Happy Spring!  It’s May, which means Chicago has finally thawed.  We’re all marveling at that big bright yellow thing in the sky and waiting a cursory amount of time before starting to complain about the humidity.

We’ve added a couple new Basecamp features over the past month or two.

Email Summary.  When your Basecamp projects get updated a lot or when your dad finds that lawyer joke generator, you may get more emails than you want.  We can’t help you with Dad, but now you can change your Basecamp email preferences so you get a summary email every few hours instead of a notification with every update.  The summary email contains anything people notified you about, and your events and to-do emails continue to be emailed to you separately, so you don’t miss anything urgent. (How many lawyer jokes are there? Only three, the rest are true stories.)

Live Filtering.  Sometimes you want to find a specific file, document, or discussion, and you can’t remember exactly where it’s located.  Now, from project pages or the Everything page, you can use Basecamp’s new super speedy live filtering search tool to find an item.  You can even search by just file type, if you can only remember that you need to send Sylvia that perfect .GIF you posted a month ago.

At the end of March, Basecamp held a meet-up at our office in Chicago.  We have them twice a year, and all of our employees travel to Chicago for a week.  Since most of us Basecampers work remotely, it’s always great to see everyone, grab some in-person face time, and remind ourselves that our coworkers are not actually cartoons.  During the work days, we gathered in the office for small team meetings and larger talks in the auditorium, and in the evenings we braved the slushy Chicago “spring” for group dinners and activities. 

One of the more interesting sessions we had was a panel discussion with some Chicago-area Basecamp customers.  We wanted to know how they use Basecamp, why they love Basecamp, and especially why they hate Basecamp.  On the panel was Adam and his team from Lucky Peach, Scout and her team from DesignScout, Matt from moss, and Ken from Smartley-Dunn Solutions. Seeing how folks use Basecamp in the real world is always enlightening, and discussions like that really do inform how we think about developing features in the future.

At our panel, our friends at Lucky Peach told us that they built their beautiful new website using Basecamp.  As a thank you to Basecamp and our foodie customers, Lucky Peach is offering an exclusive discount — just use the promo code PEACHCAMP, and you can get 10% off a one-year subscription.

Also at the meet-up, we met the two newest members of the Basecamp team, Allison Grayce Marshall and Jay Ohms.  Allison is Basecamp’s new Marketing Designer.  She hails from Las Vegas, and most recently worked as Creative Lead at JobHive and a teacher at Treehouse, and unfortunately has never met Wayne Newton or Britney Spears.  Jay is from Chicago and joins us as our Lead Android Programmer.  Before Basecamp, he was at a company called inside.com, leading their Android development.  We also want to give a shout out to George Claghorn.  He came on board as a summer intern last year, and he’s been working as a part-time programmer with Basecamp since his internship ended in August.  We couldn't let him leave because he's great at what he does, and as an added bonus, he lives in Pittsburgh so we get a good laugh when he calls us yinzers.

The Distance is the Basecamp-sponsored publication that celebrates small businesses that have endured for over 25 years.  This month, The Distance features Richard Bennett Custom Tailors.  After a few years at his grandfather’s menswear shop, Albert Karoll struck out on his own to start a high-end bespoke tailor shop, and then expanded by acquiring a handful of garment shops to form one distinct, formidable brand.  Everything is hand-sewn, meticulously pressed, and will totally make you feel like the fashion love child of Katharine Hepburn and Don Draper.

Check out Richard Bennett Custom Tailors and other past stories on The Distance podcast, too.  You can subscribe on iTunes or directly via RSS feed.

Thanks, as always, for being a friend to Basecamp. I'll talk with you next month! 

-Andrea at Basecamp