131: Ryan Singer - How Basecamp Builds Software

Everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Fullstack Radio podcast. I'm your host, Adam Waddam, and today is my pleasure to, welcome back to the show actually one of the very first guests I ever had on years and years ago, Ryan Singer. How's it going, man? Hey, Adam. Nice to be back. Yeah. Thanks so much for taking the time to to come back on the show. So what I was hoping to talk to you about today is, a few months back, I guess, you you published Shape Up, which is a book about basically how you deliver quality software at base camp sort of like the real nitty gritty workflow for actually making sure that, you get stuff out the door when a lot of other teams at other companies are struggling with that. Yep. So I think maybe the best place to start would be, asking you what did you sort of notice, I guess, out in the world that made you realize you had something to share on this topic? The first thing that happened was we reached a point where we had a few newer hires at Basecamp, and we had also had some ups and downs with some projects over the last maybe two years that made us reflect back on, wait a minute, how do we do what we do when we're doing it right? Because a lot of the practices that we use, they are things that develop sort of organically within the core group of us who've been around for a really long time. You know? And then as we had a few more people on board, and as we were trying to sort of explain what we were doing and how we work, we started to feel like like it would be nice if we could sort of spell it out more clearly instead of just like, hey, like, watch how I do it and hopefully absorb it. You know? Yeah. And a big piece of that was, when we put Hillcharts into base camp, maybe, I don't know, a year and a half ago now it's been, something like that. I'm not sure. Year, two two years, something like that. Those suddenly gave us, kind of some handles on the problem. They they gave us a way to start talking about things like scopes and knowns and unknowns. And a lot of things just sort of came together where we realized that all of a sudden we were finding it easier to talk about what we felt were the important things internally. And, Jason pulled me into his office and said, Hey, you know, I think it's time for you to to share this outside the company. You know? So Yeah. It was kind of like it had gotten baked enough internally that that we could talk about it. And then the opportunity arose like, okay, let's let's package this up so other people can take advantage of …