Discover how The Epic Programming Principles can transform your web development decision-making, boost your career, and help you build better software.

In a fit of frustration, I wrote the first version of Kamal in six weeks at the start of 2023. Our plan to get out of the cloud was getting bogged down in enterprisey pricing and Kubernetes complexity. And I refused to accept that running our own hardware had to be that expensive or that convoluted. So I got busy building a cheap and simple alternative.  Now, just two years later, Kamal is deploying every single application in our entire heritage fleet, and everything in active development. Finalizing a perfectly uniform mode of deployment for every web app we've built over the past two decades and still maintain. See, we have this obsession at 37signals: That the modern build-boost-discard cycle of internet applications is a scourge. That users ought to be able to trust that when they adopt a system like Basecamp or HEY, they don't have to fear eviction from the next executive re-org. We call this obsession Until The End Of The Internet. That obsession isn't free, but it's worth it. It means we're still operating the very first version of Basecamp for thousands of paying customers. That's the OG code base from 2003! Which hasn't seen any updates since 2010, beyond security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. But we're still operating it, and, along with every other app in our heritage collection, deploying it with Kamal. That just makes me smile, knowing that we have customers who adopted Basecamp in 2004, and are still able to use the same system some twenty years later. In the meantime, we've relaunched and dramatically improved Basecamp many times since. But for customers happy with what they have, there's no forced migration to the latest version. I very much had all of this in mind when designing Kamal. That's one of the reasons I really love Docker. It allows you to encapsulate an entire system, with all of its dependencies, and run it until the end of time. Kind of how modern gaming emulators can run the original ROM of Pac-Man or Pong to perfection and eternity. Kamal seeks to be but a simple wrapper and workflow around this wondrous simplicity. Complexity is but a bridge — and a fragile one at that. To build something durable, you have to make it simple.

slug: supapechakucha

Denmark has been reaping lots of delayed accolades from its relatively strict immigration policy lately. The Swedes and the Germans in particular are now eager to take inspiration from The Danish Model, given their predicaments. The very same countries that until recently condemned the lack of open-arms/open-border policies they would champion as Moral Superpowers.  But even in Denmark, thirty years after the public opposition to mass immigration started getting real political representation, the consequences of culturally-incompatible descendants from MENAPT continue to stress the high-trust societal model. Here are just three major cases that's been covered in the Danish media in 2025 alone: Danish public schools are increasingly struggling with violence and threats against students and teachers, primarily from descendants of MENAPT immigrants. In schools with 30% or more immigrants, violence is twice as prevalent. This is causing a flight to private schools from parents who can afford it (including some Syrians!). Some teachers are quitting the profession as a result, saying "the Quran run the class room". Danish women are increasingly feeling unsafe in the nightlife. The mayor of the country's third largest city, Odense, says he knows why: "It's groups of young men with an immigrant background that's causing it. We might as well be honest about that." But unfortunately, the only suggestion he had to deal with the problem was that "when [the women] meet these groups... they should take a big detour around them". A soccer club from the infamous ghetto area of Vollsmose got national attention because every other team in their league refused to play them. Due to the team's long history of violent assaults and death threats against opposing teams and referees. Bizarrely leading to the situation were the team got to the top of its division because they'd "win" every forfeited match. Problems of this sort have existed in Denmark for well over thirty years. So in a way, none of this should be surprising. But it actually is. Because it shows that long-term assimilation just isn't happening at a scale to tackle these problems. In fact, data shows the opposite: Descendants of MENAPT immigrants are more likely to be violent and troublesome than their parents. That's an explosive point because it blows up the thesis that time will solve these problems. Showing instead that it actually just makes it worse. And then what? This is particularly pertinent in the analysis of Sweden. After the "far right" party of the Swedish Democrats got into government, the new immigrant arrivals have plummeted. But unfortunately, the net share of immigrants is still increasing, in part because of family reunifications, and thus the problems continue. Meaning even if European countries "close the borders", they're still condemned to deal with the damning effects of maladjusted MENAPT immigrant descendants for decades to come. If the intervention stops there. There are no easy answers here. Obviously, if you're in a hole, you should stop digging. And Sweden has done just that. But just because you aren't compounding the problem doesn't mean you've found a way out. Denmark proves to be both a positive example of minimizing the digging while also a cautionary tale that the hole is still there.

