Founders at Work.pdf

David Heinemeier Hansson 313
One of the technical mistakes that we made early on was that we had this
notion that Basecamp was for creative services firms. Set up like that, you have
a firm and you have a client, so it’s a one-to-one relationship. That assumption
went very deep. For instance, in the database there’s a client ID and firm ID,
and now that people were using it, you’d have setups where people wanted two
firms. So now what did we do? Basecamp simply couldn’t do that. And that
assumption was so deep at the roots of the system that it took us about a year
and a half to fix, which was not a good thing.
Another interesting mistake was that we didn’t consider time zones.
Basecamp ran with the assumption for the longest time that everybody is in
Central Standard Time, even though I was in Copenhagen, which is a 7-hour
time difference from Chicago. So people in Australia would get their milestones
one day late. We didn’t really care about time, because we didn’t usually
have fixed deadlines. We had stuff we wanted to do, but it didn’t really matter
whether it was 2 hours later or 2 hours earlier. Of course, not every firm works
like that.
And it was also disguised by the fact that Basecamp didn’t use a lot of time.
The only place where we displayed the time itself was on the comments. On the
posts themselves, it just said the date and the milestone. So you wouldn’t be
able to discover that, unless you were in that central time zone, it was off. In
Denmark, for 7 hours after midnight, the system would say it was yesterday. So
it was a big deal for the firms that needed specific times. And it was always a big
deal to people in Australia. Half of the time they would be off by one day. We’ve
gone back to fix that problem too.
Livingston: Were you the only programmer?
Heinemeier Hansson: I was until February 2005 when we brought on our
second programmer. Yes, for well over a year, I was the only programmer and
systems administrator on Basecamp.
Livingston: In addition to all your responsibilities, you were also starting the
Rails project. How did you manage it?
Heinemeier Hansson: When you have to do a project like Basecamp and you
only have 10 hours a week, you can’t spend your time on things that don’t produce
anything. So you get extremely aware of tools that aren’t necessarily helping
your productivity and you go seeking tools that can help.
That’s how I found Ruby. It was such a nice experience for me and a nice
productivity booster. I was coming from PHP. I had also looked at Java and
other environments and I wasn’t finding anything else that would allow me, as a
single programmer, to deliver all this stuff.
And I then built Rails on top of Ruby to allow me to build Basecamp and
drive this project in the way that we wanted to. Because we didn’t want to bring
on more programmers. We wanted to keep those constraints that we had and so
we just had to make tools that allowed us to do that. And I think that’s also a big
explanation for why Rails is having the success that it is: it was born in an environment
that was so focused on productivity and was so focused on being able