Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

April 2020

Hiring programmers with a take-home test

There’s no perfect process for hiring great programmers, but there are plenty of terrible ways to screw it up. We’ve rejected the industry stables of grilling candidates in front of a whiteboard or needling them with brain teasers since the start at Basecamp. But you’re not getting around showing real code when applying for a job here. In the early days of the company, we hired programmers almost exclusively from the open source community.

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes

Basecamp’s newest product HEY has lived on Kubernetes since development first began. While our applications are majestic monoliths, a product like HEY has numerous supporting services that run along-side the main app like our mail pipeline (Postfix and friends), Resque (and Resque Scheduler), and nginx, making Kubernetes a great orchestration option for us.

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel

The vast majority of web applications should start life as a Majestic Monolith: A single codebase that does everything the application needs to do. This is in contrast to a constellation of services, whether micro or macro, that tries to carve up the application into little islands each doing a piece of the overall work. And the vast majority of web applications will continue to be served well by The Majestic Monolith for their entire lifespan.