Six o’ clock in the morning, you’re the last to hear the warning

I woke up on a typically cold and dreary February morning in Chicago before the sun rose. I leaned over to check my phone on my nightstand and noticed an abnormal amount of messages in my inbox. 75 to be precise.

The Big Migration

In the problem space of software development, few things I can think of are as daunting a task as migrating a living, breathing, heavily-trafficked web application from one environment to another. While there may be more technically challenging feats in software development, none require the kind…

George Washington’s axe

As the question goes, if George Washington’s axe had both its head and handle replaced, is it still considered George Washington’s axe?

The original codebase and infrastructure of DoneDone when we launched in 2009 looks nothing like it does today. The code’s…

The ridiculous thing we do every day

Most software products these days lean heavily on the efficiency and speed of everything. Not just development or deployments, but customer support, marketing, and all other non-programmatic things. It’s almost tautologous — if you work in software every process…

Project BugSpray

The original name of DoneDone was BugSpray. I thought it was a clever name.

Can’t you see the fantastic analogies between a can of bug spray and a bug tracker that helped you kill a slew of bugs? Can’t you envision a marketing plan where we design a parodied version of a…

How an early feature was born

While we were in the throes of developing the first version of DoneDone, sometimes features would arise through nothing more than a quick Basecamp note. No meetings. No weighing of priorities on a Kanban board. Just a simple thought.

Hindsight is…please don’t make me look

Jeff Bezos admits to Amazon launching their service with a pretty horrific bug. For some (presumably) small amount of time, you could order a negative number of books. Amazon would credit you with the amount of the purchase.

One vote of influence

I think that software of any longevity is the end result of a lot of competing forces. There’s the product owner’s own influence, the capabilities and limitations of technology at the time, the collective feedback of its customers, a development team’s strengths and weaknesses, the amount…