Rework

In 2007, Kenneth Coats started a business helping Chicagoans expunge their arrest records so they could improve their job prospects. After a challenge from the Illinois Attorney General shut down that venture, Kenneth reinvented his business with an assist from a local clinic that provides free legal services to entrepreneurs. In this episode, hear how Kenneth pivoted—and what he did to ensure he couldn't return to his previous career...

We're introducing a new segment called Check-Ins, where we talk to folks at Basecamp about their answers to recurring questions that get asked of everyone here. Recently, Jeremy Daer on our Security, Infrastructure, and Performance team dealt with an incident where an Internet scammer was fraudulently posing as a Basecamp recruiter to collect personal information from job seekers...

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You sign up for a service or a product online. When you go to cancel, you discover the only way to stop the subscription is to write an email or—even worse, make an actual phone call. In this episode, we try to get to the bottom of why this consumer trap persists, especially in the newspaper industry, and what it says about a company's confidence (or lack thereof) in what it's selling...

"Passwords just aren't cutting it online. It's getting worse. We all feel it." This is what Jeremy from Basecamp's Security, Infrastructure, and Performance team wrote in a February blog post after dealing with a mass-login attack. Intruders with huge lists of login credentials—obtained in previous data breaches—tried using those passwords to access Basecamp accounts...

David Heinemeier Hansson talks about creativity, finding a passion, and how writing Ruby changed the way he thinks about programming.

Why are manhole covers round? How many golf balls can fit in a 747? Why are job interviews so terrible? In this episode, Aja Hammerly, a developer advocate at Google, talks about the drawbacks of common tech interview techniques like whiteboard coding and trivia questions, and shares her tips for improving the process by making it about discovering the candidate's best qualities...

We place a long-distance phone call to Antarctica to chat with Kathrin Mallot, an astrophysicist who works at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole...

Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy are the co-authors of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions At Work. They come on Rework to talk about how the future of work is emotional; why it's useful to listen to feelings like envy; and how we can all take small steps toward a healthier emotional life at work...

The folks at Basecamp have been blogging since 1999, when Jason Fried would write by the light of a fire fueled by David Heinemeier Hansson's savage indictments of the tech industry. A lot has changed since then (with the exception of DHH's feelings about Silicon Valley). Basecamp's blog, Signal v. Noise, changed platforms a few times. And it just moved again, this time from Medium to WordPress...

Basecamp co-founders David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried are fans of Marie Kondo's 2014 bestseller "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," which is back in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to her new Netflix show. In this bonus episode, DHH talks about how he's applied the KonMari framework to code, business decisions at Basecamp, and his own belongings...