The O'Saasy License
One of my favorite parts of the early web was how easy it was to see how the front-end was built. Before View Source was ruined by minification, transpiling, and bundling, you really could just right-click on any web page and learn how it was all done. It was glorious. But even back then, this only ever applied to the front-end. At least with commercial applications, the back-end was always kept proprietary. So learning how to write great web applications still meant piecing together lessons fr
Europe is weak and delusional (but not doomed)
The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe's sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn't worked for the past forty years. Let's start with free speech, and the €120 million fine just levied against X. The fig leaf for this was pai
Fizzy is our fun, modern take on Kanban (and we made it open source!)
Kanban is a simple, practical approach to visually managing processes and backlogs by moving work cards from one progress column to another. Toyota came up with it to track their production lines back in the middle of the 20th century, but it's since been applied to all sorts of industries with great effect. And Fizzy is our new fun, modern take on it in digital form. We're certainly not the first to take a swing at this, not even for software development. Since the early 2000s, there's been a
Six billion reasons to cheer for Shopify
Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out. But you'd be wrong. This year, merchants sold an astounding $6.2 billion worth of wares through Shopify on Black Friday. That's up 25% from last year, when the record was ~$5 billion. Just crazy high g
Local LLMs are how nerds now justify a big computer they don't need
It's pretty incredible that we're able to run all these awesome AI models on our own hardware now. From downscaled versions of DeepSeek to gpt-oss-20b, there are many options for many types of computers. But let's get real here: they're all vastly behind the frontier models available for rent, and thus for most developers a curiosity at best. This doesn't take anything away from the technical accomplishment. It doesn't take anything away from the fact that small models are improving, and that m
No backup, no cry
I haven't done a full-system backup since back in the olden days before Dropbox and Git. Every machine I now own is treated as a stateless, disposable unit that can be stolen, lost, or corrupted without consequences. The combination of full-disk encryption and distributed copies of all important data means there's just no stress if anything bad happens to the computer. But don't mistake this for just a "everything is in the cloud" argument. Yes, I use Dropbox and GitHub to hold all the data tha
Sabbaticals keep our attrition at bay
The only way many tech workers in the US can get a long break is by quitting their job. So lots of them do that every few years, which is partly why the average tenure in our industry is at an atrocious 18 months. But this terrible rate of churn is often avoidable by one simple benefit trick: Sabbaticals. We've been giving everyone at 37signals a six-week sabbatical every three years for the last fifteen years or so. It's been magical for retention because a break like that allows the mind to r
Success always spawns haters
As Omarchy was taking off this summer, and thousands of happy users started expressing their delight with the system, I kept waiting for the universe to balance the scales of passion. Nothing of note in this world is allowed to succeed without spawning a counteracting force of haters. And now they're finally here. The same happened twenty years ago with Ruby on Rails, but back then I still thought you could argue your way to understanding. That if you just made a logical case to counter whatever
A petabyte worth of Omarchy in a month
Omarchy didn't even exist before this summer. I did much of the pre-release work during the downtime between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June. And now, just a few months later, we've delivered a petabyte of ISOs in the past thirty days alone. That's about 150,000 installs of the Omarchy Linux distribution! I've been involved with a lot of successful open-source projects in the past quarter of a century or so. Ruby on Rails, first and foremost. But nothing, not even Rails, grew as qui
Give me AI slop over human sludge any day
We're fed an endless stream of consternation over AI slop these days. The content apocalypse is nigh! It'll rot your brain! Okay, sure, maybe, but have you seen the kind of content sludge that perfectly ordinary humans are capable of producing? It's thrice as tragic. The web is full of it. Garbage writing and brain-dead shorts. Content mills pumping out nonsense pages and gagging videos to appease whatever the high priests of SEO now think they've divined will please Lord Google or Master TikTo
Pay yourself first
There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the work that actually means something to you. I feel this acutely as someone responsible to employees, customers, followers, and readers. I could do nothing all day but check up on projects, people, and posts, but my brain would quickly check out if it was
We've all had enough of this nonsense
Every few years, the same sad contingent of Ruby malcontents tries to cancel me from Rails. At the peak of the woke era, back in 2022, they were actually successful in getting Ruby Central to uninvite me from doing the yearly keynote at RailsConf. But now RailsConf is dead, Rails World is thriving, and the cancellation nonsense is over. Only I guess nobody told that same sad contingent! Because three days ago, they tried yet again, with the same trite grab bag of accusations: "he holds racist a
Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence
The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people. Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, y
The great falls of Boeing, Intel, and Apple
It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That's been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple. Legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean counter, marketing man, or logistics hand took over. Boeing's troubles started when they were taken over by McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but really accelerated after 2005 when they installed their first CEO with no aerospace background
As I remember London
As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day. That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the
Apple has no one left who can say no
Apple spent a decade trying to develop their own car with Project Titan. It never launched, and was finally canceled in 2024, but not before the company had spent ten billion dollars on getting nowhere. In the same time frame, Tesla launched the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck. But maybe that's just because manufacturing cars is really hard, and at least Apple had some superior software ready to go? Also no. We know this because the CarPlay Ultra project has been heralded as the o
