When we introduced a default setup for system tests in Rails 5.1 back in 2016, I had high hopes. In theory, system tests, which drive a headless browser through your actual interface, offer greater confidence that the entire machine is working as it ought. And because it runs in a black-box fashion, it should be more resilient to implementation changes. But I'm sad to report that I have not found

I've gone around the computing world in the past eighty hours. I've been flowing freely from Windows to Linux, sampling text editors like VSCode, neovim, Helix, and Sublime, while surveying PC laptops and desktops. It's been an adventure! But it's time to stop being a tourist. It's time to commit. So despite my earlier reservations about giving up on TextMate, I've decided to make Windows my new p

I’m kinda shocked. Windows actually got good for web developers. Between VSCode, WSL, and Intel’s latest desktop chips, I’ve been living with a PC for over a week that runs my programming tests faster than an M3 Max, ships with an excellent window manager out-the-box, and generally feels like a completely viable alternative to macOS for working with the web. Hell, not just viable, but better in ma

January 14, 2024 Multi-tenancy is what’s hard about scaling web services Computers have gotten so ridiculously fast that there is scarcely any organization in the world that can overwhelm a web-based information system running on a single server. All the complexity and sophistication required to run web services today stem from multi-tenancy. From having a single system serve millions of users at

Celebrating twenty years of Ruby on Rails with more than 700 happy developers packed into the coolest conference venue possible in Amsterdam was epic. Safe to say, Rails World was a roaring success. Which is deeply satisfying to conclude, because it really wasn't a given outcome when I started working on The Rails Foundation last year. It's hard to know how new institutions are going to be receive

By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can announce we're dropping TypeScript from the next big release of Turbo 8. The fac

By all accounts, Figma has been an amazing tool for designers. We've used it extensively at 37signals, and I'm sure most every other software shop has too. Adobe didn't pay $20 billion for nothing. But we don't do the bulk of our design work with or in Figma when developing Basecamp or HEY for the web. That's all done directly in HTML and CSS, as it should be. Because no matter how good Figma is,

I won't deny there may well be cases where a microservices-first architecture makes sense, but I think they're few and far in between. The vast majority of systems are much better served by starting and staying with a majestic monolith. The Prime Video case study that blew up the internet yesterday is but the latest illustration. Maybe once you reach the scale of Netflix or Amazon, there are areas

It's finally time to talk about the technology we've been building at 37signals to leave the cloud with HEY and many of our legacy applications. We already run Basecamp on our own hardware, but we deploy it using an old tool known as Capistrano. This is the deployment tool we originally wrote at 37signals all the way back in 2005, when we first had to deploy applications to multiple servers. It's

2021 was an incredible year for Ruby on Rails. We started it off still celebrating the third major version of Ruby, and left it with the accomplishment of the seventh major version of Rails. Together, these releases sparked a renewed enthusiasm for building modern web applications with Ruby on Rails, unlike anything I can recall since the late oughts. The moment was finally right, and we were righ

September 24, 2021 Stimulus 3 + Turbo 7 = Hotwire 1.0 For so long, it felt like I could only tell half the story of how we make software for the web at Basecamp. Too many of the chapters about our front-end approach were missing key pages. Sure, we had some of it out there. Turbolinks, for example, hark back to 2012, when I was inspired by Chris Wanstrath's ideas in pjax, and took them further. An

September 6, 2021 Rails 7 will have three great answers to JavaScript in 2021+ Rails has been unapologetically full stack since the beginning. We've continuously sought to include ever-more default answers to all the major infrastructure questions posed by modern web development. From talking to a database, to sending and receiving emails, to connecting web sockets, to rendering HTML, to integrati

August 12, 2021 Modern web apps without JavaScript bundling or transpiling I didn't much care for vanilla JavaScript prior to ES6. Through all of the 2000s, I chased different approaches to avoid writing too much of it. First there was RJS (Ruby-to-JavaScript). Then there was CoffeeScript. Both transpiling approaches that turned more enjoyable-to-write source code into the kind of JavaScript that

At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company changes, which, taken in total, collectively feel like a full version change. It deser

March 8, 2021 Google suffers from a digital petro curse The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the international market on top of that.