David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

We can do better.

We know how to make web applications.

Can't we just make a system that's better than email for managing projects?

It can't be that hard.

We've been doing blogs.

We've been doing to-do lists.

Let's put some of these things together and just make a system where everything that anyone involved in the project needs is on one page.

And it has to be simple enough that I'm not going to run a seminar teaching you how to use the system.

I'm just going to give you the login code.

You're going to jump into it.

So that's Basecamp.

And when we started working on Basecamp, I, for the first time in the experience I had with Jason, had the freedom of technology choice.

There was no client telling me, yeah, PHP, that sounds good.

We know PHP.

Can you build it in PHP?

I had free reigns.

And at that time, I'd been reading IEEE magazine and a couple of other magazines back from the early 2000s.

where Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler had been writing about programming patterns and how to write better code.

And these two guys, in particular, were both using Ruby to explain their concepts because Ruby looked like pseudocode.

Whether you were programming in C or Java or PHP, all three constituencies could understand Ruby because it basically just reads like English.