One rabbit hole I can never resist going down is finding the original creator of a piece of art. This sounds simple, but it’s often quite difficult. The Internet is a maze of social media accounts that only exist to repost other people’s art, usually with minimal or non-existent attribution. A popular image spawns a thousand copies, each a little further from the original. Signatures get cropped, creators’ names vanish, and we’re left with meaningless phrases like “no copyright intended”, as if that magically absolves someone of artistic theft. Why do I do this? I’ve always been a bit obsessive, a bit completionist. I’ve worked in cultural heritage for eight years, which has made me more aware of copyright and more curious about provenance. And it’s satisfying to know I’ve found the original source, that I can’t dig any further. This takes time. It’s digital detective work, using tools like Google Lens and TinEye, and it’s not always easy or possible. Sometimes the original pops straight to the top, but other times it takes a lot of digging to find the source of an image. So many of us have become accustomed to art as an endless, anonymous stream of “content”. A beautiful image appears in our feed, we give it a quick heart, and scroll on, with no thought for the human who sweated blood and tears to create it. That original artist feels distant, disconected. Whatever benefit they might get from the “exposure” of your work going viral, they don’t get any if their name has been removed first. I came across two examples recently that remind me it’s not just artists who miss out – it’s everyone who enjoys art. I saw a photo of some traffic lights on Tumblr. I love their misty, nighttime aesthetic, the way the bright colours of the lights cut through the fog, the totality of the surrounding darkness. But there was no name – somebody had just uploaded the image to their Tumblr page, it was reblogged a bunch of times, and then it appeared on my dashboard. Who took it? I used Google Lens to find the original photographer: Lucas Zimmerman. Then I discovered it was part of a series. And there was a sequel. I found interviews. Context. Related work. I found all this cool stuff, but only because I knew Lucas’s name. Traffic Lights, by Lucas Zimmerman. Published on Behance.net under a CC BY‑NC 4.0 license, and reposted here in accordance with that license. The second example was a silent video of somebody making tiny chess pieces, just captioned “wow”. It was clearly an edit of another video, with fast-paced cuts to make it accommodate a short attention span – and again with no attribution. This was a little harder to find – I had to search several frames in Google Lens before I found a summary on a Russian website, which had a link to a YouTube video by metalworker and woodworker Левша (Levsha). This video is four times longer than the cut-up version I found, in higher resolution, and with commentary from the original creator. I don’t speak Russian, but YouTube has auto-translated subtitles. Now I know how this amazing set was made, and I have a much better understanding of the materials and techniques involved. (This includes the delightful name Wenge wood, which I’d never heard before.) https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoKdDK3y-mQ A piece of art is more than just a single image or video. It’s a process, a human story. When art is detached from its context and creator, we lose something fundamental. Creators lose the chance to benefit from their work, and we lose the opportunity to engage with it in a deeper way. We can’t learn how it was made, find their other work, or discover how to make similar art for ourselves. The Internet has done many wonderful things for art, but it’s also a machine for endless copyright infringement. It’s not just about generative AI and content scraping – those are serious issues, but this problem existed long before any of us had heard of ChatGPT. It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts. How many of us have used an image from the Internet because it showed up in a search, without a second thought for its creator? When Google Images says “images may be subject to copyright”, how many of us have really thought about what that means? Next time you want to use an image from the web, look to see if it’s shared under a license that allows reuse, and make sure you include the appropriate attribution – and if not, look for a different image. Finding the original creator is hard, sometimes impossible. The Internet is full of shadows: copies of things that went offline years ago. But when I succeed, it feels worth the effort – both for the original artist and myself. When I read a book or watch a TV show, the credits guide me to the artists, and I can appreciate both them and the rest of their work. I wish the Internet was more like that. I wish the platforms we rely on put more emphasis on credit and attribution, and the people behind art. The next time an image catches your eye, take a moment. Who made this? What does it mean? What’s their story? [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]