Words are not violence
Debates, at their finest, are about exploring topics together in search for truth. That probably sounds hopelessly idealistic to anyone who've ever perused a comment section on the internet, but ideals are there to remind us of what's possible, to inspire us to reach higher — even if reality falls short. I've been reaching for those debating ideals for thirty years on the internet. I've argued with tens of thousands of people, first on Usenet, then in blog comments, then Twitter, now X, and als
Thrice charmed at Rails World
The first Rails World in Amsterdam was a roaring success back in 2023. Tickets sold out in 45 minutes, the atmosphere was electric, and The Rails Foundation set a new standard for conference execution in the Ruby community. So when we decided to return to the Dutch Capital for the third edition of the conference this year, the expectations were towering. And yet, Amanda Perino, our executive director and event organizer extraordinaire, managed to outdo herself, and produced an even better show
Engineering excellence starts on edge
The best engineering teams take control of their tools. They help develop the frameworks and libraries they depend on, and they do this by running production code on edge — the unreleased next version. That's where progress is made, that's where participation matters most. This sounds scary at first. Edge? Isn't that just another word for danger? What if there's a bug?! Yes, what if? Do you think bugs either just magically appear or disappear? No, they're put there by programmers and removed by
Omarchy 2.0
Omarchy 2.0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment! It's crazy that it took me more than thirty years to realize this, but while I spent time in Apple's walled garden, the free software alternative simply grew better, stronger, and faster. The Linux of 2025 is no
National pride
The Danish flag is everywhere in Denmark. It's at the airport when parents greet their kids coming back from holiday. It's on the birthday cake when you invite people over. It's swinging from the flagpoles in house after house, especially in the countryside. It's on the buses on the monarch's birthday. It's everywhere and all the time. I love it. I love that the Danes are so proud of their country that the flag is the most common symbol for celebrating any momentous occasion. Even just returni
Omarchy micro-forks Chromium
You can just change things! That's the power of open source. But for a lot of people, it might seem like a theoretical power. Can you really change, say, Chrome? Well, yes! We've made a micro fork of Chromium for Omarchy (our new 37signals Linux distribution). Just to add one feature needed for live theming. And now it's released as a package anyone can install on any flavor of Arch using the AUR (Arch User Repository). We got it all done in just four days. From idea, to solicitation, to suc
What do you do with a chance?
One day, I got a chance. It just seemed to show up. It acted like it knew me, as if it wanted something. This is how Kobi Yamada's book What do you do with a chance? starts. I've been reading that beautiful book to the boys at bedtime since it came out in 2018. It continues: It fluttered around me. It brushed up against me. It circled me as if it wanted me to grab it. What a mesmerizing mental image of a chance, fluttering about. What do you do with a chance? is a great book exactly because
All-in on Omarchy at 37signals
We're going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals. Over the next three years, as the regular churn of hardware invites it, we're switching everyone on our Ops and Ruby programming teams to our own Arch-derived Linux distribution (and of course sharing all the improvements we make along the way with everyone else on Omarchy!). It's funny how nobody bats an eye when the company mandate is to use Macs or Windows, but when the prescription is Linux, it's suddenly surprising. It really shouldn't be. Your
It's beginning to feel like the 80s in America again
Have I told you how much I've come to dislike the 90s? The depressive music, the ironic distance to everything, the deconstructive narratives, the moral relativism, and the total cultural takeover of postmodern ideology. Oh, I did that just last week? Well, allow me another go. But rather than railing against the 90s, let me tell you about the 80s. They were amazing. America was firing on all cylinders, Reagan had brought the morning back, and the Soviet Union provided a clear black-and-white a
The Framework Desktop is a beast
I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4.5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster! And finally, it's simply funky, quirky, and fun! In some ways, the Framework Desktop is a curious machine. Desktop PCs are already very user-repairable! So why is Framework even bringing th
YouTube has earned its crown
I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the business, it's an entirely different story. And that's the tale of YouTube: The King of Internet Archives (Video Edition). I've just revived my YouTube channel after
Omarchy is on the move
Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(!) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-to-Linux enthusiasts. We have about 3,500 early adopters on the Omarchy Discord, 250 pull requests processed, and one heck of an awesome Arch + Hyprland Linux environment to show for it! The latest release is 1.11.0, and it brings an entirely overhauled control menu to the experience. Now everything is
Executives should be the least busy people
If your executive calendar is packed back to back, you have no room for fires, customers, or serendipities. You've traded all your availability for efficiency. That's a bad deal. Executives of old used to know this! That's what the long lunches, early escapes to the golf course, and reading the paper at work were all about. A great fictional example of this is Bert Cooper from Mad Men. He knew his value was largely in his network. He didn't have to grind every minute of every day to prove other
The beauty of ideals
Ideals are supposed to be unattainable for the great many. If everyone could be the smartest, strongest, prettiest, or best, there would be no need for ideals — we'd all just be perfect. But we're not, so ideals exist to show us the peak of humanity and to point our ambition and appreciation toward it. This is what I always hated about the 90s. It was a decade that made it cool to be a loser. It was the decade of MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head. It was the age of grunge. I'm generationally obliged t