Top all-time · #945
37signals Dev
Company blog · dev.37signals.comprogrammingweb
37signals Dev is the company blog at dev.37signals.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2022, 72 different Hacker News readers have linked it 100 times, most often “Modern CSS Patterns in Campfire”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this engineering blog for Rails, Hotwire/Turbo page morphing, Solid Cache and Queue, cloud repatriation, Kamal and Ruby performance. Commenters cite it as support or as reading recommendations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The 37signals Dev blog is brought to you by the people who build Basecamp, HEY, Fizzy, and ONCE ✌️❤️
Most-linked posts?
- Modern CSS Patterns in Campfire6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-04-07
- A happier happy path in Turbo with morphing5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-10-11
- 37signals Dev – A vanilla Rails stack is plenty5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-12-12
- Our Cloud Spend in 20225 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-01-13
- Upright: An Open Source Synthetic Monitoring System4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-17
- Solid Queue4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-18
- Vanilla Rails Is Plenty4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-11-08
- De-cloud and de-K8s – bringing our apps back home (2023)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-22
- SQL db as cache – 2x faster* requests vs. Redis3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-05
- The 10x Development Environment3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-29
What Hacker News says?
“Almost” is key there. I respect your position, but it’s an always/never take, and the longer I am in this industry, the more I find myself leaning into “it depends.” Here’s a take that articulates this being done well on a large codebase better than I can in a short comment: https://dev.37signals.com/globals-callbacks-and-other-sacril...
Comment linking /globals-callbacks-and-other-sacrileges/
on “RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI”Submitted Running our Docker registry on-prem with Harbor as a story · 155 points
HN discussiongot a link to the rails improvement? nvm, found it: https://dev.37signals.com/solid-cache/
Comment linking /solid-cache/
on “SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud”Submitted Hotwire Native as a story · 44 points
HN discussion> * It's my view that MVC (and therefore Rails otb) is not ideal by itself to write a production-ready app, because of the missing service layer. This is quite the claim. I despise service objects, personally. They end up scattering things around and hurt discoverability. There are other ways to do modelling that scale very well. There are a few blog posts on it, here's one from someone at Basecamp: https://dev.37si…
Comment linking /vanilla-rails-is-plenty/
on “Show HN: Rust Web Framework”Submitted 37signals Dev – Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails as a story · 32 points
HN discussionhttps://dev.37signals.com/introducing-solid-queue/
Comment linking /introducing-solid-queue/
on “Show HN: PgQueuer – Transform PostgreSQL into a Job Queue”Submitted Kamal 2.0 Released as a story · 20 points
HN discussionYour personal preferences aside. Full page morphs get you back to 3XX redirects of pure HTML (no JS forms) when you use them with req/resp. https://dev.37signals.com/a-happier-happy-path-in-turbo-with...
Comment linking /a-happier-happy-path-in-turbo-with-morphing/
on “</> Htmx – The Fetch()ening”Submitted Vanilla Rails Is Plenty as a story · 20 points
HN discussion> Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? "At the moment we have somewhere between 20-25 servers in each cab, or about 90 servers in each site. Here’s what the rack layout looks like in Chicago, for instance." - https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/ Their "server count" is definitely much higher than what you are thinking.
Comment linking /37signals-datacenter-overview/
on “Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation”Submitted Modern CSS Patterns in Campfire as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI recently turned on View Morphing via upgrading Turbo 7->8 [1] in production and man it really does feel faster. Like a free performance upgrade. I looked it up on Github and they seem to be using the idiomorph package. [1] https://dev.37signals.com/turbo-8-released/
Comment linking /turbo-8-released/
on “I made a better DOM morphing algorithm”Submitted 37signals Dev – Monitoring 10 Petabytes of Data in Pure Storage as a story · 15 points
HN discussionhttps://dev.37signals.com/page-refreshes-with-morphing-demo/ I'm not being snarky. What apps must be SPA's and why? I'm personally questioning where that line really should be.
Comment linking /page-refreshes-with-morphing-demo/
on “Ask HN: What is happening in tech unrelated to AI?”Submitted 37signals Datacenter Overview as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThis appears to be riding the [Solid Cache]( https://dev.37signals.com/solid-cache/ ) idea that DHH has started espousing. At the core of this idea is that SSD's are sufficiently fast for caching. Sure, this may work for 37signals, but that is because they manage their own hardware. That is the exception and not the rule. And, per [this discussion two weeks ago]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39443679 ). SSD'…
Comment linking /solid-cache/
on “You Don't Need a Dedicated Cache Service – PostgreSQL as a Cache (2023)”Submitted Hotwire Spark: live reloading for Rails applications as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> Remember, this excludes the current Basecamp and Basecamp 2, which use our own hardware for this https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
Comment linking /our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
on “Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready”Submitted Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails as a story · 11 points
HN discussionReminds me of a common complaint about ORMs. The easy stuff is easy and the hard stuff is insanely hard. This recent post convinced me to just use CSS again: https://dev.37signals.com/modern-css-patterns-and-techniques...
Comment linking /modern-css-patterns-and-techniques-in-campfire/
on “Signals for Tailwind CSS (styling based on ancestor state via style queries)”Submitted 37signals Dev – A vanilla Rails stack is plenty as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis was true, but the new Rails Turbo Page Morphing in Turbo 8 changes the game entirely. I've been using it. The experience is amazing! Some highlights: * In 7 lines of code, with no javascript, I had my index and view pages live-updating whenever a model changed on the server! It is spooky good. Nothing against JavaScript, but now I only maintain one ERB view and no SPA. This is a large dev speed multiplier. * If…
Comment linking /turbo-8-released/
on “Unpoly is what Hotwire should have been”Submitted Announcing Hotwire Native as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRe: DDD and business logic, I’d recommend reading https://dev.37signals.com/vanilla-rails-is-plenty/
Comment linking /vanilla-rails-is-plenty/
on “Rails Cheat Sheet”Submitted The 10x Development Environment as a story · 7 points
HN discussionWell color me disappointed, I was hoping this was going to be a technical discussion about the decision/tradeoffs. Instead it's just an old question from the community that has no official answer from the Basecamp folks and no recent activity. As long doing conjecture, I would guess it's because the team at Basecamp/37 Signals already had significant experience with Docker, it's much more widely used and understood…
Comment linking /bringing-our-apps-back-home/
on “Kamal: Reason behind choosing Docker instead micro VMs (like firecracker)”Submitted Faster Pagination in Hey as a story · 7 points
HN discussion37signals disagrees. They’re moving off the cloud and have published several blog entries about the process and the approx ~1mm/yr (fully loaded) they expect to save. I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers. The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here: https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-202…
Comment linking /our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
on “Tech Layoffs Are Feeding a New Startup Surge”Submitted Our Cloud Spend in 2022 as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
