A Month Exploring Fizzy - In their book Getting Real, 37signals talk about Open Doors — the idea that you should give customers access to their data through RSS feeds and APIs. Let them get their information when they want it, how they want it. Open up and good things happen.

Fizzy takes that seriously. When 37signals released Fizzy with its full git history available, they didn’t just open-source the code — they shipped a complete API and webhook system too. The doors were wide open baby!

So I dove in — reading the source, building tools, and sharing what I found. Every time curiosity kicked in, there was a direct path from “I wonder if…” to something I could actually try and execute. This post is a catch-all for my very bubbly month of December.

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Fizzy's Pull Requests: Who Built What and How - Sifting through Fizzy’s pull requests, it was fascinating to see how the 37signals team thinks through problems, builds solutions, and ships software together. Outside of their massive contributions to open source libraries, the podcast and the books — this was a chance to see up close, with real code, the application building process.

Below you will read which 37signals team members owned which domains in this project, and which PRs best demonstrate their craft. If you’re new to the codebase (or want to level up in specific areas), I will point you to the PRs worth studying. Each section highlights an engineer’s domain knowledge and the code reviews that showcase their thinking.

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Fizzy Design Evolution: A Flipbook from Git - After writing about the making of Fizzy told through git commits, I wanted to see the design evolution with my own eyes. Reading about “Let’s try bubbles” and “Rename bubbles => cards” is one thing. Watching the interface transform over 18 months is another.

So I got to work: I went through each day of commits in the Fizzy repository, got the application to a bootable state, seeded the database, and took a screenshot. Then I stitched those screenshots together into a flipbook-style video.

Here’s the final result - I hope you enjoy it! Read on below for details about the process and the backing music.

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The Making of Fizzy, Told by Git - Today Fizzy was released and the entire source code of its development history is open for anyone to see. DHH announced on X that the full git history is available - a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain of how a 37signals product comes together.

I cloned down the repository and prompted Claude Code:

“Can you go through the entire git history and write a documentary about the development of this application. What date the first commit was. Any major tweaks, changes and decisions and experiments. You can take multiple passes and use sub-agents to build up a picture. Make sure to cite commits for any interesting things. If there is anything dramatic then make sure to see if you can figure out decision making. Summarize at the end but the story should go into STORY.md”

It responded with:

“This is a fascinating task! Let me create a comprehensive investigation plan and use multiple agents to build up a complete picture of this project’s history.”

Here is the story of Fizzy - as interpreted by Claude - from the trail of git commits. Enjoy!

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Fizzy Webhooks: What You Need to Know - Fizzy is a new issue tracker (source available) from 37signals with a refreshingly clean UI. Beyond looking good, it ships with a solid webhook system for integrating with external services.

For most teams, webhooks are the bridge between the issues you track and the tools you already rely on. They let you push events into chat, incident tools, reporting pipelines, and anything else that speaks HTTP. If you are evaluating Fizzy or planning an integration, understanding what these webhooks can do will save you time.

I also put together a short PDF with the full payload structure and example code, which I link at the end of this post if you want to go deeper.

What could we build?

Here are a few ideas for things you could build on top of Fizzy’s events:

• A team metrics dashboard that tracks how long cards take to move from card_published to card_closed and which assignees or boards close issues the fastest.
• Personal Slack or Teams digests that send each person a daily summary of cards they created, were assigned, or closed based on card_published, card_assigned, card_unassigned, and card_closed events.
• A churn detector that flags cards that bounce between columns or get sent back to triage repeatedly using card_triaged, card_sent_back_to_triage, and card_postponed.
• A cross-board incident view that watches card_board_changed to keep a separate dashboard of cards moving into your incident or escalation boards.
• A comment activity stream that ships comment_created events into a search index or knowledge base so you can search discussions across boards.

If you want to go deeper, you can also build more opinionated tools that surface insights and notify people who never log in to Fizzy:

• Stakeholder status reports that email non-technical stakeholders a weekly summary of key cards: what was created, closed, postponed, or sent back to triage on their projects. You can group by label, board, or assignee and generate charts or narrative summaries from card_published, card_closed, card_postponed, and card_sent_back_to_triage events.
• Capacity and load alerts that watch for people who are getting overloaded. For example, you could send a notification to a manager when someone is assigned more than N open cards, or when cards assigned to them sit in the same column for too long without a card_triaged or card_closed event.
• SLA and escalation notifications that integrate with PagerDuty or similar tools. When certain cards (for example, labeled “Incident” or on a specific board) are not closed within an agreed time window, you can trigger an alert or automatically move the card to an escalation board using card_postponed, card_board_changed, and card_closed.
• Customer-facing status updates that keep clients in the loop without giving them direct access to Fizzy. You could generate per-customer email updates or a small status page based on events for cards tagged with that customer’s name, combining card_published, card_closed, and comment_created to show progress and recent discussion.
• Meeting prep packs that assemble the last week’s events for a given board into a concise agenda for standups or planning meetings. You can collate newly created cards, reopened work, and high-churn items from card_published, card_reopened, card_triaged, and card_sent_back_to_triage, then email the summary to attendees before the meeting.

Here is how to set it up.

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