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141: Jason Fried - Running the Tailwind Business on Basecamp

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Topics include:

  • How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
  • How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
  • Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
  • How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
  • What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
  • How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
  • Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
  • How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
  • Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
  • Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
  • Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
  • When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?

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  • Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
  • Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
  • Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
  • Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
  • Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.
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