This isn't just about one awful ad. I mean, yes, the ad truly is awful. It symbolizes everything everyone has ever hated about digitization. It celebrates a lossy, creative compression for the most flimsy reason: An iPad shedding an irrelevant millimeter or two. It's destruction of beloved musical instruments is the perfect metaphor for how utterly tone-deaf technologists are capable of being. But the real story is just how little saved up goodwill Apple had in the bank to compensate for the outrage. That's because Apple has lost its presumption of good faith over the last five years with an ..read more

There's an interesting psychological phenomenon where programmers tend to ascribe more trust to computers run by anyone but themselves. Perhaps it's a corollary to imposter syndrome, which leads programmers to believe that if a computer is operated by AWS or SaaS or literally anyone else, it must be more secure, better managed, less buggy, and ultimately purer. I wish that was so, but there are no magic machines and no magic operators. Just the same kind of potentially faulty bits and brains. A great example of this was the feedback to our declaration that we're bring continuous integration ..read more

Between running Rubocop style rules, Brakeman security scans, and model-controller-system tests, it takes our remote BuildKite-based continuous integration setup about 5m30s to verify a code change is ready to ship for HEY. My Intel 14900K-based Linux box can do that in less than half the time (and my M3 Max isn't that much slower!). So we're going to drop the remote runners and just bring continuous integration back to developer machines at 37signals. It's remarkable how big of a leap multi-core developer machines have taken over the last five-to-seven years or so. Running all these checks ..read more

After more than twenty years on the mac, it was always going to be difficult for me to leave Apple. I've simply not been in the market for another computing platform in decades. Sure, I've dabbled a bit here and there, but never with true commitment. It wasn't until Cupertino broke my camel's back this year that I suddenly had the motivation needed to uproot everything. And when I did, I learned that Windows has turned into a wonderful web developer's platform thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I'm not going to lie and say I loved everything about Windows. But after the questio ..read more

The Babylon Bee ran this amazing bit last year: "Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Immediately Leave Their Desk Job If Asked To Embark Upon A Trans-Antarctic Expedition On A Big Wooden Ship". Yes. Exactly. Modern office workers are often starved for ambition, adventure, and even discomfort. This is why there's an endless line of recruits willing to sign up to work for leaders like Musk, despite his reputation for being an erratic hard ass. The ambition is worth it. Because real ambition is rare. It's the lack of ambition that fuels the malaise of a bullshit job. Work so aspirationally underwhelm ..read more

The first tech company I ever really despised was Microsoft. This was back in the 1990s, the era of "cutting off the air supply", of embrace-extend-extinguish, of open source as a "cancer", and of Bill Gates before he sought reputational refugee in philanthropy. What made the animosity so strong was the sense of being trapped. That the alternatives to the Wintel monopoly of the time was so inferior as to essentially require giving up on modern computing. So when Apple released the first Unix-powered OSX machines at the turn of the millennium, I felt relieved. Saved, even. Finally -- FINALLY ..read more

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