There’s a big difference between writing code and being a great programmer. Writing code is the output--and almost anyone can learn the basics of syntax and formatting. But what makes someone...

Report: software engineering efficiency and its $3T impact on global GDP

Since we launched Hill Charts in Basecamp we’ve been fielding many interesting questions. One common question is: how do we catch more…

Around March of 2017, I received a call asking for a code review on a product about to be launched. This company had issues with memory leaks, spontaneous crashing, slow loading, CPU spiking, and had to release in a couple of weeks. You might have heard this story before, just not from me, and not about this company. It’s surprisingly common. We got together on the weekend and started looking through the code together.

Yagni ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") is the principle that we should not build presumptive features. It should not be used as a justification for neglecting internal quality.

The Technology Blog of author and software developer Matt Butcher.

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…

There’s always a reason to rebuild. Perhaps you’re a CEO of a startup that’s had some success and your engineers are clamoring to replatform and do a rewrite from scratch. Perhaps you’re an executive or IT lead and you’re counting the cost of pulling the trigger on a rewrite of a legacy application. Perhaps you’re a lead engineer in the midst of a rebuild and are having second thoughts (am I crazy?). Regardless of where you’re at, you likely already know that talk of rebuilds, like talk of tax reform or anarchy, is just a tad bit dangerous—you never know what kind of danger you’ll end up in...

The single most important quality in a piece of software is simplicity. It’s more important than doing the task you set out to achieve. It’s more important than performance. The reason is straightforward: if your solution is not simple, it will not be correct or fast.

Trusted by millions, Basecamp puts everything you need to get work done in one place. It’s the calm, organized way to manage projects, work with clients, and communicate company-wide.

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

A begging Rails-developer explains how to maintain the code quality and development approach she was introduced to on the programming classes.

Since the dawn of time (before software, there was only darkness), there has been one constant: businesses want to build software cheaper and faster. It is certainly an understandable and laudable goal – especially if you’ve spent any time around software developers. It is a goal that every engineer should support wholeheartedly, and we should... Read more »

Incremental Delivery and how it changes the way you see a problem

The Art of War has 222,853 ratings and 6,925 reviews. Anne said: Hey! Look at me stepping outside my comfort zone!I saw this audiobook in the library...

cyle:

Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…