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. I was coming from PHP. I had also looked at Java and
other environments and I wasn’t finding anything else that would allow me, as a
single programmer, to deliver all this stuff.
And I then built Rails on top of Ruby to allow me to build Basecamp and
drive this project in the way that we wanted to. Because we didn’t want to bring
on more programmers. We wanted to keep those constraints that we had and so
we just had to make tools that allowed us to do that. And I think that’s also a big
explanation for why Rails is having the success that it is: it was born in an environment
that was so focused on productivity and was so focused on being able
David Heinemeier Hansson 313
to deliver within constraints. I’m building Rails while I’m building Basecamp—
rather, I’m building Basecamp, and every step of the way, I’m extracting Rails.
So I’m doing what I need to do for Basecamp, then figuring, “Hey, this looks
generic, I could pull this piece out and put it into the toolbox Rails.” And as
time goes by, this toolbox gets larger and larger and somewhere in the process I
realized that this generic toolbox that I had was actually a very useful toolbox
and perhaps other people could use that too to do the same thing we were
doing at 37signals, use less resources and build less software.
When we launched Basecamp, it was 4,000 lines of code—so not very
much. One guy who’s now involved with Rails told me that they had a single
configuration file in XML that was 5,000 lines!
We released Basecamp in February 2005, and by then I knew that I wanted
to release Rails. We went through the hectic time after releasing Basecamp
where we would keep on pushing a whole bunch of new features.
We always give a major update within 30 days after we launch a new product.
Because that’s really something that reinforces people’s feelings about the
project. If they buy in on day one and then they see a major new update after
2 weeks, they’re really pleased. So for us, one of the secrets about how we market

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