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....

the product is to make sure that launch is not the end. We don’t say, “Whew,
we’re done now,” and then go on vacation. It’s then when you keep on pushing
to show this product is alive.
So that happened in February and then we had pretty much a finished
framework for Rails, but I didn’t want to release it yet, because I wanted to document
it. I’d been using open source software for so long that I was really
annoyed that a lot of it had terrible documentation. I didn’t want that to...

going to be and then drive that.
You need to drive both framework development and product development
with a strong vision, where you’re not afraid to turn somebody off. We’re not
afraid to say to a customer, “Maybe Basecamp is not for you. If you want those
five things, maybe you should go look for something else.”
Livingston: Now that you have received a lot of publicity, have you been wooed
by investors?
Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah. We’ve gotten quite a lot of VC calls. But one of
the things we’re seeing that...

same place, it’s very easy to walk down the hall and interrupt somebody. If
you’re part of a distributed team that’s 7 hours off, you’re bound to have a good
portion of the day where you just get work done. There are no interruptions.
Another thing is that we communicate mainly through IM, which is a fairly
low-bandwidth way of communicating, so you’re not going to disrupt somebody
unless you’re going to say something that matters. If you meet in person, it’s
very easy to just talk for 30 minutes, and what was the...