1.5, Spain 1.29), it's merely bad and alarming. And nobody seems to know exactly why.  Even in Denmark, it's now so low (1.5) that the government went from estimating a lack of 5,000 child care professionals to suddenly looking at a 2,000 person surplus by 2035. Plans for kindergartens and schools are being rewritten in anticipation of far fewer kids in the coming years. At 1.5, De ..read more

It's hard to sell simple, because simple looks easy, and who wants to pay for that? Of course, everyone says they want something simple, but the way they buy reveals that they usually don't. This is the secret that the merchants of complexity have long since figured out. That clever and sophisticated beats basic and straightforward most days in the market. Since both clever and sophisticated implies something special, and only what's special command the premium dollar. Deep down, that's what most people want. To feel special. That's far more important than merely purchasing a solution. Basi ..read more

Since the dawn of computing, humans have sought to estimate how long it takes to build software, and for just as long, they've consistently failed. Estimating even medium-sized projects is devilishly difficult, and estimating large projects is virtually impossible. Yet the industry keeps insisting that the method that hasn't worked for sixty years will definitely work on this next project, if we all just try a little harder. It's the definition of delusional. The fundamental problem is that as soon as a type of software development becomes so routine that it would be possible to estimate, it ..read more