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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of the 37signals model. Basecamp is a terrible product. Last I used it with a partner, it still didn't support inline code highlighting. They're very opinionated about everything but I don't see their opinions driving good products. Kubernetes has been getting better with every release. I'd advise companies thinking of doing it better to implement their improvements to K8s directly so it can become a scalable, easy to use standard for everyone.

37signals is part of a contingent of reactionary developers and you can see this in HEY and now MRSK. It's reactionary without delivering real innovative value.

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37signals is known for sustainable, human-being focused development among other things.

They solve problems by breaking them into first principles and composing them into shapes that fit them.

They've created RoR which at the time brought together with textmate millions of developers onto mac and "programming can be actually pleasant and cool" side. Their hero style page was copied everywhere on the internet which is visible to this day.

Many unicorns grew from RoR, many use it to this day.

They are open source advocates.

They create environment of certain kind of skepticism towards established tech while injecting novel approaches here and there.

You're saying something about inline code highlighting and jumping onto shitting over whole company and saying something about kubernetes.

It's hard to take it seriously even if you have a point there that some functionality is embarrassingly missing in one of their products.

I think his criticism is warranted when you think of 37signals without Ruby on Rails or the open source angle. Judging them just on their products.

I don't really see people refer to them as the cream of the crop. Basecamp's UX is opinionated but still complicated: I get lost on it even though it's a simple product. It seems to work well for a team more similar to 37signals'.

Hey.com I haven't seen take the world by storm, even though it does seem better than most e-mail software (and I do appreciate their technological solutions on it). I guess most people don't have that problem with e-mail that the Basecamp founders do.

That's a bit of a trend for them: they often claim people should do one thing and everything else is worse, even though that one thing really works for them and might not work for anyone else. Their agile methodology, their team size, their tech stack, etc. they often pose themselves as the "sane" ones doing it simple and easy, while everyone else is chasing the wrong thing.

So in that sense I can see why OP said they're reactionary. I would disagree, however, as they've been revolutionary on many fronts, but it's usually as part of a contrarian view that sometimes is more of a miss than a hit.

> human-being focused development

So human-being focused a third of their human-being employees quit after the CEO wrote a blog post! https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22412714/basecamp-employe...

Yes, it's the prerogative of a company to not want its work environment to be polluted with discussions that have no relationship to the tasks at hand.

It is human-focused to not pussyfoot around such decisions but to instead bring clarity to the table and allow humans to make their choice.

More companies should be like that and, in fact, in Europe, still are.

> no relationship to the tasks at hand.

> It is human-focused

Human-focused, as long as the human is white and male.

When you make a communications service, you probably want to involve a wide range of perspectives to make sure you build a good product that doesn't contribute harm. Specifically with Hey, they've walked back a bunch of features (props for being reactive, I guess) after they got a modicum of feedback from people that don't look like the two founders.

- https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275991097261449216

"This is a great and important perspective we hadn’t considered" is a stunning example - You don't need to (and can't!) personally consider every perspective, but maybe if you involved more people in the product development process you get to catch these things before you release them. Human-focused.

- https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275595820121776128

- https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1276173017060569089

Do you know how many people they did have working on this, or what people specifically were lacking to catch these? Do you have insight into what major problems they caught before release that they public never saw?

Tweeting you ‘plan to leave’ is not the same as actually quitting.

You seem to conflate “human focused” with “no disagreement s focused”.

Except they're fast and built with care, with graphic design given as much importance as technology itself (as in actual "interface problem solving", not "the same product as everyone else's, but with gradients and transparency"). Navigation's different but it's very good. The text editor is best-in-class. I don't prescribe to the notion that a professional worker should always have 64gb RAM so both Notion and Jira can be open at the same time, and I for myself appreciated that whatever page I was on was just a single page, an slightly interactive html page, and whenever I needed to go somewhere else I'd browse there clicking on hyperlinks, and get there fast. It might sound dated, but compared to, say, Asana and Monday or dear god Microsoft or Jira's "reinventions", it's really many years ahead.

(I have nothing to do with the company, just a happy client)

One might or might not like 37 Signals and their products. Some of their ideas are fantastic, others not so much.

But claiming their text editor to be best in class when it is literal dogshit is brave.

inline coding == BAD company, very opinionated everything. but you better to use: https://kubernetes.io/ because they are good people. /s

Some people like some products other people like others. There are tons of terrible products out there and many of them are also completely overengineered.

37signals and DHH did a lot right with Rails, so I'm looking forward to trying their approach on deployment.

IMO kubernetes is quite a lot of moving pieces that are absolutely not needed for most deployments, if you like it great! I'm sure many will love the opinions guiding MRSK (myself included).

I personally wouldn't touch K8s but I'm also not telling anyone not to try it.

Basecamp is designed first to get people to use it who won't use anything else (non-technical clients, essentially.)

Syntax highlighting would be nice. They started their open source text editor before there were many good alternatives but didn't set themselves up to accept contributions. They lost the main two developers of it in the drama last year. Now that CKEditor 5 is out, they should probably switch to that...

I'm first to crap on K8s but I do agree w/ you here...

Feels a bit surreal seeing a 'tool' that wraps Traefik + Docker Swarm be so self-aggrandizing.

> I'm first to crap on K8s

OK to each their own.

Do you object to YAML? Kubelet?

It seems like a pretty solid approach to me. Some have been misdirected by it because something that uses a sizable fraction of a CPU doesn't work for their use case, but that speaks more to the lack of an alternative to Docker Compose, which Kubernetes wasn't intended to be.

I was griping re: MRSK not so much K8s.

Kubernetes is 'fine' in the sense that a sledgehammer can, technically, open a door...

Upvoted this, because opinions about an opinionated product should be allowed.

Fully agree that 37Signals’ products are very opinionated and often missing crucial features. I can see that they fulfil some use-cases, but could be more mainstream.

I don’t have a problem with opinions on products, but urging people to “do x instead of y because standards” is such an intellectually lazy take, especially when the party being criticized has led development on some of the most influential open source projects in history.

I’d love to see OP do anything as remotely influential in the industry as DHH.

> I’d love to see OP do anything as remotely influential in the industry as DHH.

I vastly prefer their appeal to standards over your appeal to authority.

Their standard is rational thinking though first principle decomposition - if it still holds through their evaluation, it'll stay as standard, otherwise it's not a standard from their PoV.

What? Appeals to standards are appeals to authority.

Are you sure you can’t see the nuanced difference in this case?

There can be differences between appeals to authority, and there's also a difference between an appeal to standards and an appeal to (the common, shared hacker value of) standardization.

But no such differences are captured by calling one appeal to authority 'an appeal to authority' in contradistinction to another.

Personally, I find quite a big difference between the standard of the already widespread usage of K8S versus the cult of personality around DHH who is abrasively opinionated at times.

> They're very opinionated about everything...

So is Apple, and it seems to work for them.

Apple's opinions seem to be agreeable...

And yet there are entire sub-threads all over this forum every week with people voicing a preference for Microsoft over Apple for development work. This was my point.

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