David Heinemeier Hansson

I am the creator of Ruby on Rails, a partner at 37signals, a writer, a public speaker, and a hobbyist photographer.

It all started back in 2001 when Jason Fried of 37signals was trying to learn PHP. He blogged a few questions on Signal vs. Noise, I emailed him a lengthy response, and he decided it was easier to hire me than learn programming.

The seven time zones between Copenhagen and Chicago actually meant that we got a lot done with few interruptions. In 2003, we started work on Basecamp and I decided that it was time to drop Java and PHP in favor of programming in Ruby. My first project in Ruby was Basecamp and out of that came Ruby on Rails.

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Today I bought my very first suit. Would you believe that I've actually never owned or worn a suit in my life? I did rent a tux once though. Today at 12:55pm
How did the generic horoscope survive as a generally accepted piece of superstition to be included in all sorts of weird places? Today at 10:12am
The reason for the suit: We're instituting Formal Fridays at 37signals. Now that we're 16 people, we need to grow up: http://bit.ly/JzIie Yesterday

Recent Blog Posts

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Think of emails as views delivered through SMTP 16 Nov, 2009
We need both engineers and artists in programming 11 May, 2009
So how do we get more women into Rails? 01 May, 2009
Alpha male programmers aren't keeping women out 27 Apr, 2009
I'm an R rated individual 27 Apr, 2009

Ruby on Rails

The open-source framework that I created in 2004. Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Learn more about Ruby on Rails