David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Ruby on Rails
David Heinemeier Hansson is a father of three, the creator of Ruby on Rails, co-owner of 37signals, a best-selling author, a Le Mans class-winning racing driver, an investor in Danish startups, and a Shopify board member.
He writes regularly on HEY World and speaks on The REWORK Podcast. Follow him on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

The best way to balance open source developing and growing your own business is to combine the two, Hansson suggests.
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3 min
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Hansson loves Apple’s products, but he calls their decision to restrict programming languages for iPhone apps a “fascist move.”
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9 min
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Cloud computing shouldn’t be an either/or decision. We should definitely make use of the tremendous collaborative possibilities of the Web for some tasks but utilize “the awesome local, graphical power […]
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5 min
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“They have no bearing on what I do,” says Hansson of the software giant. But he admits there is something sad about no longer having an “evil empire” to rally […]
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7 min
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Hansson merged Rails and Merb last year, and, despite initial “squabbles,” the fruits of their cooperation—Rails 3—is on the verge of release.
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6 min
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With applications like Ruby on Rails lowering the bar for creating web applications, some programmers may complain about “the unwashed masses” overrunning their “beautiful, pristine programming communities.” Hansson thinks that […]
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5 min
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“A big part of what makes Ruby so special to work with is just how much expression you can pack into a few lines of code,” says Hansson.
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7 min
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David Heinemeier Hansson was so fed up with PHP and Java that he almost gave up on programming altogether—then he found Ruby and everything changed.
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5 min
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A conversation with the programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails.
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46 min
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