David Heinemeier Hansson
Hansson at the 2016 6 Hours of Silverstone
Born	(1979-10-15) 15 October 1979 (age 43) Copenhagen, Denmark
Occupation	Programmer[1]
Employer	Basecamp
Known for	Ruby on Rails
Website	dhh.dk

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer, and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki.^[2] He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp.

Hansson co-wrote Agile Web Development with Rails with Dave Thomas in 2005 as part of The Facets of Ruby Series. He also co-wrote Getting Real, Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work with Jason Fried.

Programming

In 1999, Hansson founded and built a Danish online gaming news website and community called Daily Rush, which he ran until 2001.^[3] After attracting the attention of Jason Fried by offering him help with PHP coding, Hansson was hired by Fried to build a web-based project management tool, which ultimately became 37signals' Basecamp software as a service product.^[4] To aid the development process, Hansson used the then-relatively obscure Ruby programming language to develop a custom web framework. He released the framework separately from the project management tool in 2004 as the open source project Ruby on Rails. In 2005, Hansson was recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the "Hacker of the Year" award for his creation of Ruby on Rails.^[5] After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School and receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005.^[6]

Personal life

David Heinemeier Hansson lists photography and race car driving amongst his many hobbies.^[7] He took part in the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans driving for OAK Racing.^[8] He also drove a Morgan-Nissan P2 car for Conquest Racing in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), winning two races in the season. Heinemeier Hansson joined OAK Racing full-time in 2013, taking five 2nd-place finishes to finish 2nd in the Trophy for LMP2 Drivers. During the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans post-race technical checks, certain irregularities were detected on the Vaillante Rebellion team's #13 Oreca 07-Gibson, resulting in the car's disqualification. In July 2010 it was revealed that Heinemeier Hansson was the person that had commissioned the one-off Pagani Zonda HH supercar.^[9] He also commissioned the Koenigsegg Agera HH, which was sold in 2022 to Houston Crosta, a YouTube video creator in Las Vegas.^[10] Heinemeier Hansson also purchased an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

24 Hours of Le Mans results

Year	Team	Co-Drivers	Car	Class	Laps	Pos.	Class Pos.
2012	OAK Racing	Bas Leinders Maxime Martin	Morgan LMP2-Nissan	LMP2	341	14th	7th
2013	OAK Racing	Olivier Pla Alex Brundle	Morgan LMP2-Nissan	LMP2	328	8th	2nd
2014	Aston Martin Racing	Kristian Poulsen Nicki Thiim	Aston Martin Vantage GTE	GTE Am	334	17th	1st
2015	Extreme Speed Motorsports	Scott Sharp Ryan Dalziel	Ligier JS P2-Honda	LMP2	329	28th	10th
2016	Abu Dhabi-Proton Racing	Khaled Al Qubaisi Patrick Long	Porsche 911 RSR	GTE Am	330	28th	3rd
2017	Vaillante Rebellion	Nelson Piquet Jr. Mathias Beche	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	364	DSQ	DSQ
2018	Jackie Chan DC Racing	Ricky Taylor Côme Ledogar	Ligier JS P217-Gibson	LMP2	195	DNF	DNF
2019	Jackie Chan DC Racing	Ricky Taylor Jordan King	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	199	DNF	DNF
2022	Inter Europol Competition	Pietro Fittipaldi Fabio Scherer	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	364	18th	14th

Complete FIA World Endurance Championship results

⁺ As Heinemeier Hansson was a guest driver, he was ineligible for points.

Complete European Le Mans Series results

(Races in bold indicate pole position; results in italics indicate fastest lap)

^* Season still in progress.

WeatherTech SportsCar Championship results

(Races in bold indicate pole position, Results are overall/class)

⁺ Points only counted towards the Michelin Endurance Cup, and not the overall LMP2 Championship.

Recognition

• 2005: Won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly for the work on Rails.^[11]
• 2006: Accepted the Jolt Award of product excellence for Rails 1.0.^[11]
• 2012: Named ALMS Rookie of the year.^[12]

References

External links

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (September 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

• Loud Thinking - Hansson's weblog
• 37signals
• Ruby on Rails
• Video of David Heinemeier Hansson presentation at Startup School
• David Heinemeier Hansson - The Pareto Principle and Stoic Philosophy on Developer on Fire
• David Heinemeier Hansson interview on the Inside the Net Podcast
• Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson interview on Hanselminutes Podcast
• David Heinemeier Hansson interview in Danish on Builder.dk Podcast
• Podcast interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on the Web 2.0 Show
• Ruby on Rails video David Heinemeier Hansson explains Ruby on Rails at the university of Roskilde, in 2004
• Keynote 2007 - RailsConf Europe 2007 - Berlin
• RailsConf Keynote on REST. July 9, 2006
• The Great Surplus - Keynote at RailsConf 2008 - Portland^{[permanent dead link]}
• Living with legacy software - Keynote at RailsConf Europe 2008 - Berlin
• FLOSS Weekly podcast 79 and its transcription
• Podcast interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on This Developer's Life
• Podcast interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on the alphalist CTO podcast where he talks about Hey, the no-notification life and other thoughts on technical leadership. 2020